The primary takeaway since Mojtaba Khamenei was selected to replace his father as the supreme leader of Iran is that the most we’ve seen of the man is the portrait that was used when he was officially announced as the country’s new chief.
This led to plenty of jokes that the theocratic state was now being led by a cardboard cutout. The unfortunate irony that’s emerging is that, actually, the Iranians might be better off with the cardboard Khamenei than the real one.
It’s unknown where the 56-year-old Khamenei is or what his condition may be. Heck, we don’t even know if he knows he’s the leader of the country his father led until he met his demise in an airstrike.
What we do know is that his father didn’t really want his son to take over his position; this was long assumed to be due to the fact that the Islamic revolution of 1979 explicitly rejected the concept of hereditary rule.
As it turns out, however, the reasons for Ali Khamenei’s reluctance to make his son the next-in-line for his job were a bit more multifarious and complicated — and, in a way, darkly hilarious.
Multiple reports that emerged over the weekend indicated that not only is the new leader severely disfigured, in a coma, and unaware that a war is even going on, but that he wouldn’t really be that much more effective if he weren’t injured anyway.
First, the injuries: According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, reports in the Middle East media indicate Khamenei has been flown to Moscow for surgery because wounds he sustained in an airstrike could not be effectively treated in Iran.
It’s unclear whether or not the injuries were suffered in the same strike that killed his father, but sources say the harm was extensive.
“One or two of his legs have been cut off,” a source based in London told the U.K. Sun. “His liver or stomach has also ruptured. He is apparently in a coma as well.”
Meanwhile, an Iranian official had this to say, according to the U.K. Telegraph: “No one knows anything about Mojtaba, whether he is alive or dead or how badly injured. We are all just told that he’s injured. He has no control over the war because he is not here. The majority of commanders, or more correctly, all commanders, have no news about him.”
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, said Friday, according to Military Times, that “the new so-called, not-so-supreme leader is wounded and likely disfigured.”
Further reports over the weekend also implied that, when he was un-maimed, Mojtaba still wasn’t any great shakes.
According to CBS News, “U.S. intelligence has circulated to President Trump and to a small circle around him that Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had misgivings about his son replacing him.”
“The analysis showed the elder Khamenei was wary of his son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, ever taking power because he was perceived as not very bright, and was viewed as unqualified to be leader, according to sources,” the report added.
“The information gathered also indicated that the father was aware that his son had issues in his personal life, according to sources within the administration, the intelligence community and people close to the president.”
Translation: He likes the dudes, and not in a platonic way.
The New York Post, which isn’t given to couching these things in woke euphemism, was more blunt: “President Trump was stunned to learn last week that U.S. intelligence indicates new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei may be gay — and that his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, feared his suitability to rule the Islamic Republic for that reason.
“Trump couldn’t contain his surprise and laughed aloud when he was briefed on the intel, according to sources,” the newspaper added.
Two sources the paper talked to said the new leader “has had a long-term sexual relationship with his childhood tutor” with a third source having “indicated the affair was with a person who formerly worked for the Khamenei family.”
Extreme Islamist theocracies with roving morality police are difficult to maintain at the best of times, but that becomes exponentially more problematic when they’re being nominally led by a comatose sodomite whose father thought he wasn’t smart enough for the job even when his son was ambulatory.
Furthermore, the New York Post reported, a leaked State Department file on the younger Khamenei notes that he got hitched (to a woman) “relatively late in life … reportedly due to an impotency problem treated and eventually resolved during three extended visits to the U.K., at Wellington and Cromwell Hospitals, London.”
“Mojtaba was expected by his family to produce children quickly, but needed a fourth visit to the U.K. for medical treatment; after a stay of two months, his wife became pregnant.”
And, yes, while most of this is “sources say” kind of stuff, the notion that the younger Khamenei was thought to be unfit to replace his aging father had been floating around before the current conflict.
The problem is that Khamenei père had been particularly ruthless in making sure that any potential challenge to his rule was sidelined while he was alive — meaning there wasn’t exactly a panoply of choices, good or bad, to replace him, even if he’d met the Grim Reaper in a peaceful and predictable fashion.
He did not, and the mullahs are left with a possibly gay, probably dumb, and potentially dying leader, if intelligence is accurate. Given that Iran is besieged on all sides with just a few allies in name only — Moscow and Beijing pretend to be outraged at the U.S.-Israeli military operations, but they’ve yet to get involved in any material fashion for reasons that need no explanation — and dwindling stocks of missiles and drones, Mojtaba’s succession is even more disastrous than it would have been otherwise.
And to think, Barack Obama’s administration gave Iran $1.7 billion in pallets of cash because he was cowed by these fools.
Speaking of impotency…
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