Nach Angaben der Chinesischen Gesundheitskommission sind bis zum 25. März 2021 knapp 50 Millionen Chinesen gegen Covid-19 geimpft. Der offizielle Impfstart in China war am 25. Dezember 2020.
Trotzdem die Chinesen täglich mit über 6 Millionen Dosen kostenfrei geimpft werden können, ist das staatliche Ziel schwer zu erreichen, dass 70% der chinesischen Bevölkerung bis zum Ende des Jahres 2021 geimpft werden solle. Es ist eine große Herausforderung.
A wave of corporate media reports on Chinese organ harvesting rely without acknowledgement on front groups connected to the far-right Falun Gong cult, whose followers believe “Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.”
By Ryan McCarthy, a US-based writer and activist
Western corporate media outlets have gone wild with claims that the Chinese state is “harvesting” the organs of ethnic minorities and political opposition figures. But an investigation by The Grayzone has found that these allegations originate from front groups run by the far-right opposition cult Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, whose devotees can often be seen clad in yellow and performing coordinated qi gong routines in crowded city centers, runs an ultra-conservative, staunchly pro-Donald Trump media network that has been compared to Alex Jones’ Infowars.
According to a former member of the fringe religious group, Falun Gong believes that an apocalyptic judgement day is soon approaching and “that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the [Chinese] Communist Party.”
In order to understand, then, how heavily politicized rumors from an obscure far-right cult found their way into the headlines, it is essential to trace the roots of the story through an elaborate network of front groups.
In June 2019, a London-based organization called the China Tribunal published a report claiming that the Chinese government has been systematically executing and harvesting the organs of members of Falun Gong, a leading force of opposition to Beijing in the diaspora.
The China Tribunal describes itself as an “independent tribunal into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.” Most Western journalists took the organization at its word.
Up to and after it published the report, the China Tribunal received scattered coverage from various mainstream media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Guardian. In September, the coverage ramped up considerably after the China Tribunal presented its case to the UN Human Rights Council, with major outlets like The Independent and Reuters joining in.
One thing all this reporting has in common is that it assumes the China Tribunal is truly “independent.” On its website, the China Tribunal says that it was “initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international not for profit organisation, with headquarters in Australia and National Committees in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.”
So what is ETAC, really?
On ETAC’s website, one finds a “management” page with a list of people, devoid of any information except their names, photographs, and positions in the organization. The executive director and co-founder is Susie Hughes; Margo MacVicar is named as the New Zealand national manager; Rebecca James is the UK national manager for outreach, and so on.
Where do these figures come from, and what brought them together? The website has no bios. But follow the names, and it soon becomes apparent that there is another connection apart from ETAC — the Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times, which uses the slogan “Truth and Tradition,” has marketed itself as just another conservative, pro-Trump media outlet.
But NBC News published a major exposé in August revealing it to be the media arm of the opposition cult Falun Gong. The report details the bizarre workings of the Falun Gong organization, showing how the Epoch Times is carving a place for itself in American right-wing media.
NBC News found that the Falun Gong website spent more than $1.5 million on roughly 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook in just six months, “more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.”
And while the NBC reporters, Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, cautiously refer to Falun Gong as a “spiritual community,” the behavior they document very easily fits into the popular definition of “cult.” (It’s okay, Zadrozny and Collins, you can say it — say it with me: “Falun Gong is a cult.” Now doesn’t that feel better?)
A quick look at Falun Gong’s official emblem, posted on its website, should raise some eyebrows: it features an ancient swastika symbol. Falun Gong reassures skeptics on the web page, “Some people say: ‘This symbol looks like Hitler’s stuff.’ Let me tell you that this symbol itself does not connote any concepts of class.”
So where do the ETAC managers fit in with Falun Gong? Susie Hughes has photographer credits on several Epoch Times articles (her name seems to have been scrubbed, the photos merely credited to “The Epoch Times,” but the credit still shows up on Google searches at the time of writing). Margo MacVicar has numerous articles gushing about Shen Yun, Falun Gong’s traveling dance show. Rebecca “Becky” James shows up organizing a Falun Gong art exhibition in Bristol and sharing vegan drink recipes.
ETAC’s UK national manager for initiatives, Andy Moody, is credited by Epoch Times as a reporter for its sibling NTD, or New Tang Dynasty Television, Falun Gong’s TV arm. (Concerned Canadians have noted that the cult’s propaganda network has received millions of their tax dollars worth of disproportionate funding.)
ETAC’s UK communications coordinator Victoria Ledwidge appears in another Epoch Times article, coming to greet Shen Yun performers in London and, of course, acclaiming the “amazing” performance.
As one goes down the list of ETAC management, these Falun Gong connections spring up for almost everyone. ETAC is very clearly a Falun Gong front group.
Neither ETAC nor China Tribunal discloses these connections, but it hardly takes an intrepid investigative journalist to find them. So why was this level of basic research a step too far for, say, Owen Bowcott at the Guardian, who does little more than transmit ETAC’s talking points?
In fact, Falun Gong itself is actively spreading this “organ harvesting” rumor in major North American cities. The Grayzone’s Ben Norton saw some of the cult’s activists standing in central Toronto next to a giant banner titled “Stop Forced Live Organ Harvesting in China.”
They handed out pamphlets to passers-by declaring that the “Chinese Communist Regime Is Slaughtering Innocents” (using a painting as supposed evidence), while preaching about the “great health benefits” of Falun Gong.
The far-right cult is clearly using these rumors to proselytize and recruit new supporters.
Turning to the China Tribunal’s report itself, it is apparent that, despite the authors’ claim to “have maintained distance and separation from ETAC in order to ensure their independence,” they rely heavily on information curated for them by ETAC.
The introduction, after describing ETAC as “a not-for-profit coalition of lawyers, medical professionals and others”, goes on to state that “ETAC’s main interest has been the alleged suffering of practitioners of ‘Falun Gong’, a group performing meditative exercises and pursuing Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, but regarded by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1999 as an ‘anti-humanitarian, anti-society and anti-science cult’.”
It is understandable that critics might hesitate to take the PRC’s characterization of Falun Gong at face value. But it is easy to make a fair evaluation of the group’s true character simply by perusing their own publications, where one will learn, for instance, that modern science was invented by aliens as part of a scheme to take over human bodies; or that feminism, environmentalism, and homosexuality are part of Satan’s plan to make us into communists; or that race-mixing severs our connection to the gods.
What Falun Gong means exactly when it preaches the timeless values of “truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance” is beyond this article’s scope. I leave it to the reader to judge how the above doctrines correspond to them.
The report summary goes on to state: “Evidence was submitted by ETAC for the first hearing, amplified by further evidence following the first and second evidence hearings.” So despite framing their investigation as separate and independent of ETAC, the authors admit that they began with evidence fed to them by ETAC.
Their reliance on ETAC is further highlighted later when several doctors are named who expressed skepticism about the Falun Gong organ harvesting narrative. These doctors are listed as “doctors speaking favourably of the PRC.”
The report then states:
“All of these doctors were invited by the Tribunal to participate in the Tribunal’s proceedings. Their participation would have greatly assisted the Tribunal in its work; they all declined the invitations. Further, although each did contribute in person to a recent report by an Australian Government Committee their contributions have been subject to review by ETAC that reveals that they produced no hard evidence to support what they said and could be criticised for their methodology or their experience in transplant surgery.”
In other words, the China Tribunal didn’t see any need to consider their testimony, because ETAC had already looked at it and declared it to be bogus.
One of these doctors, Francis Delmonico, was contacted by the science journal Nature for its article on the China Tribunal’s report — a rare case of a dissenting opinion being registered, however grudgingly.
Delmonico was asked specifically for his opinion on a research paper cited by the China Tribunal, which was published on the scientific archive, SocArXiv, by Matthew Robinson – a research fellow of the famously impartial Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation:
“But Francis Delmonico, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that although there is evidence that organs were taken from prisoners in the past — which he condemns — he is not convinced by the SocArXiv evidence because it is not direct. Delmonico is chair of the World Health Organization’s Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues and has been supporting organ-donation reform in China for more than a decade, although he made his comments to Nature in a personal capacity.”
The China Tribunal’s report is not the first alleging that the Chinese government is murdering Falun Gong prisoners en masse to harvest their organs. It relies heavily on an earlier document, known as the Kilgour-Matas report, which was initially released in 2006 and updated several times since then, with the title “Bloody Harvest.”
This previous report was commissioned by the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China. Unlike ETAC, CIPFG plainly states that it is a Falun Gong organization.
More interesting connections arise when probing the backgrounds of the co-authors of the report, David Kilgour and David Matas.
David Matas is the senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, a right-wing pro-Israel lobby that works hard to tar any critique of the occupation of Palestine as anti-semitism. He was also a member of the Canadian government’s now-defunct Rights and Democracy board, in which capacity he lobbied on behalf of the Iranian opposition cult Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), as part of an effort to remove the MEK from the Canadian and US lists of terrorist organizations — an effort that was eventually successful.
The Rights and Democracy board’s chairman, Aurel Braun, was also a strident MEK advocate, who promoted the cult as a replacement for Iran’s present government. Rights and Democracy eventually dissolved due in part to Braun’s and Matas’ relentless attacks on another board member for supposed contacts with Hezbollah and Hamas.
The MEK emerged in 1960s Iran, promoting a strange mixture of Marxism and Shia Islam, and supported the 1979 Revolution until the Mullahs turned against it. MeK leadership then fled to Europe, from which they launched a series of terrorist bombings. They simultaneously maintained a presence in Iraq, where they enjoyed Saddam Hussein’s patronage, massacred Kurds on his behalf, and even fought with his troops against their own country.
The MEK promote themselves, to anyone who will listen, as the Iranian opposition and the best democratic alternative to the present government — and politicians and think tanks seeking regime change in Iran readily indulge them, despite wide reports of their cult-like behavior.
In August 2019 Canada’s National Observer published a report about Canadian politicians who love the MEK. Prominently featured in the article is the other co-author of “Bloody Harvest,” David Kilgour, a former MP who is co-chair for “Canadian Friends of a Democratic Iran” and has been doing PR for the MEK for years.
So both authors of “Bloody Harvest” advocate on behalf of, not one, but two cults that also happen to be darlings of regime-change enthusiasts in and around Western governments. (The latest edition of “Bloody Harvest” includes a third co-author, Ethan Gutmann, who, notably, has been affiliated with the Gulf monarchy-funded Brookings Institution and the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
How does one unwind from all this hard shill work? David Kilgour makes a point of seeing Shen Yun’s dance performances year after year and effusing about it again and again and again to the Epoch Times.
In March, Jia Tolentino published her impressions of Shen Yun in the New Yorker. Like the aforementioned NBC piece on the Epoch Times, Tolentino ‘s article shows that more and more people are noticing that there is something very odd about Falun Gong.
From the “baroque and surreal” Shen Yun dance-propaganda show, which bills itself as a last bastion of genuine Chinese culture, she moves to consider some other very troubling aspects of the Falun Gong organization, such as their penchant for resisting journalistic inquiry and harassing critics.
Tolentino also mentions a 2017 Washington Post investigation by Simon Denyer, which, while hardly a pro-PRC puff piece, casts serious doubt on the claims of the Kilgour-Matas report on organ harvesting.
Denyer may be the only journalist in the mainstream US press who conducted an independent investigation on organ harvesting in China and seriously questions Falun Gong’s organ harvesting narrative. Naturally, Ethan Gutmann felt compelled to run a rebuttal to Denyer’s report on ETAC’s website — and one can only imagine the kinds of emails and phone calls Denyer has been getting since he dared to publish that piece.
For most of the Western corporate media, the “Bloody Harvest” horror story is too ghoulishly titillating to subject to serious scrutiny, especially when the “Yellow Peril”-style villain is an increasingly powerful state threatening the old hegemonies.
(Source: Reports-china-organ-harvesting-cult-falun-gong – TheGrayZone)
On 24th March 2021, China published its annual report on U.S. human rights, meanwhile the U.S. continuously unites many forces to misinterpret social situations and the living standards in China while covering its messes. The report in 2020 is divided into six parts to present the severe human rights violations that happened in the U.S. last year.
Johns Hopkins University showed that as of the end of February 2021, with a population of less than 5 percent of the world’s total, the United States accounted for more than 25 percent of all the confirmed cases and nearly 20 percent of the deaths.
Disease modelers with the Columbia University estimated that, if the United States had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1st 2020, about 83 percent of the nation’s pandemic-related deaths would have been avoided.
Though a number of health officials, including the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and medical experts warned of the possibility of a pandemic in the United States, the American leader not only left it to cities and states to solve national problems with testing and hospital supplies by themselves but also gave wrong treatment suggestions to the public. Vulnerable citizens fell victim to the government’s incompetent response to COVID-19. The Guardian website reported on last March 21th that in the wake of the epidemic, it’s the wealthy and powerful first get coronavirus tests, while low-paid workers, most of whom have no paid sick leave and can’t do their work from home, put themselves at greater risk of contracting the virus in order to earn a living.
According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, dark money groups poured more than 750 million U.S.-Dollars into 2020 elections through ad spending and record-breaking contributions to political committees such as super political action committees. The influence of money in American electoral politics essentially makes it a money-led election, causing the public to have low rates of faith in politics.
According to a November 13th 2020 report by Pew Research Center, there has been an increasingly stark disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the economy, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement, and a long list of other issues. The 2020 presidential election exacerbated these deep-seated divides. A month before the election, about 90 percent in both camps worried that a victory by the other would lead to “lasting harm” to the United States. The election did not resolve the political differences in the United States but heated the social confrontation. On Januar 6th 2021, tens of thousands of protesters who refused to accept the election defeat staged a “Save America” rally in Washington, D.C.
In the United States, racism exists in a comprehensive, systematic and continuous manner. Davis Vanguard reported on December 4th 2020 that people of color account for a disproportionate 43 percent of executions in the U.S. since 1976, and 55 percent of defendants currently awaiting execution are people of color.
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of the United Nations and other institutions pointed out that the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan overtly use racist slogans, chants and salutes to promote white supremacy and incite racial discrimination and hatred.
Many indigenous peoples live in low-income communities, and suffer from higher rates of cancer and heart diseases due to toxic radioactive environments, causing an abnormally high rate of birth defects. Since the pandemic began, the incidents of Asian Americans being humiliated and even assaulted in public have been found everywhere, and some American politicians have misled the public on purpose. Political figures increasingly use divisive language in attempts to marginalize racial, ethnic and religious minorities, which amounts to inciting and fueling violence, intolerance and bigotry.
According to the FBI’s Preliminary Uniform Crime Report released in September 2020, in the first half of 2020, the number of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses increased 14.8 percent year on year, with cities with populations of 250,000 to 500,000 reporting an increase of 26 percent. During the same period, the number of arson offenses increased 19 percent year on year, while such offenses rose 52 percent in cities with populations of 1 million and over.
According to data from Gun Violence Archive, more than 41,500 people died by gun violence in 2020 nationwide, an average of more than 110 a day, which is a record. There had been 592 mass shootings nationwide, an average of more than 1.6 a day.
George Floyd’s death from police brutality sparked unrest, leading to protests in support of Black Lives Matter throughout the United States with protesters blocking the streets and building barricades to confront the police. A large number of police stations, public institutions and shopping malls were looted. In the face of visceral public grievances, the then U.S. administration leader added fuel to the fire by deploying a large number of National Guard soldiers across the country and calling for shooting. There were at least 117 cases of journalists being arrested or detained while on the job covering anti-racism protests in the United States in 2020, a 1,200-percent increase from the figure in 2019.
The COVID-19 epidemic plunged the United States into the worst economic downturn since World War II. The website of Forbes reported on December 11th, 2020 that over the past months of the pandemic, the collective net worth of America’s 614 billionaires has increased by 931 billion U.S.-Dollars. America’s poverty rate jumped to 11.7 percent in November 2020, up from 9.3 percent in June, according to researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.
More than 50 million people – one in six Americans, including one in four children – could experience food insecurity in 2020, according to an analysis report updated in October 2020 by Feeding America. America has no universal health insurance because of political polarization and the number of people enjoying health insurance has shrunk sharply due to the epidemic. From March to May 2020, an estimated 27 million Americans have lost health insurance coverage in the pandemic.
At a time when global unity is needed to fight the pandemic, the American government brazenly announced its withdrawal from the WHO. During this pandemic, the U.S. government still imposed unilateral sanctions on countries such as Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria, which made it difficult for the sanctioned countries to obtain needed anti-pandemic medical supplies.
According to a report of CNN on September 30th 2020, in the 2020 fiscal year, 21 people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, which was more than double the number of deaths in the fiscal year 2019 and marked the highest annual death toll since 2005. According to a report on the website of the Los Angeles Times on November 18th 2020, the U.S. government had expelled at least 8,800 unaccompanied immigrant children despite serious protection risks during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Plus, the United States, as the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, promised to bear a great share of emission reduction. However, the United States ran counter to the trend of the times and officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement on November 4th 2020, becoming the only country among the nearly 200 contracting parties to quit the treaty. On June 11th 2020, the U.S. government authorized economic sanctions and travel restrictions against workers of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and their family members for investigating American troops and intelligence officials for possible war crimes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. President Trump also pardoned four Blackwater contractors who were found to have committed a massacre at Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007, causing 14 unarmed civilians dead and at least 17 people wounded.
(Source: The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, Nytimes, Vox, abcnews, usatoday, nbcnews, ice, ohchr, latimes, chicagotribune, BBC, LAist, the times of India, time magazine, the nation, the guardian)
Königin Elisabeth (1876-1965)
Die originelle, avantgardistische Élisabeth Gabrielle Valérie Marie de Wittelsbach, die 1909 Königin von Belgien wurde, zögerte während des Kalten Krieges nicht, Einladungen aus kommunistischen Ländern anzunehmen, und reiste nach Polen, in die Sowjetunion, nach Jugoslawien und auch nach China.
ERSTES KAPITEL
Das Jahr 1910 stand unter dem Zeichen der internationalen Beziehungen. Die Weltausstellung fand in diesem Jahr in Brüssel statt und war ein großer Erfolg. Es fanden Reisen in die Nachbarländer statt: Frankreich, Österreich, Luxemburg und die Niederlande.
Neben ihren ersten Reisen interessierte sie sich für das musikalische, künstlerische und intellektuelle Leben des Landes und förderte dessen Entwicklung. Schloss Laeken wurde rasch zu einem Zentrum intensiven kulturellen Lebens. Schon in den ersten Jahren der Regentschaft Alberts waren der Maler Eugène Laermans, der Dichter Émile Verhaeren und der Geiger Eugène Ysaÿe gern gesehene Gäste bei Hofe.
Während des ersten Weltkriegs wurde diese erstaunliche Königin Krankenschwester. Zwischen den Kriegen entdeckte sie die USA, Ägypten und Indien.
DIE KÖNIGIN DER MUSIK
Als Musikliebhaberin und Geigerin unterstützte Élisabeth Ende der 1930er Jahre die Gründung des Orchestre National de Belgique, das 1936 gegründet wurde.
1937 wurde der Internationale Königin-Élisabeth-Musikwettbewerb Belgiens (CMIREB), der allgemein als Königin-Élisabeth-Wettbewerb bekannt ist, auf Betreiben der Königin ins Leben gerufen, die sich seit Jahren für seine Gründung eingesetzt hatte. Dieser Wettbewerb ist in der ganzen Welt bekannt. Heute träumen viele asiatische und insbesondere chinesische Musiker und Sänger davon, ihr Talent bei diesem internationalen Wettbewerb zu zeigen!
Während des Zweiten Weltkriegs rettete sie auch Juden.
DER KALTE KRIEG UND CHINA
Königin Élisabeth, Witwe von König Albert I., war eine der ersten westlichen Persönlichkeiten, die China während des Kalten Krieges besuchte.
Von Moskau aus nahmen Élisabeth und ihre Tochter Prinzessin Marie-José, die kurzzeitige Königin von Italien, am 24. September 1961 eine Tupolew mit Ziel Peking.
Obwohl Belgien und China keine diplomatischen Beziehungen unterhielten, traf die Königin Mao Zedong und wurde auf dem Vorplatz der Nationalversammlung von Premierminister Zhou Enlai empfangen.
Sie wurde auch von der Akademie der Wissenschaften empfangen, nahm an der Parade zum 1. Oktober auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens von der offiziellen Tribüne aus teil und besuchte den Schauspieler Gai Jiao-Tian in Hankou.
Diese Initiative brachte den Hof und in erster Linie ihren Enkel König Baudouin in große Verlegenheit, ebenso wie sie die belgische Regierung irritierte.
Am Ende ihres Lebens besuchte die Königin mehrmals kommunistische Regime und stellte sich taub gegenüber der Kritik und Missbilligung, die es damals reichlich gab.
DIE ROTE KÖNIGIN
Die Presse zögerte nicht, ihr den Spitznamen „Rote Königin“ zu geben. Bei ihrer Rückkehr sagte Elisabeth: „Ich hoffe, durch meine Reise nach China zur Annäherung zwischen den Völkern und zur Einheit der Welt beitragen zu können.“
Diese friedliche Erklärung täuscht jedoch nicht über die kommunismusfreundlichen Gedanken der Herrscherin hinweg, die sie auch in ihren Notizbüchern festhielt.
In der zweiten Hälfte ihres Lebens zeigte Königin Elisabeth, dass sie nichts von ihrer Freiheitsliebe und Unabhängigkeit verloren hatte.
Sie starb am 23. November 1965 mit 89 Jahren auf Schloss Stuyvenberg und wurde in der königlichen Krypta von Laeken beigesetzt.
Sicherlich haben auch andere belgische Königinnen China geliebt, von Königin Fabiola bis zur heutigen Königin Mathilde, aber die Rote Königin war die erste Entdeckerin des heutigen Chinas.
On the 18th March 2021, the first senior dialogue between China and the U.S. was held after the call on New Year’s Eve of China. It is also the first face-to-face meeting between China and the United States after the Biden administration took office.
Tensions between the U.S. and China escalated in the past few years due to continuous smears, sanctions, and restrictions directed by President Trump on China’s economy, technology, human capital, sovereignty, etc. Though President Biden tries to ease this bilateral diplomacy, the main idea is still to prevent China from further and rapid development.
Within half a month before talking officially with China, President Biden hosted a video talk with the prime ministers of Australia, India, and Japan, which is the first time that the U.S. decides to forge a strategic partnership with four of the Indo-Pacific region’s most powerful forces. The foreign and defense ministers of Japan and the U.S. also met at the “two-plus-two” dialogue to discuss the sovereignty of territorial waters in the East China sea. Plus, the U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan spoke with the Diplomatic Advisor to the French President, the Foreign and Security Policy Advisor to the German Chancellor, the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of the UK, and the NATO Secretary-General. The series of virtual meetings and phone calls led by the U.S. is interpreted as inciting the international main forces to strengthen potential alliances more broadly and deeply prevent China from further advancement in economy, military, and technology. Such political atmosphere is easy to remind people of the history of the Boxer Protocol, an unequal and humiliating treaty signed in 1901, between the Qing Empire of China and the Eight-Nation Alliance, including the UK, the U.S., Russia, Germany, Japan, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium.
Boxer Protocol was entirely targeted to surpass the democratic and economic development of China. The powers demanded compensation of 450 million taels of silver since China had a population of 450 million, carved up China by setting the controlled areas and continued to implement the strategy of “ruling China with China” by facilitating the Qing government as a traitor to the country in accordance with the will of foreign invaders.
120 years have passed, the U.S. still wants to continue similar oppression of China by making agreements with other forces again. Even at the beginning of the dialogue with China, the U.S. started to criticize and give commands about China’s issues such as sovereignty, social advancement, and economic development, with an indifferent arrogance to every nation as usual.
However, China directly emphasized that the vast majority of countries in the world do not recognize that the value of the United States is the international value since the United States always uses force at every turn to cause turmoil and unrest in the world. What the United States should do is to change its image and manage its own affairs, instead of transferring contradictions to the world, diverting attention, and making irresponsible remarks about China.
The dialogue ended on 20th March 2021, the U.S. agreed to maintain communication, carry out mutually beneficial cooperation in the field of climate change, prevent misunderstanding and misjudgment, avoid conflict and confrontation, and promote the healthy and stable development of Sino-US relations in accordance with the spirit of the call between the two heads of state on February 11th. The U.S. also reiterates its adherence to the one-China policy on the Taiwan issue.
Such agreements show that the U.S. fails to build an universal consensus to meet its interests at the cost of sacrificing others’. 120 years passed, now both China and the United States are world powers and are responsible for regional and world peace, stability, and development.
China has just held the two sessions and passed the “14th Five-Year Plan” and the outline of long-term goals for 2035. China is in the historical confluence of the “two centenary” goals. By 2035, it will basically realize modernization, and by 2050, it will become a socialist modernized power. Chinese are on the way to achieve a better life, a stable society, and a strong country.
The U.S. doesn’t have the ability to divide China into pieces and lead some of them, can’t order Chinese as servants, and fails to take control of Chinese development. History gave Chinese lessons to understand diplomatic inequality, and now China gives the U.S. a lesson about diplomatic equality.
(Source: White House, Huan Qiu Wang)
Die vor wenigen Tage beschlossenen Sanktionen der EU gegen China kamen für Beobachter nicht überraschend. Die EU nutzte ihren neu beschlossenen Sanktionsmechanismus, der nach jahrelanger Lobbyarbeit eines amerikanischen Hedgefond-Milliardärs namens Bill Browder im Dezember 2020 in Brüssel in Kraft getreten war: das Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime, oder auch „Global Magnitzky Act“. Die EU folgt somit vergleichbaren Schritten, die man Jahre zuvor bereits in den USA, Kanada, den Baltischen Staaten und Großbritannien unternommen hatte. Der wegen Steuerhinterziehung in Russland gesuchte Spekulant Browder hatte die Obama-Regierung und den amerikanischen Kongress dazu gebracht, 2012 ein Gesetz zu verabschieden, mit dem Personen in jedem Land der Welt mit Sanktionen belegt werden können (u.a. Visa-Verbot, Kontensperrung), die nach Ansicht der USA Menschrechtsverletzungen begangen haben. Ursprünglich ging es Browder um Russland, wo er unter anderem seine halbseidenen Finanzgeschäfte tätigte und wegen Unterschlagung von Steuerabgaben ins Visier der russischen Behörden geriet.
Den nicht geklärten Tod eines seiner Mitarbeiter, Sergej Magnitzky, schob Browder dann den russischen Sicherheitskräften in die Schuhe – eine Behauptung, die sich später als reine Erfindung erwies, zumindest jedoch zu viele Widersprüche aufweist, um wahr zu sein.[1] Als Browder dann erreichte, dass die USA Personen, die angeblich in diesen Fall verwickelt seien, mit Sanktionen bestrafte, nannte man dieses Gesetz nach Browders verstorbenen Mitarbeiter, Magnitzky. Die Sanktionen, die die EU nun am 21. März gegenüber Personen in China, Russland, Nordkorea, Eritrea und Myanmar verhing, stellen die erste Handlung im Rahmen des am 7. Dezember 2020 beschlossenen „European Magnitzky Act“ dar, für die Browder rund zehn Jahre lang Druck auf Behörden und Regierungen in Europa ausgeübt hat, so lange, bis sich im November 2020 selbst Kommissionschefin Ursula von der Leyen stark in der Öffentlichkeit dafür einsetzte.[2] Der EU-Außenbeauftragte Josep Borrell erklärte das Gesetz zum Meilenstein.
Die EU setzte nach einem einstimmigen Beschluss der EU-Außenminister vom Montag, den 22. März 2021, vier Personen und eine Institution in China auf die Sanktionsliste, die in Verbindung zu Menschenrechtsverstößen in der Provinz Xinjiang stehen sollen. Großbritannien, Kanada und die USA folgten umgehend nach. Chinas Außenministerium bestellte den Botschafter den EU am Montag ein, um formal Protest einzulegen. Gleichzeitig wurden Gegenmaßnahmen angekündigt, die prompt in Kraft traten. Chinas Regierung setze im Gegenzug zehn Politiker und vier Organisationen in Europa auf die Sanktionsliste, die „Chinas Souveränität und Interessen ernstlich schaden und bösartigerweise Lügen und Falschinformationen verbreiten“, teilte die EU-nahe Agentur Euractiv mit.[3] Der Direktor der Abteilung für Europäische Studien im Chinese Institut of International Studies, einer dem Pekinger Außenministerium nahe stehenden Denkfabrik, sagte gegenüber der Global Times: „Unsere Gegenmaßnahmen mögen Brüssel überrascht haben, da sie vermutlich Sanktionen im gleichen Ausmaß erwarteten, aber wir wollten das Maß der Bestrafung unsererseits erhöhen.“ Bei den zehn betroffenen Personen handelt es sich unter anderem um Mitglieder des europäischen Parlaments, zu denen auch der deutsche Reinhard Bütikofer gehört, der dort für die Grünen im Ausschuss für auswärtige Angelegenheiten, Menschenrechte, Gemeinsame Sicherheit und Verteidigungspolitik sitzt. Mit seinen ständigen Beschimpfungen und Sanktionsforderungen gegenüber China versucht er bereits seit Jahren besonders aufzufallen.[4]
Aber auch Adrian Zenz gehört dazu, der zu einer der zentralen Referenzpersonen des militärisch-Industriellen Establishments der USA aufgestiegen ist. Zenz‘ Datenmanipulationen, die den Beweis für einen angeblichen Genozid an den Uiguren in Xinjiang liefern sollte, wurde bereits mehrfach von investigativen Journalistennetzwerken klar als Schwindel entlarvt.[5]
Auch das Policy and Security Committee der Europäischen Union, das aus Botschaftern der EU-Mitgliedsländer und hochrangigen Beamten der außenpolitischen Abteilung (External Action Service) besteht, wurde sanktioniert. Zudem noch der Unterausschuss für Menschenrechte des Europäischen Parlaments. Chinas Sanktionen beinhalten, dass betroffenen Personen und ihren Familienangehörigen keine Einreise nach Festland-China und den Sonderverwaltungszonen Hongkong und Macao gewährt wird, und dass ihnen sämtliche Geschäftsbeziehungen mit China untersagt sind.
Das trifft besonders hart das ebenfalls unter Sanktionen gestellte Mercator Institute of China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin, eine mit privaten Millionen finanzierte China-Denkfabrik, deren Mitglieder sich durch ihre gegen die chinesische Führung gerichteten allgegenwärtigen Medienkommentare hervorgetan haben. Als die gewalttätigen Subversionsaktivitäten in Hongkong eskalierten, beeinflusste MERICS maßgeblich die öffentliche Debatte in Deutschland, wobei es China systematisch „Totalitarismus“ unterstellte und die Belege für eine vom Ausland gesteuerte Farbrevolution als Verschwörung abtat.[6] In einer kurzen Pressemitteilung bestritt MERICS nun die Vorwürfe seitens der chinesischen Regierung und versprach, ihre „Mission mit faktenbasierter Analyse“ weiterzuverfolgen. Da MERICS stets sehr eng mit der deutschen Bundesregierung zusammenarbeitete und für Ministerien zahlreiche Studien erstellte, werden die Sanktionen das quasi-Monopol von MERICS bezüglich der deutschen China-Meinung sicherlich in Frage stellen.
Die Motive hinter den koordinierten Sanktionen der EU, USA, Großbritannien und Kanada liegen in der Absicht, Chinas Souveränität zu untergraben und seine Position in der Weltgemeinschaft zu schwächen. Bereits nach dem Ende der Sowjetunion erklärten die anglo-amerikanischen Neokonservativen, die sich zum Project for a New American Century zusammenschlossen, dass sie niemals wieder das Aufkommen einer hegemonialen Macht in Asien tolerieren und stattdessen an der Vorherrschaft der „einzigen Supermacht“ Amerika festhalten würden. Die EU-Kommission unter von der Leyen, Borrell u.a. zeigt immer deutlicher, dass sie keine eigenständige Außenpolitik im Interesse ihrer Mitgliedstaaten macht, sondern sich als weiteres Standbein dieses westlichen Unilateralismus versteht – Codewort: regelbasierte Ordnung.
Doch die Zeiten haben sich grundlegend geändert. Russland lässt sich nicht zu einer lediglich rohstoffliefernden Regionalmacht herabstufen, und China ist schon längst nicht mehr das Land, das billig produziert, was die industrialisierten Staaten konsumieren. Wenn man die Menschenrechte, wie sie in der Erklärung der Vereinten Nation nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg festgehalten wurden, zum Maßstab nimmt, muss man China höchste Anerkennung zollen angesichts der Tatsache, dass es in wenigen Jahrzehnten 850 Millionen Menschen aus extremer Armut befreit hat und es mit dem Wohl der Allgemeinheit wesentlich ernster nimmt als andere. Und was ist mit denjenigen Staaten geschehen, in die die USA und Europa im Namen von humanitären Interventionen und unter der Flagge der Menschenrechte eingedrungen sind? Sie liegen heute in Schutt und Asche. Chinas deutliche Gegenreaktion auf die koordinierten Sanktionen der sogenannten liberalen Demokratien ist mehr als gerechtfertigt, weil sie die Doppelmoral des Westens aufdeckt und verdientermaßen diejenigen bestraft, die über lange Zeit einige der übelsten Lügen über China in Umlauf gebracht haben. Nicht China ist es, das sein Verhalten ändern muss, sondern die Länder im Westen, die glauben, sie könnten unter dem Deckmantel der Gerechtigkeit die Welt ins Chaos stürzen.
[1] Der Fall Magnitski. Wie wahr ist die Geschichte, auf der die US-Sanktionen gegen Russland beruhen? https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/russland-der-fall-magnitski-story-ohne-held-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000167093479
[2] A Spectre is haunting Europe — the Spectre of Magnitsky. https://rebelheldblog.medium.com/a-spectre-is-haunting-europe-the-spectre-of-magnitsky-dab601ce548e
[3] Brüssel, Washington, London und Ottawa belegen China wegen Uiguren mit Sanktionen. https://www.euractiv.de/section/eu-aussenpolitik/news/bruessel-washington-london-und-ottawa-belegen-china-wegen-uiguren-mit-sanktionen/
[4] „Es ist Zeit für Sanktionen“. Wie geht Deutschland mit den Uiguren-Lagern in China um? https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/es-ist-zeit-fuer-sanktionen-wie-geht-deutschland-mit-den-uiguren-lagern-in-china-um/25357542.html
[5] US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/
[6] Unruhen in Hongkong – Gewalt bleibt für China eine Option. https://www.manager-magazin.de/politik/weltwirtschaft/hongkong-china-koennte-mit-gewalt-auf-proteste-antworten-peking-harter-kurs-a-1281540.html
Nord Stream 2 ist fast fertig, doch die USA wollen die Gaspipeline immer noch um jeden Preis verhindern. US-Außenminister Antony Blinken macht auch beim ersten Zweiertreffen mit seinem deutschen Kollegen Heiko Maas Druck bei diesem Dauerstreitthema.
Der neue US-Außenminister Anthony Blinken nutzte seinen ersten Besuch im NATO-Hauptquartier in Brüssel, um “das unerschütterliche Bekenntnis” der USA zur transatlantischen Militärallianz auszudrücken. Die USA wollen ihre Partnerschaften wieder aufbauen und das Bündnis wiederbeleben. Seinen Auftaktbesuch nutzte Blinken auch für eine erneute Kritik an dem Pipeline-Projekt Nord Stream 2.
Blinken warf beim ersten Zweiertreffen mit Bundesaußenminister Heiko Maas Deutschland indirekt vor, mit dem Festhalten an der Ostsee-Gaspipeline Nord Stream 2 Russlands Bemühungen um eine Beeinträchtigung der kollektiven Sicherheit in die Hände zu spielen. Sprecher Ned Price teilte nach dem Gespräch am Dienstagabend am Rande des NATO-Treffens in Brüssel mit, Blinken habe die Entschlossenheit der USA unterstrichen, mit Verbündeten und Partnern zusammenzuarbeiten, um dieser Absicht Moskaus entgegenzuwirken. In diesem Zusammenhang habe er den Widerstand gegen die Gaspipeline bekräftigt.
Das Auswärtige Amt machte keine Angaben zum Thema Nord Stream 2 und sprach von einem “sehr guten Austausch”.
Zuvor hatte ein informelles Gespräch zwischen Blinken, Maas und den Kollegen aus Frankreich sowie Großbritannien stattgefunden. Bei dem “vertrauensvollen Austausch” im Viererkreis sei es unter anderem um Afghanistan, den Jemen und den Iran gegangen, teilte das Auswärtige Amt mit. Zudem sei der Strategieprozess “NATO 2030” Thema gewesen, der auch Reformen für eine engere politische Zusammenarbeit der Bündnispartner auf den Weg bringen soll.
Der britische Außenminister Dominic Raab schrieb auf Twitter, die vier NATO-Länder stünden als “Kraft für das Gute” zusammen, um auf Frieden im Jemen zu drängen und den Iran daran zu hindern, eine Atommacht zu werden. Nähere Informationen zu möglichen Absprachen der vier Minister gab es aber zunächst nicht.
Die Gespräche am Dienstagabend fanden am Rande des derzeitigen NATO-Außenministertreffens statt. Bei ihm standen an diesem Mittwoch noch Gesprächen über den weiteren Umgang mit Russland an.
Wenige Stunden vor dem Gespräch mit Maas – welches das US-Außenministerium als “kurz” beschrieb – hatte Blinken bereits deutlich gemacht, dass die USA einen sofortigen Stopp von Nord Stream 2 verlangten und auch nicht vor neuen Sanktionen gegen am Bau beteiligte Unternehmen zurückschrecken würden.
Die Forderungen der USA zu Nord Stream 2 sind vor allem deswegen brisant, weil die Pipeline mit ihren beiden rund 1.230 Kilometer langen Leitungssträngen bereits zu mehr als 90 Prozent fertiggestellt ist. Sie soll künftig eigentlich 55 Milliarden Kubikmeter Erdgas pro Jahr von Russland nach Deutschland befördern.
Die USA begründen ihre Ablehnung des Projektes mit der ihrer Ansicht nach zu großen Abhängigkeit ihrer europäischen Partner von russischem Gas und hatten im Januar bereits Sanktionen gegen ein am Bau beteiligtes Unternehmen verhängt. Pipeline-Befürworter werfen den USA dagegen vor, nur ihr Flüssiggas in Europa besser verkaufen zu wollen.
Die Bundesregierung hat bislang eine politische Intervention zum Stopp des Projektes ausgeschlossen. In Berlin wird unter anderem argumentiert, dass eine Politik, die auf eine wirtschaftliche Isolation Russlands setzt, große Gefahren bergen könnte. Zudem soll eine milliardenteure Bauruine vermieden werden.
(Quelle: US-Außenminister Blinken nutzt Treffen mit Maas für harte Kritik an Nord Stream 2 — RT DE)
US media hailed a Newlines Institute report accusing China of Uyghur genocide as a “landmark” independent analysis. A look beneath the surface reveals it as a regime change propaganda tool by interventionist operatives at a sham university.
By Ajit Singh, a lawyer and journalist. He is a contributing author to Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (Brill: 2019). He tweets at @ajitxsingh.
Throughout March 2021, headlines in corporate media outlets from CNN to The Guardian blared about the release of the “first independent report” to authoritatively determine that the Chinese government has violated “each and every act” of the United Nations convention against genocide, and therefore “bears State responsibility for committing genocide against the Uyghurs.”
The report, published on March 8 by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in collaboration with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, follows a last-minute accusation made in January by the outgoing Trump administration, along with similar declarations by the Dutch and Canadian Parliaments. It was published shortly after the release of a remarkably similar report on February 8 that was commissioned by the US government-backed World Uyghur Congress, and which alleged that there is a “credible case” against the Chinese government for genocide.
CNN, The Guardian, AFP, and the CBC hailed the March 8 Newlines report as an “independent analysis” and a “landmark legal report” that involved “dozens of international experts.” Samantha Power, the Biden administration’s nominee to direct the US Agency for International Development (USAID), also promoted it: “This report shows how this [genocide] is precisely what China is doing with the Uighurs,” the notorious humanitarian interventionist stated.
The report’s authors have insisted that they are “impartial” and are “not advocating any course of action whatsoever.” But a closer look at the report and the institutions behind it reveals its authors’ claims of “independence” and “expertise” to be a blatant deception.
Indeed, the report’s principal author, Yonah Diamond, recently called on the Biden administration to unilaterally “confront,” and “punish” China for supposedly committing genocide, and expand sanctions against the country. Meanwhile, the think tanks behind the report have advocated fervently for the West to “combat” and sanction China, and have promoted US regime change policies targeting Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia.
A majority of the report’s “expert” signatories are members of the Newlines Institute and the Wallenberg Centre. Others are members of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, former US State Department officials, and ardent supporters of US military interventionism. The report relies most substantially on the “expertise” of Adrian Zenz, the far-right evangelical ideologue, whose “scholarship” on China has been demonstrated to be deeply flawed, riddled with falsehoods and dishonest statistical manipulation.
The reliance on the voluminous but demonstrably fraudulent work of Zenz is not surprising, given that the report was financed by the Newlines Institute’s parent organization, the Fairfax University of America (FXUA). FXUA is a disgraced institution that state regulators moved to shut down in 2019 after finding that its “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses”, academic quality was “patently deficient,” and plagiarism was “rampant” and ignored.
Just days before the Newlines Institute published its “expert” report accusing China of genocide, an advisory board to the US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of FXUA’s accreditor, placing its license in jeopardy.
The Newlines report presents no new material on the condition of Uyghur Muslims in China. Instead, it claims to have reviewed all of “the available evidence” and applied “international law to the evidence of the facts on the ground.”
Rather than conducting a thorough and comprehensive review of “the available evidence,” the report restricted its survey to a narrow range of deeply flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by US government-backed lobbying fronts for the exiled Uyghur separatist movement. It was upon this faulty foundation that the report applies legal analysis related to the UN Genocide Convention.
Newlines’ report relies primarily on the dubious studies of Adrian Zenz, the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia, and claims made by the US-funded separatist network, the World Uyghur Congress. These three sources comprise more than one-third of the references used to construct the factual basis of the document, with Zenz as the most heavily relied upon source – cited on more than 50 occasions.
Many of the remaining references cite the work of members of Newlines Institute’s “Uyghur Scholars Working Group”, of which Zenz is a founding member and which is made up of a small group of academics who collaborate with him and support his conclusions.
As The Grayzone has reported, Zenz is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who has said he is “led by God” against China’s government, deplores homosexuality and gender equality, and has taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions. A careful review of Zenz’s research shows that his assertion of genocide is concocted through fraudulent statistical manipulation, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations. His widely-cited reports were not published in peer-reviewed journals overseen by academic institutions, but rather, by a DC-based CIA cut-out called the Jamestown Foundation and “The Journal of Political Risk,” a publication headed by former NATO and US national security state operatives.
As his academic malpractice comes to light, Zenz has faced increasing scrutiny and embarrassment, as evidenced by his threat to take legal action against his scholarly critics.
In order to shore up the report’s credibility, and to deflect from its essential reliance on Zenz’s reports, its authors have emphasized their supposed “independence” and “impartiality.”
“This [is] not an advocacy document, we’re not advocating any course of action whatsoever”, stated Azeem Ibrahim, Director of Special Initiatives at Newlines Institute. “There were no campaigners involved in this report, it was purely done by legal experts, area experts and China ethnic experts.”
However, just weeks before the publication of the report, its principal author, Yonah Diamond, penned a bellicose call for the Biden administration to eschew the UN (which Diamond deems to be “beholden to the Chinese government”) and unilaterally confront China. Following the Trump administration’s declaration that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang, Diamond argued that the US is legally obliged to “punish” China and that “the Biden administration must now take concrete action to that end together with U.S. allies”.
The report attempts to construct an appearance of broad expert consensus supporting its conclusions, including a list of 33 “independent expert” signatories. Unsurprisingly, this list consists of individuals pushing for a New Cold War and confrontation with China, and who support separatist efforts to transform the mineral-rich, geopolitically important region of Xinjiang into a NATO-oriented ethno-state:
Irwin Cotler and Helena Kennedy — co-chairs, along with Marco Rubio, of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). Composed almost exclusively of white Western lawmakers, IPAC formed in 2020 in order to mount a “common defence” against the “rise of the People’s Republic of China.” Members of the World Uyghur Congress executive, Erkin Ekrem and Rahima Mahmut, sit on IPAC’s advisory board and secretariat; Adrian Zenz also sits on the advisory board.
David Scheffer, Beth von Schaack, and Gregory H. Stanton — Scheffer and Schaack are both former US State Department Ambassadors-at-Large, while Stanton is a former US State Department official.
Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock — the former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Canadian UN Ambassador, respectively.
Adrian Zenz –– founding member of Newlines Institute’s “Uyghur Scholars Working Group”
Rather than consult a wide range of authorities and academic experts, or subject its study to peer review, Newlines relied entirely on a narrowly focused community of like-minded ideologues. A majority of the signatories are members of the two think tanks behind the report, the Newlines Institute and the Wallenberg Centre. Far from “independent”, these organizations are deeply partisan, self-described “campaigners” that align closely with US and Western foreign policy goals, advocating for sanctions and intervention against China and other non-aligned nations across the Global South.
The supposedly independent report accusing China of genocide was published by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy based in Washington, DC and known formerly as the Center for Global Policy. Founded in 2019, the think tank’s stated aim is “to enhance US foreign policy” with a “specialization in Muslim states and societies.”
With extensive ties to the US regime-change establishment, the Newlines Institute is a reliable repository of anti-China material. For example, it has featured the ramblings of Robert Spalding, the former Senior Director for Strategy to President Trump and one of the architects of the Trump administration’s 2018 national security doctrine, which formally reoriented US foreign policy from a focus on the so-called “global war on terror” towards great power competition with China and Russia.
The leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the “shadow CIA” private spying firm, Stratfor, and a collection of interventionist ideologues. Its contributors represent a who’s who of Syria regime changers who cheerleaded for US military interventionism while intimidating and bullying any prominent figure that dared present a critical perspective on the proxy war.
Hassan Hassan, Director; Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Newlines Magazine — Ardent supporter of US imperialism, including wars on Iraq, Libya, Yemen and especially Syria. Along with Newlines contributor Michael Weiss, Hassan called for the US military to balkanize Syria, permanently occupy its oil-rich Jazira region and turn the country into “an American security protectorate.”
Azeem Ibrahim, Director — Adjunct Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. Ibrahim is a co-author of the Newlines report.
Kamran Bokhari, Director — Previously served as the Central Asia Studies Course Coordinator at US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute
Faysal Itani, Deputy Director — Former resident Senior Fellow at the US State Department-funded Atlantic Council, which functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO in Washington, DC.
Michael Weiss, Senior Editor – A veteran Israel lobbyist, neoconservative activist and anti-Muslim agitator-turned advocate of Islamist insurgents in Syria, Weiss has branded himself as an expert on Russia despite having never visited the country and speaking no Russian.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Senior Editor – In 2016, Ahmad phoned Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal unsolicited before Blumenthal published a two-part investigative exposé on the Syrian White Helmets, threatening him with severe consequences if he went ahead. (Listen to a recording of Ahmad’s threatening call here). A lecturer on digital journalism at Stirling University in the UK, Ahmad recently attacked Democracy Now! for hosting scholar Vijay Prashad for a discussion on the danger of a new Cold War with China.
Rasha Al Aqeedi, Senior Analyst — Iraq-born pundit who formerly worked as a research fellow at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a neoconservative think tank originally founded by white supremacists and Cold War hardliners that has honored Iraq war advocates John Bolton and James Mattis. Like her colleague Ahmad, Aqeedi dedicates a significant portion of her time to smearing anti-war figures on social media.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, Non-Resident Fellow — Previously worked for a number of neoconservative and establishment think tanks, including the Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy Research Institute and Freedom House. Tsurkov served in the Israeli military, during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon. Throughout the Syrian proxy war, Tsurkov maintained friendly contacts with members of the Saudi-backed jihadist militia, Jaish al-Islam, and boasted about links both she and Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus maintained with Syria’s armed opposition.
Nicholas A. Heras, Senior Analyst — Previously a research associate at the US Department of Defense’s National Defense University, Heras is also a fellow at the arms industry-funded Center for New American Security. There, he proposed using “wheat [as] a weapon of great power…to apply pressure on the Assad regime.” In other words, Heras advocated for the mass starvation of Syrian civilians by occupying their wheat fields, a US policy that is currently underway in the country’s northeastern region.
Caroline Rose, Senior Analyst — Previously served as an analyst at Geopolitical Futures, headed by Stratfor founder, George Friedman. Stratfor is a private spying and intelligence firm commonly referred to as a “Shadow CIA.” It has contracted extensively with the US government, and has trained the radical wing of Venezuela’s opposition and advised them on destabilization tactics.
Robin Blackburn, Managing Editor — For 12 years, Blackburn served as a writer and editor with Stratfor.
Robert Inks, Editor — Previously served as Director of the Writers Group and Special Projects Editor at Stratfor.
Daryl Johnson, Non-Resident Fellow — Served in the US Army and previously worked as a senior analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. He is the founder of DT Analytics, a private consulting firm for police and law enforcement.
Eugene Chausovsky, Non-Resident Fellow — Lectures on the “geopolitics of Central Asia” at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Previously worked as Senior Eurasia Analyst at Stratfor for over a decade.
Imtiaz Ali, Non-Resident Fellow — Previously worked as a curriculum specialist at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.
Ahmed Alwani is the founder and president of the Newlines Institute. Alwani previously served on the advisory board for the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) and is the Vice President of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT); his father, Taha Jabir Al-Alwani was one of IIIT’s founders.
Newlines Institute recently took steps to counter rumors of IIIT’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. In an internal email obtained by The Grayzone, dated November 17, 2020, Newlines Director Hassan Hassan addressed the “accusation” against the then-Center for Global Policy. Hassan wrote that while a different “older entity” was funded by IIIT, “[t]he current one has no relation to IIIT.” Hassan attempted to assuage concerns by downplaying Alwani’s connection to IIIT, claiming that Alwani “inherited the International Institute for Islamic Thought as Vice President as a sort of legacy”, following his father’s death in 2018.
Newlines Institute is a branch of a disgraced educational institution that has repeatedly violated state educational standards, raising further questions about the quality of the think tank’s work.
Newlines Institute’s parent institution is Fairfax University of America (FXUA), a school also founded and led by Alwani, and formerly known as Virginia International University. FXUA is a private university in Fairfax, Virginia. Founded in 1998, FXUA’s short track record has been riddled with numerous academic scandals and efforts by state regulators to shut the institution down.
In 2019, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia initiated proceedings to revoke FXUA’s (then known as Virginia International University) certificate to operate. The move came after state regulators found widespread noncompliance with state educational standards.
According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, auditors determined that “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses”, the academic quality and content of classes were “patently deficient”, and student work was characterized by “rampant plagiarism” that went unpunished.
“Unqualified students regularly submit plagiarized or inferior work; faculty turn a blind eye and lower grading standards (perhaps to avoid failing an entire class); and administrators do not effectively monitor the quality of online education being provided”, the audit said.
“That such substandard coursework could continue with no complaints from students, faculty or administrators raises concerns about the purpose of education at VIU [Virginia International University].”
Indeed, signs point to FXUA/VIU serving as a “visa mill” rather than a legitimate educational institution. As Inside Higher Ed explains, the term “visa mill” refers to a sham operation where an institution “offers little by way of educational value,” but instead lures international students through its ability to offer access to student and work visas, while exploiting them by charging exorbitant tuition costs. FXUA/VIU’s accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), has long faced accusations of certifying such institutions.
In 2019, Inside Higher Ed reported that FXUA/VIU’s “appears to exist primarily to enroll international students,” finding that over the previous five years, “the percentage of students from North America varied between 1 and 3 percent”. Auditors found that the the student body was largely comprised of international students with an “abysmally poor command” of the English language. The students were charged $2,178 per graduate class and $1,266 per undergraduate class to receive their “patently deficient” education.
Although Virginia International University reached an agreement with state regulators that allowed it to continue operating and has rebranded itself as Fairfax University of America, significant concerns remain about the university, along with its subsidiary Newlines Institute.
Just days before Newlines Institute’s report on China was released, its FXUA’s accreditation was once again in potential jeopardy. On March 5, an advisory board to the US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition for ACICS. The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity voted 11-to-1 to recommend that ACICS lose the federal recognition it needs to operate.
The advisory committee made the same recommendation in 2016, leading to the ACICS’s recognition being revoked under the Obama administration, before recognition was restored to the troubled accreditor in 2018 by then-President Trump’s Secretary of Education, the infamous privatization activist and oligarch Betsy Devos.
Newlines Institute published its report in collaboration with The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. The report’s principal author, Yonah Diamond, is legal counsel for The Wallenberg Center, and many of the report’s signatories hold affiliations with the organization.
Based in Montreal, The Wallenberg Centre was founded by Irwin Cotler, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. While often touted as a “human rights champion”, Cotler is, in fact, a champion of the “responsibility to protect” and “humanitarian intervention” doctrines, regularly invoked by Western states in order to justify imperial interventions in the global south.
Cotler routinely levels propagandistic accusations of human rights abuses, atrocities, and genocide in service Western imperialism, including interventions in Libya and Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, where Cotler served as legal counsel for far-right, US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Leopoldo López. Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, holds an advisory position at The Wallenberg Centre.
Cotler is also active in Haiti, serving as the Minister of Justice in the Canadian administration that worked with the US and France to help overthrow former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. In 2014, Cotler invited Maryam Rajavi, leader of the exiled Iranian MEK cult, to speak on Canada’s parliament hill. Four years later, he nominated US and UK-funded Syrian White Helmets for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Cotler is an ardent supporter of Israeli apartheid and longtime advisor to Moshe Ya’alon, former Israeli Defense Minister and Chief of Staff of the Israeli military. Cotler has played significant role in the Canadian government’s efforts to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and smear the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
Cotler has long harbored hostile sentiments towards China. For a number of years, Cotler served on the international legal team for Chinese anti-government dissident Liu Xiaobo, a right-wing ideologue who called for the privatization and “Westernisation” of China, ardently supported former President George W. Bush, and cheered on US wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
More recently, during the coronavirus pandemic, Cotler echoed calls of right-wing US lawmakers for international legal action and sanctions to punish China for supposedly causing the coronavirus pandemic.
In its mission statement, the Wallenberg Centre outlines its right-wing, Western imperial outlook in detail, explicitly identifying China, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia as countries that it is pushing to “combat” with sanctions.
The Wallenberg Centre has become a haven for anti-China hawks, including Senior Fellows David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State, and David Matas, senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, a right-wing organization that describes itself as dedicated to “Israel advocacy”.
Kilgour and Matas have extensive ties to the far-right, anti-China religious cult Falun Gong. Both men are regularly contributors to the group’s propaganda arm, The Epoch Times, a media network that The New York Times has described as an “anti-China, pro-Trump media empire” and “leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation”. In 2019, an NBC News exposé found that The Epoch Times spent over $1.5 million on approximately 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in just six months, “more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.”
In 2006, Kilgour and Matas were commissioned by Falun Gong to author a report which made sensational accusations that the Chinese government was secretly conducting a mass campaign of live organ harvesting Falun Gong disciples. In 2017, an investigation by The Washington Post determined that the claims made by Kilgour and Matas were unfounded, with experts commenting that their allegations were “not plausible” and “unthinkable.”
* * *
As Washington advances its new Cold War strategy, it has amplified accusations of genocide and other atrocities against the Chinese government, all focused on Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang. To broaden support for the dubious narrative, the US government has turned to a series of pseudo-academic institutions and faux experts to generate seemingly serious and independent studies.
Any critical probe of the reams of reports on Xinjiang and the hawkish institutions that publish them will quickly reveal a shabby propaganda campaign dressed up as academic inquiry. Western media’s refusal to look beneath the surface of Washington’s information war against China only highlights its central role in the operation.
While Democracy Now hosts US gov’t-funded pundits to spread humanitarian interventionist propaganda about Xinjiang, an analysis by The Grayzone found most of the outlets’s China coverage is sharply negative.
By Danny Haiphong, an activist, writer, and author of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence.
The U.S. has claimed a humanitarian “Responsibility to Protect” to justify military operations in the name of saving civilian lives from evil dictators. Most notable have been the brutal U.S.-led wars in Libya and Syria which destabilized entire regions in the name of “civilian protection” and “promoting democracy.” These operations relied heavily on self-described human rights NGO’s and media outlets to cultivate support among liberal sectors of the US intelligentsia. Sadly, Democracy Now has been among the most influential and insidious outlets carrying water for the humanitarian interventionist agenda.
The flagship program of the left-wing Pacifica radio network, Democracy Now (DN) and its founding host, Amy Goodman, are regarded as standard bearers of grassroots progressivism. However in recent years the show has become a reliable platform for uncritical regime change propaganda, demonizing targets of US empire from Syria to Nicaragua while sending a correspondent to embed with US-backed “rebels” in Libya. Now that China is in the crosshairs of the US, DN is playing host to virtually any piece of humanitarian agitprop that Washington can conjure up, while publishing a regular serving of sharply negative stories about Chinese government and society.
A review by The Grayzone of every China-related report and interview Democracy Now aired in the past year found that 3 out of every 4 painted China in a decidedly negative light, often echoing narratives emanating from the US State Department. Perhaps its most inflammatory and factually questionable report appeared this February amid an escalating wave of anti-China propaganda.
On February 4th, DN aired a story on the latest moral outrage out of China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It was a report from the BBC, the British Foreign Office-funded media giant that was exposed by The Grayzone as a UK intelligence contractor. Instead of questioning the BBC’s report, which appeared custom-tailored to generate public support for the new Cold War, Democracy Now uncritically amplified it.
DN’s story opened with the BBC’s interview of Tursunay Ziawudun, the singular source for accusations of “mass rape” in so-called re-education camps in Xinjiang. Democracy Now repeated the US-based exile’s claims as fact without any investigation into the credibility of the source. Ziawudun is no stranger to the Western press. In fact, prior interviews with Ziawudun reveal several glaring inconsistencies that place her credibility as a source into question.
Ziawudun was first interviewed by a human rights organization in Kazakhstan called Atajurt. The group possesses no formal website or information about donors, only social media accounts. In 2018, directors of Atajurt junketed to Washington DC to meet with the National Endowment for Democracy and various anti-China influencers.
Neither Ziawudun’s interviews with this organization nor her testimony to the CIA-created Radio Free Asia mention rape at all. In a feature with Buzzfeed in February of 2020, Ziawudun stated, “I wasn’t beaten or abused… The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain – you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason. You have no freedom. You suffer.”
Ziawudun’s reflection on her experience changed character after she became involved with the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). The UHRP was created and is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US intelligence passthrough that was established under the watch of former CIA director William Casey.
The Grayzone exposed the Uyghur Human Rights Project as part of a consortium of groups operating under the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) umbrella, and funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year in US government money to promote the narrative of a Uyghur genocide carried out by China’s government.
In September 2020, the UHRP resettled Ziawudun in the United States, flying her from Kazakhstan to the Washington DC area. “Ms. Tursunay is a critical witness…,” the US government-funded organization declared in a press release. “Her testimony will be vitally important for future atrocity-crimes determination processes and tribunals.”
In a CNN report based on her contradictory claims alleging a Chinese policy of “systematic rape,” her Chinese passport briefly appeared on screen. It showed that after all her alleged travails, she was granted a ten year visa to travel abroad as she pleased. Yet CNN reported she “walked across the Kazakh border” in 2019, creating the impression she had to escape from China to tell her horror story. In a subsequent broadcast of its report, CNN blurred out Ziawadun’s passport issue date.
Democracy Now did not mention Ziawudun’s apparent recruitment by the US government or her dramatically shifting story in its coverage. Instead, it invited a cast of guests from the Washington’s anti-China echo chamber on to discuss her story.
Among them was so-called “linguist,” Abdulweli Ayup, who spent two years in the United States as a fellow for the Ford Foundation and has interviewed more than a half-dozen times with Radio Free Asia, a US government propaganda network founded by the CIA. Ayup’s biography was published in a lengthy report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the same NED-backed organization which helped Tusurnay Ziawudun resettle in the United States.
U.S. academic Darren Byler rounded out Democracy Now’s panel on the BBC report. Byler is a fellow at the Wilson Center, a DC-based think tank funded by the US Congress, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, and a host of Wall Street big banks including Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase. Former U.S. General and CIA director David Petraeus and BP share important council positions for the organization.
Byler is a regular source of quotes advancing the US government’s Cold War posture against China. He has framed Beijing’s counter-terrorism policy in Xinjiang as the political and military equivalent of the United States’ post 9/11 War on Terror, omitting the historical context of dozens of documented mass casualty attacks by the separatist Al Qaeda affiliate known as the East Turkestan Islamic Front in the region between the years of 1990 and 2016. He was even quoted in an article by the State Department-funded Coda Story attacking The Grayzone alongside other US government sponsored anti-China pundits.
An email to Democracy Now staff requesting a comment on its relentless parade of anti-China coverage and steady stream of dubious, US government-sponsored guests went unanswered.
Democracy Now’s coverage of China over the past year has been almost entirely negative. A content analysis by The Grayzone of DN headlines directly referencing China from February 1st 2020 to the present reveals that 54 of 69 (78 percent) presented a sharply negative spin on events. The vast majority of the stories focused on “human rights” in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, echoing narratives generated by the US national security state. Some emanated directly from hardline Trump administration officials like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
The other fifteen DN stories could be considered “neutral” in tone. They centered on developments surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Even here, however, DN’s bias toward China stood out. For example, in a headline about a small outbreak of Covid in China in April 2020, DN editors placed scare quotes around the word “imported” in order to cast doubt on Beijing’s claim that the virus originated abroad. Meanwhile, the outlet has offered nothing but praise for the pro-US government of Taiwan’s successful pandemic response.
While Democracy Now appears to have deemed the US’s Cold War-style policies toward China as unworthy of criticism, the flagship progressive program found time to host so-called Xinjiang expert Adrian Zenz in 2019. Zenz, a far right Christian fundamentalist member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who claims to “led by God” against the Communist Party of China, is an odd guest for a supposedly left-wing program.
In analysis of Zenz’s research paper accusing China of forced sterilization and genocide in Xinjiang, The Grayzone’s Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal found wanton manipulation of data, major errors and a number of missing footnotes. Despite his clear credibility issues, Zenz is without question the most cited source in the U.S. and West on all matters relating to Xinjiang.
Democracy Now provided Zenz a platform despite the fact his most constantly repeated claim that over one million Uygurs are being detained in “concentration camps” was based on a mere two sources: a total of eight interviews conducted by the NED-backed, Washington DC-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and a single television report from a Turkish-based Uygur exile organization.
Under the Trump national security doctrine, which has been largely retained by the Biden administration, the US proclaimed China and Russia to be the greatest threats it faces on the global stage. The truth is that China’s emphasis on poverty alleviation, multilateral cooperation, and economic growth coupled with its growing political independence is seen as an existential threat to the United States’ continued hegemony. As the US charts a dangerous course toward war with China, authentically independent investigative journalism and activism is required to prioritize peace over access to the powerful.
Unfortunately, while Democracy Now has marketed itself as “the exception to the rulers,” it is functioning as little more than a force multiplier for the State Department, amplifying Cold War narratives on China behind progressive cover.
(Source: Democracy-nows-china-state-departments-cold-war – TheGrayZone)
Dieses Jahr findet vom 22. Mai bis zum 21. November die 17. internationale Architekturausstellung statt. Das ist eine gute Gelegenheit, über ein unglaubliches Jubiläum zu sprechen … 1271 stach der große italienische Seefahrer von Venedig aus in See. Das hatte auch einigen Einfluss auf das Schicksal Europas: Europa entdeckte durch ihn Asien, genauer gesagt China, wie es dieses Land noch nie zuvor gesehen hatte. Als Marco Polo auf den Mongolenkaiser Kubilai Khan traf, erkundete er den Reichtum und die Kultur Chinas von der Qin-Dynastie bis zur Song-Dynastie. Die Reise des Marco Polo dauerte 24 Jahre. Der junge venezianische Kaufmann, der mit 17 Jahren nach China aufgebrochen war, brachte neue Erkenntnisse über den Fernen Osten nach Europa. Sein Buch „Die Wunder der Welt“ kündete von seinen großen Entdeckungen.
Ende 1271 verließ Marco Polo Venedig zusammen mit seinem Vater und seinem Onkel. Da wusste er noch nicht, dass er erst mit 41 Jahren zurückkehren sollte. Und er war erst 17. Nachdem die drei Männer Israel und dann Persien durchquert hatten, um nach Zentralasien zu gelangen, reisten sie durch die Wüste Gobi und erreichten 1275 Cambaluc. Dort kamen sie an den Hof von Kaiser Kubilai Khan.
16 Jahre lang begleiteten sie den Kaiser in die größten Städte und in die entlegensten Regionen des Landes. Kubilai, ein kultivierter Herrscher, der mit den systematischen Massakern seiner Vorfahren gebrochen hatte, schätzte den kulturellen Beitrag der Venezianer.
Es gilt anzumerken, dass das China, das Marco Polo entdeckte, auf der Ebene der Wissenschaft und Kultur immer noch das der Song-Dynastie war, auch wenn die Yuan die Verwaltung völlig umgestaltet hatten.
Marco Polo lernte nach und nach Chinesisch und wurde Diplomat.
Er soll sogar drei Jahre lang Gouverneur der Stadt Yang-chou gewesen sein. Doch Marco, sein Vater und sein Onkel vermissten Venedig und baten den Kaiser, sie gehen zu lassen. Kubilai akzeptierte dies an dem Tag, an dem er eine mongolische Prinzessin nach Persien bringen musste. Die Venezianer, die ja erfahrene Reisende waren, wurden beauftragt, ihn zu begleiten. Sie durchquerten Sumatra und Indien, setzten die junge Frau in Persien ab und reisten dann nach Italien weiter. Als sie nach Venedig zurückkehrten, befand sich die Stadt im Konflikt mit Genua. Am 8. September 1298 befehligte Marco Polo in einer Seeschlacht zwischen den beiden Mächten eine Galeere. Die venezianische Flotte erlitt eine vernichtende Niederlage und Marco wurde gefangen genommen.
Im Gefängnis saß er mit Rustichello von Pisa, einem genuesischen Romancier, ein. Ihm diktierte er seine unglaublichen Geschichten.
Die Redaktion dieser Plattform hat sich das Ziel gesetzt, eine große Vielfalt an Meinungen zu präsentieren, um den Leserinnen und Lesern die Möglichkeit zu geben, sich selbst sich selbst zu informieren und eine eigene Meinung zu bilden. Sowohl positive als auch kritische Nachrichten, Berichte oder Kommentare sind willkommen und werden wertgeschätzt. Alle Beiträge bemühen sich weiterhin, um einen respektvollen und höflichen Umgangston. (Medienprojekt von VANA)
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