Regimes based in Turkey and Iran both sought to exploit and support violent protests in the US over the weekend for the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis. Turkey is one of the world’s largest jailers of journalists and Iran’s government murdered 1,500 protesters last year, but leaders in both countries cynically sought to exploit recent protests in the US for their own ends.
Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted that “if you’re dark-skinned walking in the US, you can’t be sure you’ll be alive in the next few minutes.”
Former Iranian president and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the killing of Floyd, the African-American man, was “deeply disturbing and upsetting” and that it was part of a plot by world powers and the “current world order.”
He even used the word “nigga” in his tweet, apparently trying to make his tweet seem relevant to Americans.
It is not clear who writes the tweets for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei in English; some of them appear to be taken more from college activists in the US than from the usual terminology of the theocratic Iranian regime, which has a long history of suppressing minorities and murdering protesters.
Even as Iran’s regime was supporting the protests in the US, which turned violent in many cities over the weekend, the regime in Tehran was gunning down peaceful Kurdish “kolbars” – people who move goods across the border.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who is known for ethnically cleansing Kurds in northern Syria and whose army carried out a drone strike that killed two civilians on Saturday in Iraq – also supported the US protests.
Read more: jpost
Ask me anything
Explore related questions
