A man who objected to a vigil for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Manhattan was punched and kicked on the ground when he snatched a poster-size portrait of the cleric from a shrine set up to honor the dead “supreme leader.”
The sparsely attended vigil in Washington Square Park on Thursday, which featured a table of photos and a man with a bullhorn pontificating about “brave martyrs” in the recent conflict, appeared outnumbered by a group supporters of the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation which has decimated the country’s theocracy.
New York police were keeping the opposing groups separated by fencing. But an innocent-looking man in a pink hat had positioned himself close to the shrine and the vigil’s speaker.
As the speaker spoke through the bullhorn, the man suddenly smiled, waved to the anti-regime crowd, then turned and ripped the poster of Khamenei from the table.
“Take this down,” he shouted, holding it high.
A man in a colorful jacket and face mask charged and punched the man with a vicious right hook. Others with the vigil also pounced, kicking him on the ground.
Police quickly intervened, separating the combatants as well as helping up a woman who was knocked to the ground in the melee.
The unidentified man in the pink hat, blood running down his nose, held up the peace sign but then was cuffed by cops. He had words for the cleric pictured on the poster.
“He’s a terrorist who’s killed American soldiers and I think it was insane that I was right there and there was a vigil, so I just took the sign down,” the man told the New York Post as police led him away. “I felt that was the right thing to do.”
“I feel like someone should show up for the Iranian people,” he explained.
Police said multiple people were taken into custody during the demonstration.
The group commemorating the leader of the regime was often drowned out by the larger counter-protestors who chanted “USA” and “death to terrorists.”
Khamenei was killed last Saturday — the first day of Operation Epic Fury — in the U.S.-Israeli military effort when Israeli missiles obliterated his compound in one of the first strikes.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
