CIA-Funded 'World Uyghur Congress' Protests Volkswagen With Sensationalist Claims
Ten activists crashed a Volkswagen shareholders meeting holding signs with unproven claims about China, Xinjiang, and the Uyghurs
This post in video form:
World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a CIA-funded, terrorist-adjacent group, crashed a Volkswagen shareholders meeting holding signs with unproven claims about forced labour in Xinjiang. Reuters calls them ‘human rights activists’, which is quite a bold claim to make considering the WUC supports and defends the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a radical Islamist terrorist group that committed over 200 violent attacks against China and other Uyghurs. More about that later. Here’s the Reuters article about this latest incident:
Volkswagen defends China record at turbulent shareholder meeting - Reuters
Now, there are plenty of ways to criticize Volkswagen that don’t involve blatant lies and ‘yellow peril’ fearmongering. I mean, they were quite literally created by Hitler and the Nazis during WWII, with slave labour from concentration camps being used for the first generation of their vehicles. Yes, VW has used slave labour in the past, but it’s clear that they aren’t currently, at least not in Xinjiang. You could also criticize them for that time when the CEO used a Nazi slogan at a company event in 2019.
Or how about the scandal where VW was caught cheating on diesel-emissions tests and adding more pollution to our dying world? Well, the CIA doesn’t give a shit about that. They only care about furthering their cold war propaganda efforts against China to feed the ever hungry imperialist war machine and fatten defense contractor wallets.
About ten activists, including one topless woman with 'Dirty Money' painted on her back, interrupted executives' speeches, shouting that the carmaker's vehicles were built with forced labour and waving banners that read: 'End Uyghur Forced Labour'.
Of course the WUC wants you to think that China is forcing the Uyghurs to work for VW. They’re funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which the founder admitted exists to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The CIA loves to manufacture consent against China, they’ve been doing it for many decades. In 2020 the NED bragged about giving almost 9 million dollars to ‘Uyghur activist’ groups, including the WUC. Read more about the imperialist efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy here:
The United Nations said last year that China's "arbitrary and discriminatory detention" of Uyghurs and other Muslims in its Xinjiang region may constitute crimes against humanity. Rights groups have documented abuses including mass forced labour in detention camps which China has denied.
Notice the keyword there? “May constitute crimes against humanity”. These claims are wholly unproven, the latest UN report could not conclusively determine if China was even committing crimes against humanity, let alone the genocide that CIA-funded organizations like the World Uyghur Congress claim. Here’s a snippet from the WUC’s press release on this incident:
Volkswagen continues to maintain its controversial plant in the Uyghur region of China—the catastrophic human rights situation there is well documented. In internment camps, millions of Uyghurs and members of other Turkic peoples are indoctrinated, tortured and raped. Increasingly, factories are being built next to these camps where detainees are forced to perform forced labor at cheap wages.
Well documented? Is it though? The WUC is still parroting the heavily discredited ‘millions’ figure, which was popularized by Adrian Zenz, a CIA-funded, far right christo-fascist that claims God sent him to earth to westernize China. “Indoctrinated, tortured and raped”? According to who? This press release does not source these claims, so let’s take a look at a WUC report that does:
Since April 2017, over 1 million Uyghurs have been rounded up by Chinese police and detained against their will in large internment camps (called ‘reeducation’ camps by the Chinese government) where they have been subjected to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, political indoctrination, torture and other serious human rights violations.
This report has 11 references at the bottom. 6 of them are direct links to Radio Free Asia (RFA). You know, the organization that was started by the CIA to broadcast propaganda against China during the cold war? The wiki page says: “Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia were later preserved by the Clinton Administration and repurposed into their modern iterations.” They’re not trying to hide it. For some reason they don’t need to. Most westerners just take what RFA says at face value.
Curious what source those RFA references use? Here they are:
“according to a security official with knowledge of the detention system”
“A resident of Xinjiang, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told RFA”
“According to officers who answered the phone at the Tomosteng Police Station”
“a source recently told RFA’s Uyghur Service, speaking on condition of anonymity”
There is not a single shred of evidence for any of these claims. Every single RFA source is anonymous. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an RFA report that had any tangible evidence at all. They never name sources. We’re supposed to believe that a CIA operated organization is telling the truth about America’s biggest geopolitical rival? When their evidence essentially amounts to ‘trust me bro’?
Well, what about the other 5 references from that WUC report? Surely one of them has some actual evidence, right? One of them is self referential, it links to a WUC press release about the death of an Uyghur Religious Leader. It sources Radio Free Asia also. Nice.
One is to an article from The Guardian. Guess what? It sources Radio Free Asia. Oops. Another links to a now defunct page from EastTurkestanInfo.com. I pulled up an archive on the Wayback Machine. Here’s an excerpt from this page:
My name is Gulchehra Hoja. I am a Uyghur reporter at Radio Free Asia, in Washington DC, USA. I have been working at RFA for 17 years….
Best regards: Gülchéhre Abduqeyyum Xoja
23 February 2018 America / Washington
Yep. A letter from a 17 year veteran reporter of Radio Free Asia. I also like how it literally signs off from Washington D.C.
Alright, two chances left to not cite the CIA. Now we’ve got a Human Rights Watch (HRW) article. They’re unbiased, right? They wouldn’t source the CIA? Let’s see:
There have also been reports of people being sentenced to prison for more than 10 years for studying or traveling abroad. Chen has also stepped up surveillance of residents, already under heightened security measures and an ongoing “strike hard” campaign, by employing the latest technologies, as well as hiring thousands more security personnel.
This is the last paragraph of that HRW article. I’ve left the links intact. Two of them lead directly to Radio Free Asia. The third links to a Jamestown Foundation article by Adrian Zenz. Sigh. Oh, and the Jamestown Foundation is a Washington D.C. based think tank that was “founded in 1984 as a platform to support Soviet defectors”. Its board of directors has historically included a smattering of advisers to US Presidents and the former President of Radio Free Europe, which, like RFA, is also obviously run by the CIA.
So Human Rights Watch bends over and spreads for CIA propaganda, now how about Amnesty International (AI), which the WUC report also references? The link to AI is a call to action for people to send a letter to PRC leader Xi Jinping himself about the 30 or so relatives of ‘former prisoner of conscience’ Rebiya Kadeer that are supposedly detained in Xinjiang. Who is Rebiya? AI says, “Rebiya Kadeer is one of the best-known Uyghur human rights advocates and is a leader at the World Uyghur Congress.” Oh. She works for the WUC. Which we already know is CIA funded.
We’ve now established that not just 6, but 10 of the 11 references from this WUC report lead directly to the CIA-run Radio Free Asia, and the 11th sources the CIA-funded WUC itself. RFA only uses anonymous, most likely fake sources… so the WUC’s claims about a million Uyghurs being locked up and tortured or whatever aren’t backed by a single piece of tangible evidence.
We should probably dig a little deeper into the World Uyghur Congress, because simply calling it CIA-funded is a very generous interpretation of their history and what they do. They actually began operating under a different name, the World Uyghur Youth Congress (WUYC). Omer Kanat was one of the founders of the WUYC, he later went on to work for Radio Free Asia.
The WUYC and the current WUC have been accused by China of colluding with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement to commit terror attacks in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China. The WUC openly claims that Xinjiang is actually East Turkestan and that the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao annexed it, although ‘East Turkestan’ has been part of China since the Qing Dynasty.
The East Turkestan Islamic Movement aims to separate Xinjiang from China by any means necessary, including violence against innocent Xinjiang/Chinese civilians.
We don’t even need to get into the nitty gritty of whether or not the WUC conspires with the ETIM to commit terror attacks. Because at the very least, they openly support ETIM.
This Voice of America article shows how happy a WUC member was when the US removed ETIM from their list of terrorist organizations, a move that definitely wasn’t ideologically motivated. Supposedly, the US only put ETIM on the list in the first place to curry favor from China because they needed support for their imperialist invasion of Iraq, which was built on CIA lies. Kind of like the nonsense that the WUC spreads about China. It always comes full circle.
An Al Jazeera article about the ETIM removal states:
“ETIM was removed from the list because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist,” a State Department spokesperson said.
Do you know why ETIM would cease to exist? Because China successfully, and non-violently, deradicalized the small amount of Uyghurs who had been poisoned by ‘East Turkestan’ nationalist propaganda. The US is mad that China doesn’t use the same brutal austerity measures that they do to deal with Islamic extremists, so they fund anti-China propaganda to pretend China treats Muslims worse than they do. (Not so) fun fact: 22 Uyghurs were imprisoned and likely tortured in Guantanamo Bay. It’s fun to look through a Wiki article like that and see the wealth of information and tangible evidence, compared to what the CIA pushes about China and Xinjiang.
Want another fun fact? Rushan Abbas was the interpreter for these 22 Uyghurs at Gitmo. She was a US State Department goon who also happened to be the first reporter for the Uyghur Service of Radio Free Asia in 1998. Then, in 2017 she founded the Campaign for Uyghurs organization, another NED/CIA funded Uyghur ‘advocacy’ organization. Ms. Abbas did a Reddit AMA once to try to spread propaganda against China. She was dunked on for her State Department and Radio Free Asia affiliations. Guess what? Campaign for Uyghurs often works directly with the WUC to spread lies about Xinjiang.
Once again, full circle.
Now do we understand why nothing that the World Uyghur Congress says about China, Xinjiang and the Uyghurs can be trusted? Hopefully. Now let’s loop back to the basis of this article, which is Volkswagen’s factory in Xinjiang and whether or not they use forced labour.
Volkswagen has been facing these allegations for years now. They wanted to find out for themselves if there was forced labour in their factory. So, they sent an exec over there unannounced. You guessed it, zero signs of forced labor were found.
From the Reuters article:
China chief Ralf Brandstaetter said: "We do not see any evidence of human rights abuses at the plant," adding that the carmaker was not able to implement an audit without agreement from SAIC.
Brandstaetter visited the plant earlier this year and said on Wednesday: "I have no reason to doubt my impressions or the information available to me."
Maybe the World Uyghur Congress should focus on the human rights violations committed by their favorite terrorist group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, instead of making shit up about China. It’s very clear that China’s treatment of the Uyghurs is fair and balanced, especially compared to how countries like the US treat Muslims.
Should we listen to CIA funded orgs like the WUC, or should we listen to the diplomats from 30 Muslim majority countries who personally visited Xinjiang and praised China for their treatment of the Uyghurs? The answer is clear.
Now subscribe, or I’ll designate you as a terrorist organization: