No tears for Khamenei: The lesson South Africa’s solidarity industry refuses to learn — Tim Flack

As the world grows more uncertain, clarity matters more than ever. BNC#8 brings together some of the smartest and most experienced minds to help you cut through the noise and navigate the turbulence with greater confidence. Tickets are selling out fast, with only 40 left. Don’t waste time, book your place at BNC#8 by clicking here or on the image below..Key topics:ANC condolences clash with South African Muslim leadersJamiatul Ulama rejects mourning, citing Islamic theologyCritique of solidarity politics and Iran’s regional record.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Tim Flack.There is a peculiar phenomenon in South African public life that deserves wider attention. It is the phenomenon of people who know nothing about a subject feeling not merely entitled but compelled to have the loudest opinions about it. Ordinarily this is a harmless enough vice. But when it involves mourning a theocratic despot on behalf of a religious community that has explicitly asked you to stop, it crosses from ignorance into something uglier. Something closer to contempt.On 28 February 2026, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, was killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike on his compound in Tehran. His wife, daughter, son-in-law and grandchild were also killed. Within hours, the machinery of international reaction had sorted itself into the usual camps. Israel celebrated. America congratulated itself. The UN called for restraint. Russia, with its customary gift for irony, denounced the violation of international law. And in South Africa, the African National Congress offered its “sincere condolences” to the people of Iran, while its Secretary General posted a video of Nelson Mandela shaking hands with Ali Khamenei, captioned with the instruction that the party “must not forget its friends.”.All of which was predictable enough. What was rather less predictable, or at any rate less predicted by the people who ought to have been paying attention, was the reaction of South Africa’s actual Muslim community. On 2 March, the Jamiatul Ulama of KwaZulu-Natal, one of the most significant Sunni theological bodies in the country, published a statement titled No Tears for Khamenei. It is worth dwelling on this document, because it says things that a great many important people in Pretoria appear determined not to hear..The statement was not equivocal. It did not hedge. It did not “call for restraint.” It argued, with considerable theological precision, that Khamenei’s death at the hands of Israel did not make him a martyr, did not make Iran a friend, and did not oblige any Muslim to shed a tear. It cited the Qur’an: “In this way We appoint some oppressors over others because of what they have earned” (6:129). The scholars’ interpretation was clear. God, in His wisdom, sometimes allows one tyrant to destroy another. This is not a tragedy. It is divine arithmetic..Read more:.FT: Iran executes Khamenei’s plan to spread regional war.The statement went further. It acknowledged that supporting Palestine remains a moral obligation. But it drew a sharp and deliberate line: “Allegiance in Islam cannot be reduced to a single political issue. No stance, however correct, erases a record of oppression elsewhere.” Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric, the scholars argued, was “political gesturing that has fooled many.” The Iran-Contra scandal was cited. So was Tehran’s role in assisting the US invasion of Iraq and the removal of the Taliban from Afghanistan. The point was unavoidable: the man who built his brand on “Death to America” had a history of quiet cooperation with America whenever it suited his purposes.Now, one might suppose that when the leading Muslim theologians of KwaZulu-Natal publish an official position on a matter of Islamic theology, the response of non-Muslim commentators and politicians would be, at a minimum, to read it. One might further suppose that the response of those who claim to act in solidarity with the Muslim community would be to take some notice of what the Muslim community actually thinks. But one would be wrong. Because in the solidarity industry, the opinions of the people you claim to be standing with are, at best, an inconvenience, and at worst, entirely irrelevant.The comment section beneath Jamiatul Ulama’s Facebook post was extraordinary in its unanimity. Dozens of South African Muslims, writing with the kind of specific historical knowledge that comes from actually caring about a subject, laid out the case against Khamenei and the Shia theocratic project with forensic detail. Iran’s backing of Assad’s butchery in Syria. The Shia militias that destroyed Sunni mosques, hospitals, schools and libraries across Iraq. The suppression of Sunni Islam in Tehran, where there is no purpose-built Sunni mosque in the capital, only informal prayer rooms operating under constant threat of closure. The theological doctrines of Twelver Shi’ism that many Sunni scholars regard as not merely heterodox but as a fundamental attack on the honour of the Prophet’s companions and his wife Aisha. One commenter wrote: “An enemy of Allah killed another enemy of Allah. Plain and simple.” Another was blunter still: “Khamenei died like a dog.”I confess I find myself in the unusual position of being in substantial agreement with people whose views on Israel I have spent considerable professional energy contesting. Many of these same voices declared “We are all Hamas” after October 7. Many marched in the same demonstrations that I have criticised in this column. And yet here they are, making an argument that is not only theologically coherent but historically unanswerable: that Iran’s regime has caused more Muslim suffering than it has prevented, that its anti-Israel posture was strategic theatre, and that the conflation of the Palestinian cause with loyalty to Tehran is an insult to every Sunni Muslim who was murdered, tortured, starved or raped by Iranian-backed militias in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.The numbers are not trivial. Under Khamenei’s leadership, Iran backed Assad through a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced over thirteen million, and reduced whole cities to rubble. In 2016, Khamenei issued a fatwa declaring the Syrian campaign a religious war against disbelief. Hezbollah fighters and Shia militias from Iraq and Afghanistan were mobilised under the banner of jihad. The Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, of all places, was besieged and devastated. In Mosul, the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, built by Nooruddeen Zangi, the teacher of Saladin himself, was destroyed. The symbolism was not lost on the Sunni world, even if it was lost on Fikile Mbalula.And this is the point at which we must turn our attention to the solidarity class in South Africa, because their behaviour in the days since Khamenei’s death has been a masterclass in everything that is wrong with contemporary progressive politics. Tehran Times, not an outlet known for its editorial restraint, reported that a crowd that gathered to mourn the death of the regime's leader included “Black and white citizens, Muslims and Christians, men and women.” They held portraits of Khamenei. They chanted “Iran is not alone” and “America, partner in crime.”One would like to ask the Christians in that crowd a few questions. Not hostile questions. Gentle ones. Questions of the “did you know” variety. Did you know, for instance, that the man whose portrait you were holding presided over a theocracy that executes apostates? That his regime hanged gay men from cranes? That in January 2026, two months before you gathered to mourn him, his security forces killed dozens of protesters, including children, in one of the bloodiest crackdowns since the 1979 revolution? That even as you stood in Sandton holding his photograph, Iranians in Shahsavar were cheering in the streets, crowds in the south were toppling statues of Khomeini, and residents of Tehran were shouting “Long live the Shah” from their rooftops?I suspect the answer, in most cases, is no. And I suspect this because the solidarity movement does not require knowledge. It requires only a formula, and the formula is this: if America or Israel did it, it was wrong, and whoever suffered it was righteous. The formula does not accommodate the possibility that the victim might also have been a perpetrator. It does not accommodate the possibility that his own people might be glad he is dead. It does not accommodate the possibility that the Muslim community in whose name you are protesting might find the whole performance offensive. The formula is clean. Reality is not. So much the worse for reality.The ANC’s position is a special case of this pathology, because it adds to ideological reflection the weight of institutional history. The Daily Maverick reported that South Africa has “consistently voted over many years in the United Nations against, or at least abstaining from, all resolutions which condemned Tehran for its persistent human rights abuses.” The SA Jewish Report documented Pretoria’s refusal to support a UNHRC emergency session on Iran’s January crackdown. In the same month, while Khamenei’s forces were shooting demonstrators, South Africa was hosting Iranian warships for BRICS naval exercises off Cape Town. The South African Zionist Federation noted the juxtaposition with what I think qualifies as understatement.The justification, such as it is, rests on the claim that Iran supported the ANC during apartheid. This is true. It is also true that Libya supported the ANC during apartheid, and that the Soviet Union did, and that a number of other regimes with appalling human rights records did. The question is not whether these alliances were useful in 1985. The question is whether they oblige South Africa, in perpetuity, to avert its eyes from mass murder conducted by its former allies. The ANC appears to believe that they do. The Muslim scholars of KwaZulu-Natal disagree. I know whose moral compass I trust more.Mbalula’s decision to post the Mandela video was revealing precisely because it was meant to end the argument rather than advance it. In the ANC’s rhetorical universe, invoking Mandela is the equivalent of playing the ace of trumps. But Mandela is dead, and the world has changed, and the act of wrapping a 2026 foreign policy catastrophe in the liberation struggle’s bunting does not sanctify it. It merely cheapens the bunting.What the Jamiatul Ulama’s statement reveals, more than anything else, is the vast and embarrassing gap between the solidarity industry and the people it claims to serve. The scholars did something that almost nobody in South African public life seems willing to do: they made a distinction. They distinguished between the Palestinian cause, which they affirm, and the Iranian regime, which they reject. They distinguished between opposing American and Israeli military action on legal grounds, which reasonable people can do, and mourning Khamenei, which they regard as theologically obscene. They distinguished between emotion and principle, and chose principle.The ANC made no such distinction. The Sandton protesters made no such distinction. The Progressive International, which condemned the strikes “in the strongest possible terms,” made no such distinction. For all of them, the world is a simple place divided into oppressors and victims, and the only thing that determines which category you fall into is whether the Americans approve of you. By this logic, Khamenei is a victim. By this logic, the Iranians celebrating his death are false consciousness. By this logic, the Sunni scholars explaining, patiently and in detail, why no Muslim should mourn this man, are simply wrong. They are wrong because they are inconvenient. And in the solidarity business, inconvenient people are the easiest to ignore.The Jamiatul Ulama closed its statement with a prayer: “May Allah Ta’ala bring goodness for the Ummah from the current events. Nothing is beyond His power. In Him alone we place our trust.” Note what the prayer does not contain. It does not contain Khamenei’s name. It does not ask for mercy on his soul. It does not call him a martyr. It asks God for goodness from these events, which is as close as a theological body will come to saying: perhaps some good will come of this man’s death. It is, in its quiet way, one of the most devastating things I have read this year..Read more:.The Economist: Trump, Bibi - Wild cards raising stakes in mass protest convulsing Iran.South Africa’s political class and its solidarity industry would do well to read it. They will not, of course. They are far too busy mourning a tyrant on behalf of people who have asked them, in the clearest possible terms, to stop. But the statement will endure. And in years to come, when the history of this period is written, it will be the scholars of KwaZulu-Natal, and not the ANC’s Secretary General and his Mandela videos, who are remembered as having told the truth.

No tears for Khamenei: The lesson South Africa’s solidarity industry refuses to learn — Tim Flack

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