The official account of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, @khamenei_ir, has tweeted on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day, saying “discrimination still prevails in the US.”
The tweets marked the birthday of the prominent civil rights activist on Monday.
“Today, not only Asian, African & Latin American nations but also American ppl are treated out of injustice by the US,” said one tweet, using hashtags #Ferguson and #MLK.
This year’s celebrations were held in the wake of nationwide Black Lives Matter demos over the past months in protest at racial profiling against African Americans, which were triggered by police killings of two black men in Ferguson and Staten Island.
Another tweet criticized the US government over its failure to establish social justice in the country, adding that “recent protests of blacks in US clearly proves this fact.”
“Many years have passed since equality of blacks & whites was first declared on paper in US, but discrimination still prevails,” read a tweet.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist, who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968.
He pressed for the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is the first US civil rights legislation aimed at outlawing discrimination.
The African Americans in the United States are being “trampled by US system just for having dark skins,” said another tweet.
Protests have been held in the US since a grand jury decided not to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo in Eric Garner’s chokehold death in New York City and two weeks after another grand jury decided not to indict former policeman Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Unlike the fatal shooting of Brown, the chokehold death of Garner, a father of six and grandfather of two, was recorded by a cell phone and widely seen, contributing to the public outrage. In the video, Garner repeatedly told police officers “I can’t breathe!”
