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The New York Times and its Uyghur “activist”

Peter Symonds

The New York Times has furnished a case study of the way in which it functions as the conduit for the utterly hypocritical “human rights” campaigns fashioned by the CIA and the State Department to prosecute the predatory interests of US imperialism.

While turning a blind eye to the gross abuses of democratic rights by allies such as Saudi Arabia, the US has brazenly used “human rights” for decades as the pretext for wars, diplomatic intrigues and regime-change. The media is completely integrated into these operations.

Another “human rights” campaign is now underway. The New York Times is part of the mounting chorus of condemnation of China over its treatment of the Turkic-speaking, Muslim Uyghur minority in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang.

In an article on May 4 entitled “In push for trade deal, Trump administration shelves sanctions over China’s crackdown on Uyghurs,” the New York Timesjoined in criticism of the White House, particularly by the Democrats, for failing to impose punitive measures on Beijing.

The strident denunciations of China involve unsubstantiated allegations that it is detaining millions of Uyghurs without charge or trial in what Beijing terms vocational training camps.

The New York Times reported, without qualification, the lurid claims of US officials, such as Assistant Secretary of Defence Randall Schriver, who last Friday condemned “the mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps” and boosted the commonly cited figure of up to a million to “up to three million” in detention. No evidence has been presented for either claim.

The repression of the Uyghurs is completely bound up with the far broader oppression of the working class by the Chinese capitalist elites and the Chinese Communist Party regime that defends their interests. The US campaign on the Uyghurs, however, has nothing to do with securing the democratic rights of workers, but is aimed at stirring up reactionary separatist sentiment.

The US has longstanding ties to right-wing separatist organisations based on Chinese minorities—Tibetans as well as the Uyghurs—that it helped create, fund and in some cases arm. As the US, first under President Obama and now Trump, has escalated its diplomatic, economic and military confrontation with China, the “human rights” of Uyghurs has been increasingly brought to the fore.

Washington’s aim, at the very least, is to foment separatist opposition in Xinjiang, which is a crucial source of Chinese energy and raw materials as well as being pivotal to its key Belt and Road Initiative to integrate China more closely with Eurasia. Such unrest would not only weaken China but could lead to a bloody war and the fracturing of the country. Uyghur separatists, who trained in the US network of Islamist terrorist groups in Syria, openly told Radio Free Asia last year of their intention to return to China to wage an armed insurgency.

The New York Times is completely in tune with the aims behind these intrigues—a fact that is confirmed by its promotion of Uyghur “activist” Rushan Abbas.

Last weekend’s article highlighted Abbas as the organiser of a tiny demonstration in Washington to “pressure Treasury Department officials to take action against Chinese officials involved in the Xinjiang abuses.” She told the newspaper that the Uyghur issue should be included as part of the current US-China trade talks, and declared: “They are facing indoctrination, brainwashing and the elimination of their values as Muslims.”

An article “Uyghur Americans speak against China’s internment camps” on October 18 last year cited her remarks at the right-wing think tank, the Hudson Institute, where she “spoke out” about the detention of her aunt and sister. As reported in the article: “I hope the Chinese ambassador here reads this,” she said, wiping away tears. “I will not stop. I will be everywhere and speak on this at every event from now on.”

Presented with a tearful woman speaking about her family members, very few readers would have the slightest inkling of Abbas’s background, about which the New York Times quite deliberately says nothing. Abbas is a highly connected political operator with long standing ties to the Pentagon, the State Department and US intelligence agencies at the highest level as well as top Republican Party politicians. She is a key figure in the Uyghur organisations that the US has supported and funded.

Currently, Abbas is Director of Business Development in ISI Consultants, which offers to assist “US companies to grow their businesses in Middle East and African markets.” Her credentials, according to the company website, include “over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America.”

The website also notes: “She also has extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Justice, and various US intelligence agencies.” As “an active campaigner for human rights,” she “works closely with members of the US Senate, Congressional Committees, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the US Department of State and several other US government departments and agencies.”

This brief summary makes clear that Abbas is well connected in the highest levels of the state apparatus and in political circles. It also underscores the very close ties between the Uyghur organisations, in which she and her family members are prominent, and the US intelligence and security agencies.

A more extensive article and interview with Abbas appeared in the May 2019 edition of the magazine Bitter Winter, which is published by the Italian-based Center for Studies on New Religions. The magazine focuses on “religious liberty and human rights in China” and is part of a conservative, right-wing network in Europe and the United States. The journalist who interviewed Abbas, Marco Respinti, is a senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Centre for Cultural Renewal, and a board member of the Centre for European Renewal—both conservative think tanks.

The article explains that Abbas was a student activist at Xinjiang University during the 1989 protests by students and workers against the oppressive Beijing regime, but left China prior to the brutal June 4 military crackdown that killed thousands in the capital and throughout the country. At the university, she collaborated with Dolkun Isa and “has worked closely with him ever since.”

Dolkun Isa is currently president of the World Uyghur Congress, established in 2004 as an umbrella group for a plethora of Uyghur organisations. It receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy—which is one of the fronts used by the CIA and the US State Department for fomenting opposition to Washington’s rivals, including so-called colour revolutions, around the world.

Isa was the subject of an Interpol red notice after China accused him of having connections to the armed separatist group, the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation, a claim he denied. East Turkestan is the name given to Xinjiang by Uyghur separatists to denote its historic connections to Turkey. None of the Western countries in which he traveled moved to detain him and the red notice was subsequently removed, no doubt under pressure from Washington.

Bitter Winter explained that after moving to the US, Abbas cofounded the first Uyghur organisation in the United States in 1993—the California-based Tengritagh Overseas Students and Scholars Association. She also played a key role in the formation of the Uyghur American Association in 1998, which receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Last year its Uyghur Human Rights Project was awarded two NED grants totaling $320,000. Her brother Rishat Abbas was the association’s first vice-chairman and is currently the honorary chairman of the Uyghur Academy based in Turkey.

When the US Congress funded a Uyghur language service for the Washington-based Radio Free Asia, Abbas became its first reporter and news anchor, broadcasting daily to China. Radio Free Asia, like its counterpart Radio Free Europe, began its existence in the 1950s as a CIA conduit for anti-communist propaganda. It was later transferred to the US Information Agency, then the US State Department and before being incorporated as an “independent,” government-funded body. Its essential purpose as a vehicle for US disinformation and lies has not changed, however.

In a particularly revealing passage, Bitter Winter explained: “From 2002–2003, Ms. Abbas supported Operation Enduring Freedom as a language specialist at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” In the course of the interview with the magazine, Abbas attempted to explain away her involvement with the notorious prison camp by saying that she was simply acting on behalf of 22 Uyghurs who were wrongfully detained and ultimately released—after being imprisoned for between four to 11 years!

Given the denunciations of Chinese detention camps, one might expect that Abbas would have something critical to say about Guantanamo Bay, where inmates are held indefinitely without charge or trial and in many cases tortured. However, she makes no criticism of the prison or its procedures, nor for that matter of Operation Enduring Freedom—the illegal US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq that resulted in the deaths of a million civilians.

It is clear why. Abbas is plugged into to the very top levels of the US state apparatus and political establishment in Washington. Her stints with Radio Free Asia and at Guantanamo Bay are undoubtedly not the only times that she has been directly on the payroll.

As Bitter Winter continued: “She has frequently briefed members of the US Congress and officials at the State Department on the human rights situation of the Uyghur people, and their history and culture, and arranged testimonies before Congressional committees and Human Rights Commissions.

“She provided her expertise to other federal and military agencies as well, and in 2007 she assisted during a meeting between then-President George W. Bush and Rebiya Kadeer, the world-famous moral leader of the Uyghurs, in Prague. Later that year she also briefed then First Lady Laura Bush in the White House on the Human Rights situation in Xinjiang.”

It should be noted, Rebiya Kadeer is the “the world-famous moral leader of the Uyghurs,” only in the eyes of the CIA and the US State Department who have assiduously promoted her, and of the US-funded Uyghur organisations. She was one of the wealthiest businesswomen in China who attended the National People’s Congress before her husband left for the US and began broadcasting for Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. She subsequently fled China to the US and has served as president both of the World Uyghur Congress and the American Uyghur Association.

The fact that Russan Abbas is repeatedly being featured in the New York Times is an indication that she is also being groomed to play a leading role in the mounting US propaganda offensive against China over the persecution of the Uyghurs. It is also a telling indictment of the New York Times which opens its pages to her without informing its readers of her background. Like Abbas, the paper of record is also plugged into the state apparatus and its intelligence agencies.

Copyright © 1998-2019 World Socialist Web Site

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Antonym
Antonym
Feb 5, 2020 1:16 AM

Another “human rights” campaign is now underway. The New York Times is part of the mounting chorus of condemnation of China over its treatment of the Turkic-speaking, Muslim Uyghur minority in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Another “human rights” campaign is now underway. Off Guardian is part of the mounting chorus of condemnation of Israel over its treatment of the Arab speaking, Muslim Palestinian minority in
West Bank province of Israel.

Chinese detention camps good, Israeli detention camps bad.

denk
denk
May 12, 2019 3:17 PM

the brutal June 4 military crackdown that killed thousands in the capital and throughout the country.

Thats an exact copy of fukus agitprop.
The CCP version has been ‘hundreds died in the back alleys, not TAM, when troops battled armed agent provocateurs’

By now, enough of evidence, from fukus embassy internal memo no less, have validated the Chinese narrative.

The author’s regurgitation of fukus official agitprop just goes to show that as is the norm this day, western leftists still have to
tell lies when they’r telling truth.

Fair dinkum
Fair dinkum
May 11, 2019 3:52 PM

DevioUS ARE US.

Louis N. Proyect
Louis N. Proyect
May 11, 2019 1:12 PM
Mira
Mira
May 11, 2019 11:32 AM

This article can be missed by readers who usually look only at the list of the latest items. Although it is published on the 10th May, it is not showing in the list of the latest articles.

Stonky
Stonky
May 11, 2019 5:39 AM

An-Nisa’ 56. Surely! Those who disbelieved in Our revelations. We shall burn them in Fire. As often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment. Truly, Allah is Ever Most Powerful, All-Wise…

Saudi Arabia: Let’s take all our kids at the age of four or five and start teaching them that this stuff is the literal truth…
Progressives: Yaaay! What a great idea! Let’s caper around our bedrooms yodelling with glee at the diversity these wonderful people are bringing to the pale, stale, male culture of our communities!

China: Let’s put these people in schools and give them vocational training. Let’s try to de-brainwash them, and teach them to live in peace and harmony with their fellow man…
Progressives: Boooo! You rotten dirty stinking fascist tyrant dictators!

Stonky
Stonky
May 11, 2019 5:21 AM

In the city of Jilin in Jilin Province in northeast China, which I know well, there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims. They practice their religion undisturbed, and live in perfect peace and harmony with their fellow citizens.

I wonder why they are not being interned in concentration camps, having their beards shaved off under duress, being forced to eat pork, and being kept under constant surveillance…

Perhaps it’s because they haven’t sent several thousand of their fellow Jiliners off to Syria to kill Syrians and be trained by the CIA in the fine arts of massacring civilians in their own country, in pursuit of their blood-drenched Islamofascist lunatocracy.

Jen
Jen
May 11, 2019 6:21 AM
Reply to  Stonky

Ummm … because these Jilin Muslims are not Uyghurs but Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese?

Stonky
Stonky
May 11, 2019 9:27 AM
Reply to  Jen

Ummm … because these Jilin Muslims are not Uyghurs but Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese?

Oddly enough, there are another 55 minorities in China, amounting to tens of millions of people, and they’re not Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese either. And none of them are being locked up in concentration camps or having their babies ripped from their mothers wombs and fried in woks and eaten.

So that can’t be the reason why one third of all Uyghurs have been locked in concentration camps where their knees are being stapled together and Q-tips are being pushed up their noses really hard.

There must be another factor at play.

eddie
eddie
May 11, 2019 9:58 PM
Reply to  Stonky

Well stated, Stonky, and the same can be said for the Uyghurs living happy lives here in Kunming & Yunnan Province.
If the western spooks really believe that they will catch Beijing napping, and stir up trouble in the hell-hole that is Xinjiang, then they are as deluded as we know them to be.

Country comes before other considerations in China, which is how they became a Giant in 30 years; beginning from scratch. In a country that never stops progressing, there is no room for parasitic lay-abouts, radical or otherwise. BRI will happen, and Xinjiang’s looney Moslem fringe-element will either adapt or find a jihadi cave-home elsewhere.

Mira
Mira
May 11, 2019 1:42 AM

Please remind me again, is the New York Times a leftist media?

Mira
Mira
May 11, 2019 1:40 AM

“The US has longstanding ties to right-wing separatist organisations based on Chinese minorities—Tibetans as well as the Uyghurs—that it helped create, fund and in some cases arm”

Also no doubt, US ties to Chinese Underground Churches that are vehemently anti-government and anti-everything to do with the ruling party in China. Adherents to these underground churches view US Pentagon and military officials as the epitome of honesty and role models for amazing leadership. They strongly believe the US can help ‘rescue’ them from the Communist party. Totally brain-washed to think and believe the US nuclear arsenal can deliver democracy and great human rights to China …

Helper
Helper
May 11, 2019 12:56 AM

“utterly hypocritical “human rights” campaigns fashioned by the CIA and the State Department to prosecute the predatory interests of US imperialism”

Is ‘to prosecute’ the best verb/word to use here?
Using ‘to engage in’ would be much clearer.

Godfree Roberts
Godfree Roberts
May 11, 2019 12:08 AM

Superb investigation! Just what the Internet was supposed to empower (and why only 6% of Americans trust their MSM.

Two quibbles about China:

1. “The repression of the Uyghurs is completely bound up with the far broader oppression of the working class by the Chinese capitalist elites and the Chinese Communist Party regime that defends their interests.” There is zero evidence for this and abundant evidence to the contrary. Next year every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health- and old age care, 500,000,000 urban Chinese will have more net worth and disposable income than the average American, their mothers and infants will be less likely to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years ahead of American kids and live longer, healthier lives.

2. “left China prior to the brutal June 4 military crackdown that killed thousands in the capital and throughout the country.” There was no brutal June 4 military crackdown anywhere in China on June 4. The kids left the square under the watchful eye of Liu Xiaobo (later arrested but released when many testified to this). Read what happened here: http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen-square-1989-revisited/

Kenric Ashe
Kenric Ashe
Feb 4, 2020 2:29 PM

Indeed this article originally published by the World Socialist Web Site repeats false propaganda while pretending to expose it. I quit reading when I got to the “repression” paragraph. I unsubscribed from WSWS long ago because they do this kind of thing all the time, and now my respect for Off Guardian has also diminished. 🙁

Godfree Roberts
Godfree Roberts
Feb 4, 2020 11:22 PM
Reply to  Kenric Ashe

I agree. WSWS shows that lefties are as willing to lie as right wingers. Orwell would be unsurprised.

Louis N. Proyect
Louis N. Proyect
May 10, 2019 11:04 PM

Washington’s aim, at the very least, is to foment separatist opposition in Xinjiang, which is a crucial source of Chinese energy and raw materials as well as being pivotal to its key Belt and Road Initiative to integrate China more closely with Eurasia.

I guess the author disagrees with Lenin’s support for the self-determination of oppressed nations but at least acknowledges that China was responsible for a “brutal June 4 military crackdown that killed thousands in the capital and throughout the country.” That’s progress for this website, which can usually be relied upon for whitewashing that kind of repression.

Stonky
Stonky
May 11, 2019 4:56 AM

“China was responsible for a “brutal June 4 military crackdown that killed thousands in the capital and throughout the country.”

The “thousands ” who were killed in the “brutal military crackdown” are a tiny fraction of the millions or tens of millions of Chinese who would have died – of starvation, poverty, disease and warfare – had the scumbuckets and leeches of Washington and Wall Street managed to take a wrecking ball to China, as they did to the Soviet Union.

A shame for the individual students involved. I’m sure they meant well enough, and they could hardly know (other than their ‘leaders’ of course) that they were nothing more than witless Washington puppets.

mark
mark
May 12, 2019 5:49 PM
Reply to  Stonky

China was wise enough to put a stop to the Maidan style CIA operation in Tiananmen Square when it did.

padre
padre
May 11, 2019 11:50 AM

You are in no position to criticize others if they are doing things, your country has been doing all the time!

denk
denk
May 12, 2019 3:22 PM

—–

Eric Zuesse:
“Why Only Fools Trust America’s Mainstream ‘News’ Media After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq”

https://southfront.org/eric-zuesse-why-only-fools-trust-americas-mainstream-news-media-after-the-2003-invasion-of-iraq/

Paul Craig Roberts
Only a deranged person could believe anything any Western government says. But the Western world has a huge number of deranged people. There are plenty of them to validate the next official lie. The ignorant fools make it possible for Western governments to continue their policy of lies that are driving the world to extinction in a war with Russia and China.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50390.htm