No power can persist on coercion, interference, domination: Leader Ayatollah Khamenei

“We also believe that the US is declining. A power built on the basis of coercion, interference in other countries’ affairs and domination over other nations won’t persist,” the Leader’s official English-language Twitter account quoted him as saying on Monday.

The Leader’s remarks came to mark the anniversary of the conviction of the deceased French philosopher Roger Garaudy at a court in Paris for questioning the Holocaust.

“#RogerGaraudy has an accurate and precise prediction about the US regime, which we confirm, too,” the Leader added.

Garaudy was a French philosopher, resistance fighter and a prominent author who was convicted and fined in 1998 for Holocaust denial under French law.

In his book, The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, Garaudy asserted that the allegation about “six million” Jews having perished through the Holocaust was a myth, prompting the French judicial system to ban any further publication of his book and fining him 240,000 French francs on February 27, 1998, Press TV reported.

Ayatollah Khamenei also criticized the Western countries’ claims of being advocates of freedom of speech by bringing up Garaudy’s case, who was also given a suspended prison term of several years for denying the Holocaust.

The Leader noted that in response to Garaudy’s academic criticism of the Holocaust, instead of giving convincing answers or allowing unbiased research, “the French govt. not only banned his book, but also brought Garaudy to trial.”

“These are the claimants of advocating #FreedomOfSpeech,” Ayatollah Khamenei added.