Guess what: monuments for Confederate soldiers have been coming down all over the American south. There has been a great deal of resentment, but only the already unhinged refer to it as persecution of Southerners. When in the 1960s the IRA destroyed the Nelson Column in Dublin, nobody in the press referred to it as Irish persecution of the English.

It is odd, perhaps disingenuous to refer to "comments section of western press". Anyone can write anything, and many often do.