Table Stakes - July 6th

Good morning everyone,

I’m Atlas, and welcome to Table Stakes!

Here’s a look at today’s topics:

• Mojtaba Khamenei Absent From Funeral Of His Father

• Pastor Freed From Prison In China After Trump Meeting With Xi

• Trump Decries Communism In 250th Anniversary Speech

Mojtaba Khamenei Absent From Funeral Of His Father

_{By: Atlas}

Three of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's sons stood beside his coffin in Tehran on Sunday as funeral prayers were read for the man who ruled Iran for nearly four decades. Missing was the fourth, and the most consequential: Mojtaba Khamenei, the son who succeeded him as supreme leader and who has not been seen in public since the airstrike that killed his father more than four months ago.

His absence hung over an event otherwise engineered to project strength. Iran has shut down much of the country for a six-day funeral that authorities are billing as the "funeral of the century," expecting well over ten million participants. But the one figure whose presence would have carried the most weight, the new leader himself, never appeared.

A Conspicuous Absence

Mostafa, Masoud, and Meysam Khamenei prayed behind their father's coffin at Tehran's Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla, the vast religious complex where the body has lain in state. Mojtaba was nowhere in sight, breaking with a tradition in which each successor leads the funeral prayers for his predecessor, a role analysts view as a way of cementing the legitimacy of a new leader.

He has been out of public view since February 28, when Israeli and U.S. strikes killed his father at the outset of the war. No photograph, audio, or video of him has surfaced in the months since. People close to his inner circle have said he was injured in the same attack, with a disfigured face and a significant wound to one or both legs, though Iranian officials have said there was no permanent disfigurement or amputation. He did not attend the funeral of his own wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, who was killed in the strike, held days earlier.

Iranian authorities are expected to justify his absence on security grounds. Yet the reasoning sits uneasily against the scene at the Mosalla, where virtually the entire senior leadership turned out. President Masoud Pezeshkian, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Revolutionary Guard chief Ahmad Vahidi, and Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani all attended, appearing in the open in a way that would have been unthinkable during the war. Their presence suggested the government felt confident the ceasefire precluded an attack on the ceremony, which made the decision to keep Mojtaba away all the more notable.

That caution may be well founded. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had said Mojtaba was "marked for death," and the armed forces issued a statement warning against any military action during the mourning. On the American side, Laura Loomer, a sometime confidante of President Trump, described the funeral on social media as a "target-rich environment."

A Spectacle of Grief and Revenge

The prayers, led by the 97-year-old Qom cleric Ayatollah Ja'far Sobhani, were for Khamenei and four relatives killed alongside him, including his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and his 14-month-old granddaughter, Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani. The small size of the child's coffin was among the more striking sights at the ceremony.

By Sunday, the crowds were larger and more militant than on the opening day, when authorities unofficially claimed more than two million attended. Mourners waved red flags, a symbol of both martyrdom and vengeance in Shia Islam, under the official slogan "We must rise," set against an image of Khamenei's clenched fist. The metro system logged some seven million trips from Saturday night into Sunday morning as people streamed toward the center of the capital.

The mourning carried an explicit thread of vengeance aimed at the United States and Israel. At a poetry recitation before the prayers, Mohammad Rasouli declared that "Trump's murder is our responsibility," asking why "the most bastard man in the world" was still alive. His scripted remarks drew a mixed but largely cheering response. Banners in the crowd read "kill Trump" and "kill Bibi," a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" echoed through metro stations and the funeral grounds.

The event drew Iran's regional allies as well. Delegations from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other groups in the Iran-backed "Axis of Resistance" attended, along with relatives of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who helped mediate between Iran and Washington, was among the most senior foreign officials present. European countries were reportedly not invited.

The War and Its Aftermath

The funeral was delayed for months by the war itself. Khamenei, 86, was killed on the first day of a conflict that raged for weeks before a shaky ceasefire took hold. More than 3,000 people died, including many of Iran's senior politicians and commanders, and strikes destroyed military bases and major infrastructure at a cost of billions of dollars.

Iran's leadership has framed the outcome as a victory. Officials point to Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in the region, the pressure placed on Gulf states hosting them, and Tehran's assertion of control over the Strait of Hormuz, which sent global energy prices climbing. An interim deal reached last month unfreezes billions in Iranian assets and waives financial sanctions that had crippled the economy. Talks on implementing that framework, and on the strait and Iran's nuclear program, appear to be on hold until after Thursday's burial. Trump told the Axios news website that Washington had granted Tehran "a week off" for the funeral.

Trump drew a sharp response from Iranians when he expressed surprise at the tears of mourners, saying, "I thought they hated him," and suggesting the grief might be "fake tears." One mourner, Zahra Safaei, 50, replied: "We did not make a revolution 47 years ago to shed fake tears. We did not sacrifice all these martyrs to shed fake tears."

What Comes Next

The ceremonies are choreographed to run for six days across two countries. After a mass procession through central Tehran on Monday, Khamenei's remains are to travel to the seminary city of Qom on Tuesday, then to the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq on Wednesday, before returning to Iran for burial Thursday in his birthplace of Mashhad. Authorities are mobilizing millions with free transport, food, and lodging, and have warned of the risk of crowd crushes, a concern rooted in the 1989 funeral of Ruhollah Khomeini, where at least eight mourners died and the military had to evacuate the body by helicopter.

Even as the processions unfolded, the region remained tense. A maritime monitor reported a cargo vessel under attack off Yemen's coast on Sunday, and the Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump discussed Iran by phone, with Putin voicing hope that the indirect talks would yield lasting solutions.

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