Iran’s supreme leader, Ayotellah Khamenei, has joined China to criticize the United States saying the police killing of unarmed African-American George Floyd shows the “true face” of the United States and its oppression of the peoples of the world, including its own.
Floyd’s killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last week monday has sparked protests across the United States for a week leading President Donald Trump to order the military to intervene in states where the governors are ‘too weak’ to ‘dominate and take control’
The protests which has shown the great racial divide and discrimination existing in the US has coincided with the world’s deadliest Coronavirus outbreak that has killed over 100,000 people in the United States.
Iran has now come out to criticize the US.
“The fact that a policeman has cold-bloodedly pressed his knee on the throat of a black man until he died and that other policemen watched on without doing anything is nothing new,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a televised speech Wednesday in Iran.
“It is the true face of America, it’s what it has always done all over the world – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and before that in Vietnam.
“It is the normal course of action of the United States, it’s the true face of their regime,” Khamenei said.
“These are realities that have always been camouflaged or hidden, but they are not new,” he said in a speech on the 31st anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The thousands of people protesting at close quarters, coughing violently when hit by police tear gas, might lead to an upsurge in infections., and Khamenei whose country has reported over 8,000 deaths due to Covid-19 has criticized the US’ handling of the pandemic.
“Thank God, (US leaders) have already been discredited by their actions — their handling of the coronavirus has discredited and shamed them around the world,” Khamenei said of the 106,000 deaths from COVID-19 already registered in the United States.
As of Wednesday, Iran’s health ministry declared a total of 8,012 deaths. Tensions between Tehran and Washington escalated sharply in 2018, after Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the 2015 Iran Nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama.
