America’s adversaries relish opportunity to criticize Trump’s response to racist groups and violence.
WASHINGTON — America’s adversaries are just loving this.
Leaders of governments dismissed by Washington as totalitarian dictatorships are relishing in the opportunity to draw attention to racism and violence in the land of the world’s sole superpower.
Indeed, they are taking particular glee in President Donald Trump’s widely criticized response to a deadly white supremacist rally, using the opportunity to decry the hypocrisy of America’s practice of scolding the world about equality, democracy and human rights.
“Behind the white supremacists is the power that has taken over the White House and the venues where decisions are made by the North American imperialists,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Monday.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei knocked America next: “If US has any power, they better manage their country, tackle White Supremacy rather than meddle in nations’ affairs … Charlottesville,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Shifting attention
Then China. “U.S. is not a human rights paradise, nor the world’s moral leader,” a headline in China’s state-run People’s Daily proclaimed on Thursday.
Saturday’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., left one woman dead and Trump insistence that people who showed up to protest racists deserve some of the blame for the violence has been widely condemned, in the United States and abroad.
Iran, classified by Washington as a state sponsor of terror, balks at any Western effort to call out its government for frequent human rights violations. Hardliners there seize any opportunity to shift attention away from the country’s nuclear and military activities, putting Tehran constantly at odds with the United States.
In Venezuela, where Trump last week threatened a possible military strike in response to the country’s democratic breakdown, Maduro used Trump’s response to Charlottesville to further decry Yankee interventionism.
Maduro spoke at one of the “anti-imperialist” rallies his government organized Monday amid a months-long wave of protests by the opposition against the president’s tightening grip on power. The U.S. has responded by sanctioning a range of Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself, and is debating imposing measures against the country’s oil industry.
‘Hate, terror on the rise’
In communist China, media outlets were calling out what they cast as America’s absence of moral authority on equality. The state-run Global Times ran an editorial lamenting the “tragic time warp” in which U.S. race relations had landed.
The People’s Daily op-ed rejected criticism leveled this week from the State Department’s annual reports on religious freedom, which noted severe restrictions in China. It said the U.S. has plenty of examples of discriminating against people of certain religions, such as Muslims.
“But it is not just hate toward Muslims that is on the rise. As the recent deadly racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, have shown, hate and terror are on the rise in America, and such problems are expected to increase,” the People’s Daily said.
And in a direct dig at Trump, China offered some advice.
“The U.S. government should focus more on making America ‘great again,’ and less on making other countries more like America,” the People’s Daily said.