Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo: www.sajed.ir via Wikimedia Commons.

A Twitter account linked to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran was “not like some retarded countries,” and fired off a barrage of oblique antisemitic tweets on Thursday.

The firebrand Iranian ruler invoked familiar tropes against the United States and Israel, including claims that America was a two-faced negotiator and that Israeli entities were steering U.S. policy.

He accused the U.S. government of “global arrogance,” and said “Zionist companies” and “economic cartels” were behind it.

He also ridiculed Israel for apparently claiming that a putative Mossad campaign to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists a few years ago, as part of a covert program to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, was not terrorism. Israel has never admitted to organizing the brief spate of assassinations in Iran.

“Enemy and global arrogance is not an illusion; it’s a reality, and its utmost epitome is U.S. government and Zionist and economic cartels backing it,” he said. He warned that the “short-term” cooperation with the United States should “not deceive us.”

“We must always be aware of the enemy’s plots,” he wrote, adding a critique of what he called Western hypocrisy regarding terrorism, namely that countries such as the U.S. consider Iran a a state sponsor of terrorism while backing governments like Saudi Arabia and Israel, which have waged war on Islamist terrorist groups in Yemen and the Gaza Strip, respectively. He said it was hypocritical to declare Lebanese and Palestinian “resistance movements” (Iran backs Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas in Gaza and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) terrorist groups, while simultaneously backing Israeli “tyranny.”

The messages on his Twitter account, which are widely attributed to Khamenei or his ideologues — but without any conclusive evidence  they are coming from the country’s head imam — appeared shortly after the supreme leader announced his backing of an Iranian parliamentary vote on the nuclear deal with world powers.

While claiming he was not trying to persuade lawmakers one way or the other, Khamenei insisted Iran only made “some concessions” to remove the crippling economic sanctions that a number of analysts believe will take Iran years to overcome.

In several rapidly consecutive tweets, Khamenei announced that sanctions must be removed for Iran to comply with the nuclear agreement. And though asserting the U.S. was duplicitous in its dealings with Iran, he said U.S. officials who have called for more sanctions, or vowed to pass new legislation imposing additional sanctions on Iran, must be taken seriously.

“I believe internal conflicts in US are real. They have differences and the reason behind these disagreements is clear to us,” he tweeted. “To officials: Don’t consider Americans’ claims persuasion [sic] of domestic rivals; official remarks need reactions or would be considered true.”