The ‘Independent’ Report Claiming Uyghur Genocide

It was brought to you by a sham university and neocon ideologues lobbying to punish China for U.S. interests, Ajit Singh reports.

By Ajit Singh
The Grayzone

Throughout March, 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 Feb. 8 that was commissioned by the U.S. government-backed World Uyghur Congress, and which alleged that there is a “credible case” against the Chinese government for genocide. 

CNNThe GuardianAFP, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. State Department officials, and ardent supporters of U.S. 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 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 Virginia 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 U.S. Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of FXUA’s accreditor, placing its license in jeopardy.

Discredited ‘Evidence’

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 flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by U.S. 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 Zenz, the U.S. government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia, and claims made by the U.S.-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 D.C.-based CIA cut-out called the Jamestown Foundation and “The Journal of Political Risk,” a publication headed by former NATO and U.S. 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 U.S. 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; Zenz also sits on the advisory board.

David Scheffer, Beth von Schaack and Gregory H. Stanton — Scheffer and Schaack are both former U.S. State Department ambassadors-at-large, while Stanton is a former U.S. 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 partisan, self-described “campaigners” that align closely with U.S. and Western foreign policy goals, advocating for sanctions and intervention against China and other non-aligned nations across the Global South.

Newlines Institute

The supposedly independent report accusing China of genocide was published by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy based in Washington, D.C., 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 U.S. 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 Donald Trump and one of the architects of the Trump administration’s 2018 national security doctrine, which formally reoriented U.S. 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 U.S. State Department officials, U.S. 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 cheer-led for U.S. 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 U.S. imperialism, including wars on IraqLibyaYemen and especially Syria. Along with Newlines contributor Michael Weiss, Hassan called for the U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute

Faysal Itani, deputy director — Former resident senior fellow at the U.S. State Department-funded Atlantic Council, which functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO in Washington, D.C. 

Michael Weiss with jihadist rebels in Aleppo, Syria, in August 2012.

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 U.K., 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Nov. 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. 

Overseen by Sham University

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].”

A review of Fairfax University/VIU by an anonymous employee.

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 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 U.S. 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 Trump’s secretary of education, the infamous privatization activist and oligarch Betsy Devos.

Raoul Wallenberg Centre founder Irwin Cotler (L) with pro-Israel lawyer and Wallenberg fellow Alan Dershowitz.

The Wallenberg Centre

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 to Western imperialism, including interventions in Libya, SyriaIran and Venezuela, where Cotler served as legal counsel for far-right, U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. and U.K.-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 a 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 “Westernization” of China, ardently supported former President George W. Bush, and cheered on U.S. wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

More recently, during the coronavirus pandemic, Cotler echoed calls of right-wing U.S. 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 Fellow David Kilgour 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 U.S. 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.

Ajit Singh is 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.

This article is from The Grayzone.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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21 comments for “The ‘Independent’ Report Claiming Uyghur Genocide

  1. Keith McClary
    March 21, 2021 at 00:11

    “Fairfax University of America” has 8 full-time instructors and 45 part-time instructors
    hXXps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_University_of_America#cite_note-4
    but somehow manages to fund “Newlines Institute”, which has a “Team” of 16 Staff, 6 Non-Resident Fellows and 59 Guest Contributors.
    hXXps://newlinesinstitute.org/about/#/our_team

  2. Paul Grenier
    March 20, 2021 at 08:46

    I am a big admirer of some of the grayzone’s work, but am disappointed in the quality of this essay. The issue at hand is whether or not certain allegations are true or not. Is there evidence to support these allegations? How solid is that evidence? While the article does focus on the latter, it tends to do so in a way that simply assumes that any source that does not measure up to current left tastes is false. This undermines the author’s case. Newsline indeed does not seem very credible. But one source is dismissed simply because its authors were white. The accusations against China may be false. I truly have no idea. But the search for the truth needs to be paramount, not PC prejudices.

    • Rob
      March 20, 2021 at 14:19

      The Grayzone has published several pieces questioning the veracity of charges of a Uyghur “genocide.” The crux of the matter is that the charges of genocide are drawn exclusively from a small number of sources with a fanatically anti-China bias who present no hard evidence whatsoever to support their claims. There is a saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The burden of proof falls on the one who makes a claim, not on one who challenges it.

      All of the claims of a genocide campaign against the Uyghurs are essentially ad hominem, i.e. they rest on the supposed authority of those who level the charges. In this piece from the Grayzone, Ajit Singh shows clearly that the authority of those behind the Newlines report is dubious at best. Yet Western governments and corporate media accept the report with no questions asked. Which leads to the key question: Whose interest does this serve?

    • Keith McClary
      March 21, 2021 at 00:22

      “But one source is dismissed simply because its authors were white.”

      Here is the “Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China” “Team”:
      hXXps://ipac.global/#team

      I think the point is that they are 100% non-Chinese.

  3. March 20, 2021 at 05:42

    4 to 5 years ago a Bombing at shrine in Thailand was associated with the Uyghurs. From my understanding the Uyghurs did not want to be sent back to China by Thai authorities. I’m not sure why the Uyghurs would bomb innocent Thai people if the Chinese were not acting in some form of cruelty. Is this article stating there is no ill treatment of Uyghurs in China??

    Thanks

  4. Zhu
    March 19, 2021 at 20:47

    I was always suspicious of the US government’s sudden interest in defending Uighurs. It reminded me of “weapons of mass destruction” and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, etc.: another excuse for war, war, war. If the US government cares about Muslims, why have they spent the last generation slaughtering them like mosquitoes? If they care about the rights of indigenous peoples, well, US indigenous peoples could use help. The Navajos have suffereed quite badly from Covid 19. The Sioux have an on-going lawsuit to regain control of the Black Hills, in accord with the Treaty of 1976. They could restore independce to Hawai’i!

    Zenz sounds like the kind of fundamentalist who have discovered China in the Book of Revelation.

  5. Eric
    March 19, 2021 at 19:58

    Good Canadian content, especially the photo pairing IRWIN COTLER with his U.S. analog, Alan Dershowitz.
    Their pretensions to advocate civil liberties are exposed in their active and avid Zionist/anti-Palestine views.
    (One link missing: as far as I know, Cotler is not linked to Jeffry Epstein, except in devotion to Israel.)

    In addition to ‘advising’ Venezuelan putschist Leopoldo Lopez, Cotler was point man for Canada’s former
    foreign affairs minister and cold war hawk Chrystia Freeland (now promoted to deputy prime minister)
    in her leading role at the so-called ‘Lima Group’ plotting to overthrow the government of Venezuela.
    After he failed to succeed at this Elliot Abrams role — but contributed to the hostility and sanctions
    that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans — the Liberal regime turned him onto China.

    LLOYD AXWORTHY is considered one of Canada’s most progressive foreign ministers (which doesn’t say much).
    He did push the international treaty against land mines, but also promoted the so-called Right to Protect
    (RTP) doctrine that NATO (including Canada) used to bomb Serbia in the 1990s, and two decades later
    (also with Canadian war planes) to dismember Libya into ruins and ongoing civil war.

  6. Jonny James
    March 19, 2021 at 13:50

    The US Empire and vassals like the UK, have blatantly seized and stolen billions from Iran, Venezuela etc in recent years. They have imposed illegal siege warfare (so-called sanctions) on many countries, based on lies. US foreign policy has caused the deaths of several millions of innocent people in the last 20 years alone, destroying entire countries…and this continues.

    They give hypocrisy a bad name:.

    The US and vassals have lied repeatedly and issued so many blatantly false accusations, it’s hard to keep track; the incubator babies story, Iraqi WMDs, Muammar Gaddafi giving viagra to his troops so they could rape innocent women, Putin shot down the plane, Putin poisoned Navalny, Putin is “a killer” and will be punished.

    The anti-China lies continued under the Trump regime and continue under the Biden regime: The PRC is committing genocide in Xinjiang, China is suppressing HK “democracy” as if HK had democracy under British colonial rule.

    I notice that recently, there has been a rash of attacks against people of Asian descent in the US – I wonder if all of this anti-China rhetoric has spurred these attacks?

    At this point, the credibility of the US govt., US oligarchy and their mass-media cartel should be nil. We need to start taking any information regarding China/Russia/Iran/Cuba/Venezuela etc. with a grain of salt. (if not the focus of ridicule and sarcastic jokes).

    On any given day, we can watch or stream the world “news” on the major outlets and crack sarcastic jokes and “take the piss” all day long. I’ve done this with colleagues and friends many times. It’s Tabloid Entertainment, and should be treated that way.

    Fortunately, we have the folks here at CN and GZ to set the record straight and debunk the laughable BS that passes for world news. The vast majority of comments on this site are great as well. Cheers!

  7. March 19, 2021 at 13:34

    Who buys these lies?

    The vilest and most warmongering nation on the planet says it wants to protect Uyghurs’ human rights. When was the last time it delivered on such promises? NEVER.

    Who’s still buying these lies? What credibility does the empire still have? NO ONE.

    Is that why they are layering the bs thicker and deeper? . . .

    Seriously, if you track the thickness of these “reports”, the number of pages, the number of words, I bet they are getting thicker and thicker, an indication that the empire knows it is losing credibility

    • Anne
      March 20, 2021 at 12:43

      All too true, Debra…And the ever thicker BS layer upon layer, applied by both faces of the Janus Party, is meant to seriously distract from our MICIMATT’s and Govt’s really existing human rights abuses, in country and beyond these shores…Look there, not here…

  8. March 19, 2021 at 13:28

    It is true that the those who have issued the report on the Uyghurs have shady credebtials by ordinate standards. As an academic who lived in Xinjiang and China for many years, and who speaks Turkish (Uyghur ia a dialect) I find the position of Consortium News very odd. China has donee a great deal for Xinjiang, building roads and schools. Now, under Xi Jing Ping China is building concentration’ re-education cams and incarcerating nearly one million Uyghurs. Isn’t that worth a mention?

    • Consortiumnews.com
      March 19, 2021 at 13:51

      This is not Consortium News’ “position.” We have a disclaimer at the bottom of the article. This is a report from the Gray Zone focused on the issue of whether genocide is taking place against the Uyghurs or not, an argument that is worth exploring, in particular looking at the people making that argument.

  9. March 19, 2021 at 13:16

    What comes to mind is this quote of Graham Fuller, with apologies to dear Ray McGovern who counts him a friend, from the introduction to the American edition of “Les Dollars de la Terreur” by Swiss researcher Richard Labévière (2000):

    “Dollars for Terror” —
    American government and Sunni Islam is doing just fine – in spite of the new geopolitical reality.

    “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army,” explains a former CIA analyst. “The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.” In a certain sense, the Cold War is still going on. For years Graham Fuller, former Deputy Director of the National Council on Intelligence at the CIA, has been talking up the “modernizing virtues” of the Islamists, insisting on their anti-Statist concept of the economy. Listening to him, you would almost take the Taleban and their Wahhabi allies for liberals. “Islam, in theory at least, is firmly anchored in the traditions of free trade and private enterprise,” wrote Fuller. “The prophet was a trader, as was his first wife. Islam does not glorify the State’s role in the economy.”

    This edifying statement, obligingly broadcast by the official newspaper of a certain stratum of the French intelligentsia* partially explains the American government’s laxity in Central Asia. Parallel to the astonishing ideological convergence between the Parisian ex-Leftists and certain former CIA analysts, there is a perceptible propagation of Sunni lslamism (in varying degrees) from Chechnya to Chinese Xinjiang, and it affects all the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.”

    * [Le Monde Diplomatique]

  10. Alex Cox
    March 19, 2021 at 11:53

    Thanks for a well researched and fascinating report.

  11. Grad
    March 19, 2021 at 10:40

    With many thanks to author and publisher to bring this well researched report in the open.
    It is astonishing to see how well the machinery in the west is working to create false news. We can by now assume almost by default that all of the China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Syria etc bashing reports are
    propaganda to influence the mindset in the west.
    Grad

    • Anne
      March 20, 2021 at 12:38

      Oh so true, Grad, oh so true…one only has to listen (my sources of the Orwellian Newspeak are NPR and the BBC World Service) to know that via omission and commission and repetition of the same governmental/MIC lies, stories they want us to believe (and all too many do) that very little of what they tell us about their target “bad guy” countries holds much if any water…

  12. Randal Marlin
    March 19, 2021 at 10:05

    The Gray Zone has done an excellent job of undermining the credentials of Irwin Cotler and others. I have hitherto considered his credentials favorably. I will now look out more carefully at the context of his pronouncements. The trouble is that there are reasons not to trust the Washington Post either. So who and what should we believe? China has difficulty governing a multi-ethnic, multi-religious territory. That it should be lacking in support of individual and group rights and freedoms should not be surprising. Any condemnation of Chinese intolerance should be measured against North America’s treatment of aboriginal nations. But it would be naive and irresponsible to ignore allegations of China’s rights violations . It would also be naive to suppose that the allegations are free from bias favoring U.S. imperialistic aims. What is needed is more and better evidence regarding specific claims.

    • James Simpson
      March 20, 2021 at 04:06

      My thoughts exactly. Grayzone reporting on this is a welcome alternative to the US-centric, anti-China bias of the corporate media. However, China is a deeply repressive state with enormous power over its people. It executes a large number of them every year in secret, a statistic far worse than the equivalent in the USA. Dissent is harshly punished in much more severe ways than even Julian Assange has experienced. China’s Belt & Road schemes will likely greatly accelerate the climate crisis, which should be of huge concern for us all.

      • Anne
        March 20, 2021 at 12:35

        If the executions are in secret – how do we know about them? Rumor? Lies propagated by those against the Chinese govt? Without real evidence such assertions are simply unfounded assertions to denigrate another form of political entity, one the west doesn’t like – NOT because it is authoritarian, dictatorial, brutal, violent, that matters not at all, (Pinochet, the Shah, Suharto, whatever PM in all of occupied Palestine – ALL – and so on and so on) in reality, to the west in general nor to the USA in particular, but because some govts, countries will NOT bend their knees, supplicate to western demands…Accept them as the “real” rulers…

        And the US is hardly behind the door when it comes to executions…nor when it comes to torture – or is torture okay when inflicted on those “others”? And then there are the other human rights abuses (as these weren’t more than enough): the Chagos Islanders, the Marshall Islanders, Vietnam and our Agent Oranging, Napalming, let alone bombing it and Cambodia and Laos (and earlier yet NK) to smithereens….

        As for political prisoners: Leonard Peltier and Abu Mumia Jamal – and their solitary confinements…..And then there is Guantanamo and was Abu Ghraib (and it is highly unlikely that that torture site in Iraq went without full backing)…

    • Teresa Smith
      March 20, 2021 at 14:58

      That would be great if governments weren’t neuteringl reporters who are, indeed, after the truth.

  13. Piotr Berman
    March 19, 2021 at 09:16

    It seems that there is some hierarchy among the think tanks, and the most privileged ones avoid producing most glaring falsifications, but once the [expletive deleted] is converted into an odorless medium, they cite merrily — including Secretary of State.

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