Mike Pompeo Uses Jews to Promote Islamophobia and Defend Trump from Criticism.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to a tweet from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, writing, “You hang homosexuals, stone women, and exterminate Jews.” 

Zarif’s original tweet contained a press release originally written by Secretary Pompeo in 2018 condemning the Iranian government’s treatment of Iranian protesters. In Javad Zarif’s tweet, he edited Pompeo’s press release in an effort to shame Donald Trump and the United States for their violent repression of Black people protesting police violence.

Javad Zarif captioned the edited photo: “Some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter. To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism. Time for a #WorldAgainstRacism.”

In his response to Javad Zarif’s tweet, Pompeo invoked the same language that is regularly used by Islamophobes to demonize Iranian people, and Muslims as a whole. The Iranian government has homophobic and misogynistic laws and goverment officials regularly traffic in antisemitism. No representative of the Trump administration, however, has any moral standing to speak about women’s rights, LGBTQIA rights, or Jewish safety — not while the Republican Party promotes regressive legislation and conspiracies that marginalize, disempower, and endanger these demographic groups.

This was not Pompeo’s first time using Jews to defend and flatter Trump in conversations about Iran. In March of 2019, he went so far as to boost a claim that Trump was sent by God to “save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”