The Most Ridiculous Guardian Article I've Ever Read
The Guardian reviews 'Waiting to be Arrested at Night' by Tahir Hamut Izgil and lies a lot
A new sinophobic book about the fake genocide in Xinjiang is making the rounds. I’ve already seen a few articles about it, but one from The Guardian popped up on my news feed and after just the first paragraph my jaw dropped. See for yourself:
A group of Uyghur friends are having a late-night chat. “I wish the Chinese would just conquer the world,” one says suddenly. “Why do you say that?” another asks, surprised. “The world doesn’t care what happens to us,” the first man replies. “Since we can’t have freedom anyway, let the whole world taste subjugation. Then we would all be the same. We wouldn’t be alone in our suffering.”
It is an understandable outburst of bitterness.
What a wild start, hey? Obviously, China is not ‘genociding’ the Uyghurs, I wouldn’t even say they’re committing human rights violations as the latest UN report guessed, but imagine this paragraph applied to an actual genocide. Imagine if a group of WWII Jewish escapees said, “I hope Germany’s lebensraum is successful, so people around the world can be thrown into gas chambers.”
Would that be an ‘understandable outburst of bitterness’?
This is not the only problem with this intro. “The world doesn’t care what happens to us”? Huh? The entire west is circlejerking harder than they ever have before about the propaganda the CIA is spreading about Xinjiang. Many western countries have gone so far as to refuse to import anything made in Xinjiang, depriving hard working Uyghurs of a job.
Are they perhaps referring to the delegation representing 30 Muslim majority countries that visited Xinjiang and praised China for their treatment of the Uyghurs? Here’s CIA-operated Radio Free Asia whining about it. No offense to the random, unnamed, totally real Uyghurs in this staged convo (taken from the book), but I’ll believe the Islamic delegation over them.
And shouldn’t we all? Are we really gonna pretend that the US, the main ringleader in this crusade against China’s treatment of Uyghurs, gives a fuck about the well being of Muslims? They don’t. They even locked up (and probably tortured) 22 Uyghurs in Guantanamo Bay. They lock up Muslims from around the world in Gitmo or CIA blacksites. They bomb Muslims daily. They don’t care about these specific Muslims. They care about delegitimizing China, because they’re scared of how powerful China, a communist nation, is becoming.
Anyways, here’s the Guardian article:
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night review – the Uyghurs’ fight for survival in a society where repression is routine - The Guardian
Bit of a mouthful, that headline. If you agree that the first paragraph of this article is insane, brace yourself for the next one:
The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who live mainly in China’s north-western Xinjiang region. They have long faced discrimination and persecution. Since 2016, the repression has greatly intensified, with mass detention, forced sterilisation and abortion, the separation of thousands of children from their parents, and the razing of thousands of mosques. Yet support for Uyghurs has been equivocal, not least from Muslim-majority countries, many of which are outraged by the burning of a Qur’an in Sweden but remain silent about the detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, for fear of upsetting Beijing.
Links kept intact. Whew. Where to start? Let’s skip the links for now and address the Muslim-majority country bit at the end. First off, the author of this article is Indian and advocates for secular societies; he in no way speaks for Muslims. To dismiss the various Muslim-majority countries’ opinions on China’s treatment of the Uyghurs is chauvinist as hell. Second, there is still zero proof of the magical one million number that so many sinophobic propagandists love to parrot. To claim that Muslims care more about Qur’an burnings than ‘one million detained Uyghurs’, when anti-communist China haters just completely made up one of those things, is frankly absurd.
Alright, let’s tackle the links one by one.
‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims - NYTimes
Here’s a notable excerpt:
They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.
Link kept intact. There’s the one million number again. The link goes to another NYTimes article. Here’s the source:
The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.
Links kept intact. Two more sources. They love to make you jump through hoops, huh? Almost like they have to hide the fact that there’s zero substance to these claims?
The first goes to a Jamestown Foundation article written by none other than Adrian Zenz. The Jamestown Foundation’s Board of Directors features several US State Department stooges. Mainly, advisors to US Presidents and the former President of Radio Free Europe, a CIA operated propaganda organization created to fight against the USSR during the cold war. Adrian Zenz is of course also directly connected to the CIA, he is a Senior China Fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by US Congress for much the same reasons Radio Free Europe was created. Zenz is also a virulent anti-semite, and a Christo-fascist; he believes God sent him to earth to westernize China.
The second link goes to a third NYTimes article (are they that desperate for clicks?) about a UN Panel confronting China. It heavily features Adrian Zenz, seemingly implying that Zenz can’t decide whether ‘hundreds of thousands’ or ‘over a million’ Uyghurs have been detained (hint: it’s neither). It’s frankly disgusting that a UN Panel would be entertaining reports from a man who said Jews will perish in a coming rapture; a man that is also funded directly by the CIA, but the UN has proven time and time again that it will violently oppose communism. This is evidenced by the UN troops in the Korean War that slaughtered thousands of innocent Korean civilians and blamed it on Kim Il Sung and his communist ilk. Listen to Season 3 of Blowback, people.
But anyways, back to that main NYTimes article. The claim that The Guardian assigns to it is of repression ‘greatly intensifying’ in Xinjiang. Do these leaked papers prove that? Of course not. It’s not repression, it’s anti-terrorism. The article makes ridiculous leaps in logic, without a shred of evidence, like this:
Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being “dealt with,” or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment.
Where is the proof that ‘dealt with’ means punishment? Are we just supposed to believe it because the NYTimes said so?
The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.
The people who specifically carry out violence are not the only concern regarding separatism and extremism. Extremism is born from brainwashing and propaganda. Anyone, even those who are not able-bodied, can poison the minds of young, impressionable, or stupid people. No offense to the idiots.
These articles serve to reinforce already established narratives, which themselves were reinforced by the constant stream of propaganda and lies. If you showed this article to someone with no prior knowledge or opinion on Xinjiang, they would not find this sufficient evidence to imply a heightened repression of the Uyghur people. We should evaluate every bit of propaganda on it’s own merit, without being influenced by everything else that’s thrown at us, but that’s simply not how the human brain works. We are a fickle species.
Alright, next link in that Guardian paragraph:
China forcing birth control on Uighurs to suppress population, report says - BBC
Wanna guess who this report is from? Come on, don’t be shy! Oh, you said Adrian Zenz? Correct! Want a cookie?
According to Mr Zenz's analysis of the data, natural population growth in Xinjiang has declined dramatically in recent years, with growth rates falling by 84% in the two largest Uighur prefectures between 2015 and 2018 and declining further in 2019.
"This kind of drop is unprecedented, there's a ruthlessness to it," Mr Zenz told the Associated Press. "This is part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs."
Sweetie, no. You know why the birth rate dropped among Uyghurs. It’s because they were previously exempt from the One Child/Two Child policy that other Chinese people, like the Han majority, were subjected to. Assimilating Uyghurs into this policy is equality, not oppression.
He also calls refers to IUDs as ‘sterilization’, which is absurd since IUDs are temporary and removable.
Next.
Uighur children fall victim to China anti-terror drive - Financial Times
I sure do love how their own sources tend to debunk each other:
The number of detentions has grown rapidly; in April, Laura Stone, the US acting deputy assistant secretary for east Asian and Pacific affairs, said the number of Uighurs detained was “at the very least in the tens of thousands”.
‘Tens of thousands’ is a far cry from ‘hundreds of thousands’ or ‘over a million’ like we’ve seen alleged from The Guardian and its other sources. Interesting. Anyways, this article is about children whose parents were arrested for sharing extremist Islamic content. This type of extremism has lead to over 200 terror attacks in China. Are they supposed to not arrest extremists that have children? I’m not sure the point of this article. At least it doesn’t source Zenz again.
In these trying times, we have to ask ourselves, WWAD? What would America do? Well, they arrest plenty of parents. At least 2.7 million American children have at least one parent in jail or prison.
Moving on.
Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang - The New Yorker
As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.
Hey, look at that. This article sources Adrian Zenz. Three out of four, Guardian? Not bad. It sources him twice, actually. Once for the ‘one million detained’ claim, and again for the same IUD bullshit from earlier. It also sources the CIA operated Radio Free Asia, about one of their anonymous, totally-real-and-not-a-figment-of-the-CIA’s-imagination sources. This article is supposed to prove that China has razed thousands of mosques. They use RFA to ‘prove’ that:
Cherished symbols of Muslim heritage—shrines, mosques, cemeteries—were systematically targeted for destruction. Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged, with minarets pulled down and decorative features scrubbed away or painted over. An official in Kashgar told Radio Free Asia, “We demolished nearly seventy per cent of the mosques in the city, because there were more than enough.”
So, the experts are from Radio Free Asia? That’s the only entity they mention. The New Yorker considers a CIA operated organization that exclusively uses anonymous sources to be an expert? Hmm.
Here’s the funny thing about the ‘razing mosques’ propaganda (and it is exactly that, propaganda). When China demolishes a mosque, it’s usually because it’s not up to code or is at risk of collapsing, and then they rebuild it afterwards. Interestingly, or not, western media only reports on the first stage of this process to rile up the brainwashed libs. Here’s a nice little debunk of this nonsense:
In 2020, the U.S. Mosque Survey counted 2,769 mosques in this country, compared to China’s more than 35,000 mosques. This means that Chinese Muslims have nearly three times more mosques per capita than do Muslims in the U.S.
Wow, I can’t believe how many mosques China has demolished! They now only have 3 times as many as the US does, per capita of their respective Muslim populations! It’s so gross how they weaponize these lies.
So, we’ve definitely debunked the various links in the beginning of this Guardian article. They are all CIA backed and based on absolutely nothing, of course. Let’s tackle the rest of this article.
A poet and film-maker, Izgil is famed for bringing a modernist sensibility to Uyghur poetry. He did not set out to be a political activist. The very fact of being a Uyghur, though, in a country that seeks to erase Uyghur existence, both culturally and physically, turns everyday life into a political act. And for a poet living in a culture within which “verse is woven into daily life”, writing is necessarily also an act of witness and of resistance.
Emphasis added. (Izgil wrote the book this article is based on). It’s a really silly claim to make, that China wants to erase Uyghur culture. This is of course ignoring the ‘physical erasure’ claim, which is complete nonsense and not even backed up by any of the Guardian’s propaganda articles. None claim any Uyghurs are being murdered. I’m not sure what else they would mean by ‘physical erasure’.
Since China has gotten the previous separatist extremism issues under control, they have actually been able to open up Xinjiang to tourism, for people from all over China, and the world, to celebrate the Uyghur culture. Once again, here’s Radio Free Asia whining about it. People from all over China are specifically traveling to Xinjiang to counter the western bans on Uyghur produced goods. They are trying to bring more tourist dollars to the Uyghurs that the US and their cronies are depriving of work, and wages.
I wrote an article about Der Spiegel’s propaganda piece on Xinjiang, and when you pick apart the propaganda, it actually paints a really nice picture of how Uyghur culture is celebrated:
Next up in the Guardian article:
Despite the subtitle of the book – “A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide” – there are no depictions here of genocide, or of torture, or even of violence. We know all these things are happening, but off-page.
They’re just so silly about it, aren’t they? This book that they’re reviewing doesn’t even mention anything that they’re accusing China of doing. Why do we ‘know all these things are happening’, Guardian? Because you linked to the CIA puppet Adrian Zenz three times to try to prove it? Not every westerner is as brainwashed as your target audience.
This book doesn’t depict any violence or torture or genocide, because the author didn’t experience any of that. He didn’t experience it, because it simply isn’t happening. What more evidence do we need? You couldn’t even find someone willing to lie about it.
Beijing seeks to cut off Uyghurs from their past and their traditions, too. Qur’ans are seized and history books banned, including many previously authorised by the state. Even personal names become part of the assault on Uyghur culture. Beijing’s list of prohibited names tells Uyghurs what they cannot call their children.
Qur’ans seized? Nope, debunked. History books banned? Nope, that was Radio Free Asia propaganda. Prohibited names? Nope, more RFA propaganda. Come on, Guardian. This is child’s play.
The greatest dread is of the physical repression wreaked upon Uyghurs: mass detentions, torture, violence. We get a glimpse of the horror when Izgil and his wife, Marhaba, attend a police station to have their biometric details collected – fingerprints, blood samples, facial scans. Along a basement corridor, they see a cell fitted out with iron restraints and a notorious “tiger chair”, used to force detainees into agonising stress positions. On the floor are bloodstains.
It’s really funny that they don’t show a picture of these ‘tiger chairs’. I was thinking they must be designed to hang people upside down or something, based on the ‘agonizing stress position’ claim here. This is what it looks like:
Yeah, I’m literally sitting in that exact position right now, in my computer chair. My hands are even similarly arranged while I type on my keyboard. Obviously I’m not shackled in, but come on, saying this is torture is a bit silly, isn’t it? It’s a normal seated position. China even says they use padding on the chairs. They probably wash them between interrogations, which is why you would see an empty chair sans padding. What is this supposed to prove? Every country shackles detainees.
People start disappearing, first in small numbers, eventually up to 1 million. They are taken to “study centres” – the code for mass detention camps – though nobody knows which one. “They simply vanished,” Izgil writes.
What, did this author personally count a million detainees? Even their own sources cast doubt on the one million number. It’s just so absurd at this point.
What is a ‘mass detention camp’? I’ve seen plenty of videos of the inside of these places, they literally look exactly like schools. What is the dividing line between a ‘study centre’ and a ‘mass detention camp’?
That’s about it for the Guardian article. But of course, they are referring to a book that is gaining a lot of attention, so let’s address it. It was written by Tahir Hamut Izgil and translated by Joshua L. Freeman. The intro is by Freeman. Here’s an excerpt:
It was also a tumultuous period in China’s capital. A new generation, unwilling to accept the tepid pace of reform, was increasingly demanding democratic rights and an end to corruption. As a sophomore, Tahir helped organize hunger strikes and marches by Uyghur students in the weeks leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen protests. While the student movement was ultimately crushed by Beijing’s tanks, Tahir’s interest in politics persisted.
Interesting spin on Tiananmen. Indeed, it did start as a ‘student movement’. But, as always, the CIA took advantage of the situation to try to manufacture a color revolution. They’re so mad that it spectacularly failed that they continue to propagandize about it to this day, despite the accounts of American journalists who were there and admitted that they witnessed no massacre. Read more here.
Year after year, Uyghur resentment festered, with no outlet for expression in the tightly controlled media. Finally, in mid-2009, after Han employees at a toy factory in eastern China lynched Uyghur colleagues following unfounded rumors of rape, Urumchi exploded in successive waves of violence between Uyghurs and Han. The death toll climbed into the hundreds as buses burned, shop windows were smashed, and passersby were bludgeoned to death in the streets.
This is a disgusting spin on the Urumchi riots. Two Uyghurs died in the initial brawl in the factory. Then, Rebiya Kadeer of the National Endowment for Democracy (CIA) funded World Uyghur Congress got involved, stoking tensions and using this incident to radicalize more Uyghurs towards violent separatism. The World Uyghur Congress believes Xinjiang is actually East Turkestan, and wants to secede from China through extreme violence. From the Wiki:
Chinese authorities accused a man who they alleged to be a key WUC member of inciting ethnic tensions by circulating a violent video, and urging Uyghurs, in an online forum, to "fight back [against Han Chinese] with violence".
Guess what? The Uyghurs did ‘fight back’ with violence. The WUC continued to propagandize about it, riling up more Uyghur violence. This is the outcome:
Xinhua did not immediately disclose the ethnic breakdown of the dead,[76] but journalists from The Times and The Daily Telegraph reported that most of the victims appeared to have been Han.[40][82] For instance, on 10 July Xinhua stated that 137 of the dead (out of the total of 184 that was being reported at that time) were Han, 46 Uyghur, and 1 Hui.
Uyghur advocates continue to question these figures, saying that the number of ethnic Uyghurs remains understated.[63] Nevertheless, third-party sources confirm that most of the casualties were Han Chinese.[23][87][88]
The vast majority of the victims were Han. Curiously, the translator of this book doesn’t mention that, and he also doesn’t mention the CIA funded Uyghur separatist group who escalated things. Weird, huh?
As a response to this, China began the de-radicalization process that so many in the West condemn. What else could they do? By the way, the Han Chinese person that made the false sexual assault claims that began the violence was arrested.
I’m not going to debunk this entire book, but there’s one more important part that I would like to outline. There’s actually another Guardian article from the Uyghur author of the book himself. Here’s an excerpt:
One day in mid-March 2017…Mass arrests had begun in Kashgar. The wave of arrests was so immense that existing detention facilities in the city – police station lockups, prisons, holding centres, labour camps, drug-detox facilities – had been quickly overwhelmed.
Hmm, what could have possibly happened to inspire mass ‘arrests’ around this time? From one month earlier, mid-February 2017:
Knife-wielding attackers kill five in China's Xinjiang: govt - Reuters
Three knife-wielding attackers have killed five people and injured another five in China’s far western region of Xinjiang…There has been an uptick in violence in Xinjiang in recent weeks after a period of relative calm. In December, five people were killed when attackers drove a vehicle into a government building and police shot dead what authorities described as three terror suspects last month.
This happened in Pishan county in the Hotan Prefecture, which is right next to the Kashgar Prefecture.
These attacks are from radicalized Uyghurs. These propagandists never mention the terrorism that inspires the de-radicalization that they call genocide. Why is that?
Now subscribe, or I’ll radicalize you: