Iranian academics have paid tribute to George Floyd, the most recent victim of racism in the United States, voicing solidarity with the thousands of American protesters who have taken to the streets in the aftermath of Floyd’s gruesome murder.
According to Press TV, the Iranian professors and personalities remembered the victim during ceremonies held across various representative offices of the country’s academic society.
Seven candles were lit during the ceremonies to mark the seven minutes that it took for Floyd to die at the hands of the police in Minneapolis on May 25. The unarmed victim died of asphyxia after a white police officer pinned him to the ground and pressed his knee to his neck during all those minutes.
The memorial events featured reading out of a letter addressed to the American people in recognition of their suffering as a result of successive US administrations’ actions.
The signatories clearly noted how the atrocity carried out against Floyd saw “the suppressive capitalist machine throwing away its mask of democracy” and denying the victim his basic right to life.
“We heard, with a painful and suffering heart, the justice-seeking voices of the oppressed people in various US states in the face of the totalitarian capitalist American establishment,” the letter read.
“We stand with the oppressed Americans in the cause of rescuing the humanity that has been taken captive by the evil American rulers,” the signatories said.
‘Great social movement’
The letter hailed that the resulting protests that have engulfed the US was giving rise to a “great social movement.”
The movement, it added, pursues one’s most basic right, namely the right to existence that is being denied by the American police from the likes of Floyd and the 99 percent movement that has been demanding equality for all Americans.
The Americans should accept the harsh reality that they have to fight for their right to “breathing,” and “struggle to change their destiny,” it said.
The signatories also reminded that the suffering that was imposed on Floyd has likewise been visited on people in all the places that have undergone US intervention, such as Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
As another case in point, the letter named the Iranian people as “one of the biggest” victims of aggression by the United States that has been denying Iranians their basic needs through illegal sanctions.
“Today, there is not a single spot across the world, where a human being has not been denied his/her right to live under the pressure of the US administration’s knees,” it noted.
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