Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in an appeal Sunday "to the youth in western countries," accused the United States of arming and nurturing terror groups such as al Qaeda and lashed out at Israel for sponsoring "the worst kind of terrorism" against the Palestinians, according to an English translation of the Iranian leader’s open letter.
On the heels of a massive attack by Islamic State affiliates in Paris, Khamenei lashed out at western governments, primarily the United States, for sponsoring terrorists across the globe and oppressing Muslims with their values.
Khamenei also encouraged young people living in western countries to oppose Israel, which he claimed is worse than any terrorist group operating in the world today.
Khamenei’s appeal comes as Iran continues to commit acts of terrorism across the globe and is waging a multi-pronged war to expand its regional influence in countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.
The Iranian leader goes on in his open letter to argue that western values and cultures are fueling groups such as the Islamic State and leading young Europeans to find these groups attractive. He encouraged western youths to embrace Islam and the Muslim world in order to improve global relations in the future.
"Today, there are very few people who are uninformed about the role of the United States of America in creating, nurturing and arming al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their inauspicious successors," Khamenei wrote. "Besides this direct support, the overt and well-known supporters of takfiri [Islamic State] terrorism—despite having the most backward political systems—are standing arrayed as allies of the west while the most pioneering, brightest, and most dynamic democrats in the region are suppressed mercilessly."
"The prejudiced response of the west to the awakening movement in the Islamic world is an illustrative example of the contradictory western policies," Khamenei writes.
The west’s support for Israel also is fueling anger, according to Khamenei, who urges western youths to reject the Jewish state.
"The other side of these contradictory policies [in the west] is seen in supporting the state terrorism of Israel," the leader wrote. "The oppressed people of Palestine have experienced the worst kind of terrorism for the last sixty years."
"It is decades that a Palestinian family is not secure even in its own home from the Zionist regime’s death and destruction machinery," he continued. "What kind of atrocious violence today is comparable to that of the settlement constructions of the Zionists regime?"
While Muslim terrorism has plagued Western nations in recent decades, Khamenei claimed that this pales in comparison to the oppression experienced by the Muslim world.
"The Islamic world has been the victim of terror and brutality to a larger extent territorially, to greater amount quantitatively and for a longer period in terms of time," Khamenei writes. "Second, that unfortunately this violence has been supported by certain great powers through various methods and effective means."
The Islamic world has suffered "pain" because of the west’s "hypocrisy and duplicity,"
"I consider the imposition of western culture upon other peoples and the trivialization of independent cultures as a form of silent violence and extreme harmfulness," Khamenei wrote.
"Dear youth!" Khamenei continued, "I have the hope that you—now or in the future—can change this mentality corrupted by duplicity, a mentality whose highest skill is hiding long-term goals and adorning malevolent objectives."
This is the second time that Khamenei has written an open letter addressed directly to young people living in Western countries.