Black Lives Matter Everywhere; People in the Middle East Remember Their Own Black Victims

Interacting with viral videos of police brutality against a black man in the US, social media commentators in the Middle East highlighted that discrimination against people with African ancestry isn't limited to the US, but that it's a serious issue in Arab countries as well.

Watching and sharing the video, depicting the last moments of Goerge Floyd's life as he was confiscated by Minneapolis police in the US state of Minnesota, also hit Arabic-speaking social media, where users remembered that such racist practices against black people happen in the Middle East too.

Twitter users took the chance of Floyd's viral video to shed light on incidents in which black people faced similar injustices in Middle Eastern countries, arguing that "black lives matter" campaign has to include black people everywhere not only in North America.

Popular Twitter account DrFeminist shared photos of what they described as a 2016 incident that took place in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, when a black Saudi man named Majid Hasan Barmanda faced Floyd's fate.

According to DrFeminist, Majid was near a police force that had stopped a number of women before things got intense. Majid reportedly rushed to calm tensions down before the police pinned him down and used blinding sprays on him before he was eventually killed.

Social media users also shared old videos of Majid's funeral, saying that his story represents the "silent racism" in the Middle East towards black people.

Translation: "Masses of people in the funeral of martyr Majid Hasan Barmanda on Thursday evening in Mecca, with his siblings and loved ones mourning him."