Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Confronting China

Tibet erupted in flames surprisingly just in time to tarnish China’s impressive 2008 Olympic preparations. Tibet can never emerge as an issue without the primary western support.

Washington is convinced that China’s economic rise is undermining its political and economic hegemony. The western rhetoric over Tibet is just a smokescreen that hides a disgustingly larger agenda that goes as far as stopping Chinese investments in African oilfields, where the Americans and the British are dazed at how the Chinese have outspent them on buying up oil concessions.

As soon as the riots erupted in Tibet, Ms. Pelosi, the first woman speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, dashed to New Delhi to meet the Dalai Lama. More nauseating was her self-righteous sermon on Tibet. “If freedom loving people throughout the world do no speak out,” she said, “we have lost all moral authority to speak on human rights anywhere in the world.” This coming from a country that stands culpable for the murder of 300,000 Iraqis in five years of brutal American occupation.

John McCain was quick to say in Paris that “mistreatment” in Tibet was an “unacceptable conduct for a world power.”

Britain’s former defense minister, Michael Portillo, a celebrated gay who bowed out after a scandal in the 1990s, openly asked western countries to blackmail China using Tibet. In a London newspaper, he came out with this headline, ‘Tibet: the West can use the Olympics as a weapon against Beijing.”

The western focus now is to push the Chinese government to make one wrong move so that Washington and other ‘allied’ governments could drag Beijing into a costly confrontation.

[Excerpt of an article by Ahmed Quraish, Global Politician]

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