Apples and trees. The former don’t generally land too far afield of the latter.

Mojtaba Khamenei on Thursday delivered his first public remarks since succeeding his slain father as Iran’s Supreme Leader.

In an lengthy speech which, when translated, reads in places like Clark Griswold’s eulogy for Aunt Edna, the son mourns, prays, blesses and threatens, all in the (stereo)typical style of a Revolution hardliner.

Most of his harangue was irrelevant for markets (and just irrelevant in general), but it was certainly notable that Mojtaba explicitly promised to sustain attacks on US bases (which he said should be shuttered by the nations hosting them) and keep the world’s most important oil chokepoint closed to through traffic.

“The leverage of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” he said, adding the regime has “conducted studies regarding the opening of other fronts where the enemy has little experience and will be highly vulnerable.”

That won’t do anything to calm frayed nerves on a day when the front page of every international newspaper featured images of burning oil tankers in an Iraqi port.

Mojtaba, who was injured in the first day of the US-Israeli bombardment which killed multiple members of his family, is sheltering in a bunker. His Thursday speech presumably traversed a circuitous path on its way to public dissemination. That’s an extremely unusual situation for a head of state.

In addition to underscoring the threat of assassination, Mojtaba’s predicament is a testament to the international community’s inability to impose any sort of limitations on the US-Israeli military campaign.

Consider the following. Vladimir Putin would very much like to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky. That he hasn’t done so isn’t a function of the Russian military’s inability to locate Ukraine’s comedian-turned wartime president. Rather, the Kremlin fears the international backlash from killing another country’s leader.

By contrast, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu labor under no such concerns or constraints. In the simplest possible terms: Israel will assassinate Mojtaba Khamenei as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Whether that opportunity presents itself I obviously can’t say, but as discussed here last week, the IRGC’s hopelessly compromised. The events of the last two years, and particularly those of June 13, 2025, make that abundantly clear.

Khamenei, a Shia cleric who, democratically chosen or not, is the acting head of state for a country of 92 million people, is being forced to live and operate like a Salafi jihadist who’s just flown jumbo jets into a couple of skyscrapers, passing notes through a network of couriers and wondering which of the three things allowed in the room with him has already sold him out, the rug, the lamp, the valet or all three.

As much as some Iranians (and all Israelis) would like to see Mojtaba reunited with his father, this situation’s lamentable to the extent it suggests Washington’s habitual abuse of America’s position at the helm of a post-War order designed specifically to ensure state sovereignty and thereby insure against another global conflict, knows no bounds.

I hope this is obvious, but just in case: I’m not advocating for the preservation of the Revolution in Iran. Even if you can somehow look past the militarism and domestic oppression, it’s a failure on any measure of government aptitude.

There are plenty of brutal autocracies in the world which don’t bother their neighbors and provide for the daily needs of their citizens. Iran insists on harassing its neighbors and doesn’t provide for its people. So, good riddance.

That said, we can’t live in a world where the US and Israel can declare, unilaterally, that heads of state are terrorists, and assert for the Pentagon and the IDF the right to kidnap and assassinate other countries’ leaders at will. That’s a form of lawlessness and tyranny.

In his Thursday message, Mojtaba conveyed his sympathies for Iranians who’ve lost loved ones in recent days. “This is based on a shared experience,” he said. “Apart from my father, whose loss has become a public matter, I have entrusted my dear and loyal wife, my devoted sister as well as her young child, and the wife of another sister, to the caravan of martyrs.”

All this for oil and religion.