Turkey, Iran seize on opportunity to exploit U.S. protests – Jerusalem Post

Turkey and Iran have wasted no time in exploiting the protests in the United States sparked by the death of an African-American man in police custody, the Jerusalem Post said on Saturday.

Turkey, the world’s largest jailor of journalists, and Iran, which had murdered 1,500 demonstrators in 2019, have both been quick to express their support for the violent protests across the United States, it said.

The widespread protests were sparked in anger over the documented killing of George Floyd on Monday, after a Minnesota policer officer dug his knee into the victim’s neck during an arrest. One man has been killed and many injured and the U.S. National Guard has been called in to secure the cities.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, known for “ethnically cleansing Kurds in northern Syria” responded to the protests by calling the United States “racist and fascist”, the Jerusalem Post said.

The Turkish president went on call the protests the result of a “painful manifestation of the unjust order we stand against across the world”.

Erdoğan’s condemnation of the “inhuman mentality” in the United States arrives as Turkey continues to arrest journalists and activists, the Israeli newspaper said said.

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Turkey is accused of prolonged and arbitrary detentions of journalists, human rights defenders and politicians, according to the World Report 2020 by the Human Rights Watch. Erdoğan’s government has prosecuted thousands of government critics on broadly defined terrorism charges in proceedings with insubstantial evidence. Turkey’s crackdown intensified after the July 2016 coup attempt. The article cited reports over the weekend on the detention of Kurdish and Yazidi women in a secret prison run by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels in Syria, where Turkey launched a military offensive last year.