Zeinab Merai, Sada al-Mashrek
In the earlier part (صدى المشرق (sadaalmashrek.ca)), different speakers including intellectual Noam Chomsky raised arguments to recommend the toning down on the anti-China rhetoric. Now Mazen Hodeib, member of the Arab-Chinese Cooperation and Development Association (ACCDA), makes further arguments and questions on the issue.
Mind Canada’s Indigenous Peoples’ suffering? But hey, the Uyghurs!
A sarcastic Chomsky points out that “we talk about China’s repression of minorities, which is serious. We don’t have that problem in exactly that way because the US and Canada had a better way of solving the problem of minorities: Exterminate them, you don’t have to worry about dealing with them. That’s the US and Canadian way, more the US than Canada, where some remain. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s our choice.”
“The accusations concerning the Uyghur genocide are based on no real grounds. What does Canada, in turn, have to say to China about the 32,000 and counting non-Catholic indigenous children buried in unmarked graves in the vicinity of residential schools?” asks Mazen Hodeib, member of the ACCDA, an independent non-governmental organisation that works on strengthening economic, social and cultural relations between Arab and Chinese peoples.
Funded by the federal government and run mostly by Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, the residential school system has caused much agony to Canada’s First Nations, whose children were forced into those schools and abused for over than 160 years.
Only last month did the government agree to stop battling the indigenous families in court and to pay C$20 billion to compensate them. Pressure had been mounting in 2021 as the mass graves were getting located. The Truth and Reconciliation Day held on 30 September 2021 even meant so much to Trudeau that he went holidaying in Vancouver Island’s Tofino with his family on the same day.
Around the Ottawa protests’ end in the past week, two people were trampled by the RCMP, including a 49-year-old indigenous woman that was seriously injured.
Until this very day, the Wet’suwet’en and the Gitxsan are still denied their rights by the Liberal government’s heavily-armed RCMP and are being fought off their ancestral lands for the sake of money-gobblers…
Gidimt’en Checkpoint, a Twitter account that represents the Wet’suwet’en people says “It’s time to end the Canadian government’s toxic relationship with Indigenous Peoples.” (See earlier article: صدى المشرق (sadaalmashrek.ca))
But wait! The Uyghurs!
Hodeib: “This is how it’s really like for Muslims in China”
As to the treatment of Muslims, Hodeib says that China is the country with the biggest number of mosques in the world, many of which have been built in the last five years. “You’ll see Muslims all lined up for prayers. They can do whatever they want to, and there is no such thing as a ‘crackdown’ on Muslims.”
Hodeib, a Lebanese who’s been living in China for 20 years, adds that “China has allowed international organisations to inspect its grounds. The Emirati and Palestinian ambassadors were there, too, and said things were just fine.”
He confirms that anti-China propagandists have fabricated lies, making use of irrelative videos, like one in which a non-Muslim girl singing and lamenting her parents, who had been killed in a car accident. Instead, the video subtitles were falsified to fit the claim that the girl’s parents’ ‘had been hunted down because they were Muslims.’ In another viral video, a thief was busted and beaten up by an officer in Indonesia; still, anti-China propagandists claimed that ‘was a Muslim being tortured by the Chinese authorities.’
In one of President Xi Jinping’s visits to a distant village, footage was misinterpreted by Arab and global media, and it was claimed the president ‘was apologising to the Muslim locals for what his government had done to them,’ but in fact it was just one of the annual visits the president makes at the beginning of every New Chinese year. “The local residents even had a meal with the president at the time,” says Hodeib.
Just another CIA orchestration
Refuting the claim that the Chinese authorities have been trying to “wind down on the population of the Muslim Uyghurs”, Hodeib says that Chinese Muslims have been given the freedom to give birth to as much children as they want, contrary to the Han Chinese, who make the majority of the Chinese ethnic groups, and who have not until recently been allowed to give birth to up to three children.
Canadian author and political activist Yves Engler says that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which funds the Ottawa-based Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, “was established in 1983 to work alongside the CIA. In 1991 Allen Weinstein, a founding member and president, told the Washington Post, ‘A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ NED funding for Uyghur groups in Canada is not to support charity work… The Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is a political organisation that is openly seeking to Balkanise China.”
“It says it defends ‘Uyghurs and other natives of East Turkistan who are living under Chinese occupation since 1949.’ In other words, the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project rejects the legitimacy of the nationalist/communist revolution that united China after more than a century of foreign domination,” warns Engler.
One last part coming out later.