The Supreme Leader made the comment on May 15 as he received organizers of a congress commemorating 12,000 martyrs of Tehran Province.

The text of Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech made during the meeting was published on Thursday as the congress kicked off at the Mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, south of Tehran.

The Supreme Leader lauded heroic endeavors of Iranian fighters during the eight-year imposed war on Iran by the toppled Iraqi Baath regime in the 1980s, noting that they conveyed the message of resistance and endurance both inside and outside the Islamic Republic during the Sacred Defense (a term used in Iran for the 8-year-long defense in the imposed war).   

Today, the slogans and stances that are witnessed in support of Palestine across the world are the same stances of the late Imam Khomeini and the same slogans chanted by the Iranian people, Ayatollah Khamenei added.

He also praised pro-Palestine protests by students at US universities, noting that American police have violated the country’s slogans by resorting to a severe crackdown on those demonstrations.

What the US had longed sought to orchestrate in Iran has backfired, the Supreme Leader further noted.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he lauded the motivation of the Iranian youth who eagerly fought on the battlefields against Daesh and the Zionist regime in recent years.

Iranian youth in Tehran, who had neither seen the late Imam Khomeini nor did experience the era of the Sacred Defense, thwarted the enemy's plots to create problems for the country in past several years, including in 2009, he underlined.

Touching on the importance of the promotion of achievements of the Sacred Defense, Ayatollah Khamenei said that if a truth is not explained and elaborated, it will be distorted by ill-wishers no matter how clear that truth is.