Do we like Ali Khamenei?
Our score: 1 out of 10. A long run of harmful words and acts of his own, including the crackdown on the January 2026 protests, and no verified good to set against it.
Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad in 1939 to a clerical father, studied in Qom under Ruhollah Khomeini and joined the movement against the shah in 1962. He survived a 1981 bomb, served as president through the 1980s, and was picked as Supreme Leader in 1989 after Khomeini died, despite thinner religious credentials than his predecessor. From there he ran Iran for nearly four decades and built up the Revolutionary Guard as the dominant force in politics and the economy.
The story that defines his last chapter is the winter of 2025-26. Protests started in Tehran's bazaar in late December after the rial hit a record low, then spread nationwide. On 8 and 9 January security forces fired on large crowds; activists documented more than 7,000 deaths and the government acknowledged more than 3,000. His line was “Rioters must be put in their place.” He then blamed Trump for the casualties and called it an American conspiracy, rather than owning the crackdown.
On the harm test, his own words are the problem. In a 2022 televised speech he named homosexuality as an example of “severe moral deprivation” in the West. In December 2025 he defended the headscarf in a meeting with women, saying those who wear it can progress more than others, just as more women were defying the mandatory dress code. Rights groups and the RFE/RL obituary tie his rule to the crackdown that followed Mahsa Amini's death in custody in 2022.
The recent chapter is his death and burial. Iranian state media confirmed on 1 March that he was killed in a joint US-Israeli strike. After a week of funeral events he was buried at the Imam Reza shrine on 10 July, without his successor Mojtaba Khamenei appearing. Supporters call him a martyr who held Iran together under sanctions; critics point to the repression, and one protester's sister summed his legacy up in one word: “injustice.”
The good column is thin. Early on he was remembered as a pious, poetry-loving cleric who liked talking with young people, and his supporters credit him with keeping the Islamic Republic intact and standing up to Western pressure. None of the sources we read show charity, kindness to others or any act of standing up for the vulnerable at a cost to himself. That's honestly the whole list.
Nothing in our reading shows a court finding against him, and he was never a defendant. The case against him is political and moral, in his own speeches and in the state he headed. For a page that asks whether you'd be glad to have liked someone, the answer is plainly no.