Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team extended “official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi,” much to the dismay and anger of Iranian American activists and dissidents.
“Some of the worst human rights abuses occurred during his tenure as president, especially the human rights abuses against the women and girls of Iran,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday. “That said, we regret any loss of life. You don’t want to see anyone die in a helicopter crash.”
Miller’s statement followed in the train of condolences from NATO and the European Union as Sunday’s helicopter crash forced Western officials to weigh diplomatic protocols against the Iranian regime’s atrocities.
Yet the diplomatic gestures angered many U.S. and European politicians, as well as overseas targets of Iran’s abuses, who argued that the accident is a cause for celebration within and beyond the country’s borders.
“To the U.S. government, EU, and the free world: Do not express condolences to the thousands of victims of Ebrahim Raisi. Instead, express your support for the people of Iran,” Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad, a prominent women right’s activist whom the Iranian regime attempted to murder in a plot exposed by U.S. investigators last year, wrote Monday. “Your condolences only pour salt on the wounds of the oppressed.”
Raisi came to Iran’s presidency in 2021 after an extended career in the judiciary. And his tenure in that office coincided with the expansion of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, making him a key player in the provision of Iranian weapons to Russian forces, as well as an eruption of violence across the Middle East in connection to the war between Israel and Hamas, the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist organization that rampaged across southern Israel on Oct. 7.
“Under the ‘Butcher of Tehran,’ Iran armed and assisted terrorists with American blood on their hands,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said Monday. “Offering condolences for the death of this monster is a disgrace.”
Raisi acquired that appellation during his long career in Iran’s judiciary. Amnesty International investigators identified him as “a member of the ‘death commission’ which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988,” as they noted in 2021. He is also regarded as a key figure in the crackdown on Iranian dissidents in 2019.
“If we haven’t forgotten, which tragically is not easily forgotten, there was the painful incident of the mass execution of political prisoners by the execution committee,” Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-run outlet. “The people of Iran had hoped to see him brought to justice, to witness how he would struggle and plead for his own exoneration. He did not deserve such an easy death.”
Alinejad, who has been amplifying the celebratory responses from Iranian dissidents in the hours since Raisi’s helicopter crash, condemned the United Nations Security Council for marking the crash with a moment of silence on Monday.
“This is a message to the EU and UN Security Council: Your sympathy and condolences are a slap in the face to us, the Iranian women who faced the brutality of Raisi and his regime,” she wrote on social media.
Miller maintained that “it is the appropriate step” to issue condolences when a foreign leader dies under such circumstances.
“We have been quite clear that Ebrahim Raisi was a brutal participant in the repression of the Iranian people for nearly four decades,” the State Department said. “He has blood on his hands. So I think most importantly, our fundamental approach to Iran has not changed and will not change. We will continue to support the people of Iran to defend their human rights, their aspirations to an open, free society and democratic participation. And we will continue to confront the Iranian regime’s support for terrorism, its proliferation of dangerous weapons, and its advancement of [a] nuclear program in ways that have no credible civilian purpose.”