The recent comments made by Ayatollah Alli Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic regime of Iran about racial discrimination in the US, received widespread and fiery responses from Iranians on social media.

In a part of his comments, Khamenei said about the U.S government: “They kill people and shamelessly criticize others,” a sentence which immediately became a trending hashtag against Khamenei himself on Twitter.

Some Iranian journalists and political activists shared images of the protesters that were massacred in different uprisings in the past 30 years in Iran, while using the same sentence as a hashtag.

The family members of the protesters killed in recent years also joined the twitter storm. Sister of Mostafa Karimbeigi, one of the protesters killed in 2009, shared a photo of her brother’s grave with the same hashtag.

Images of the massacred prisoners of 1988, passengers of the Ukrainian plane shot down by IRGC, and victims of last November’s uprising across the country have also been shared on Twitter with the same hashtag.

A Twitter account which translates as “Twitter’s Historical Memory” has shared Khamenei’s comments during different uprisings in Iran, in which he refers to the massacred Iranian protesters as thugs, villains, and connected to foreign powers, while saying the riots in the U.S are due to Human Rights issues and the people are ashamed and embarrassed by their government.

The former speaker of Iran's parliament, Ali Larijani, once referred to President Obama in his speech at the parliament as "Kaka Siah", which is the equivalent of the N-word in Persian. He was not criticized by the leader or any other official. 

Under the Islamic Republic regime of Iran, women’s lives have half the value of men’s, and official religious minorities are under heavy control, while followers of religions that are not recognized by the regime, like the Bahais, have no rights in Iran under the regime’s constitution. The regime has committed numerous massacres in the past 40 years including the November of last year in which during the country-wide uprising of Iranian people, over 1500 unarmed protesters were killed by the security forces. Independent labor union activists receive the heaviest punishments among the political activists, with Human Rights activists, women’s rights activists, environmental activists, all being persecuted, incarcerated, and executed almost daily.