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FTR #1178 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment. [5]
FTR #1179 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment. [6]
FTR #1180 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment. [7]
NB: This description contains material not included in the original broadcasts.
Introduction: The media in this and other countries have been dominated by a propaganda blitzkrieg alleging “genocide” being committed by China in its oil and mineral-rich Xinjiang province against the Turkophone, Muslim minority in that region.
This allegation is a well-documented political mythology, which has come to dominate the political and journalistic narrative in the U.S. because of media adherence to the pronouncements of a number of overlapping fascist organizations.
In addition to the dominance of coverage of Xinjiang by the German national Adrian Zenz, a fellow traveler of the OUN/B derivative Captive Nations Committee, the fascist mind control cult Falun Gong and elements that have evolved from the International Institute of Islamic Thought are deeply involved with U.S. intelligence cut-outs that have midwived the Uyghur “genocide myth.”
Pan-Turkist fascist elements in Xinjiang overlap Al-Qaeda affiliates.
An alleged U.N. report on the genocide stems from the allegations of the sole American member of a U.N. panel, who provided no corroborating evidence [8].
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- ” . . . . A spokesperson from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed in a statement to The Grayzone that the allegation of Chinese ‘camps’ was not made by the United Nations, but rather by a member of an independent committee that does not speak for the UN as a whole. That member happened to be the only American on the committee, and one with no background of scholarship or research on China. . . .”
- ” . . . . This is to say, one American member of an independent UN body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims, but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one US individual to the UN as a whole. . . . ”
- ” . . . . In addition to this irresponsible misreporting, Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called “activist group” the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). . . .”
- ” . . . . However, tax documents uncovered by The Grayzone show that a significant portion of this group’s budget comes from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [9], a CIA-linked soft-power group that was founded by the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s to push regime change against independent governments and support “free markets” [10] around the world. . . .”
A Gray Zone piece [11] from a couple of months ago about a major mainstream promotion of the genocide claims via a New York Times op-ed written by an American woman of Uyghur ancestry that more or less regurgitated the genocide claims of Adrian Zenz [12]. The op-ed neglected mention that the author, Amelia Pang, was an employee of The Epoch Times from 2011–2016.
That paper is an organ of the Falun Gong [13] cult.
The Gray Zone article does more than detail a major example of mainstream media catapulting this misinformation campaign.
The article underscores how the ‘concentration camp’ claims from the West suddenly erupted in 2017, after the Trump administration basically made a new Cold War with China a major foreign policy objective in keeping with Steve Bannon’s vision of a new Great Powers war [13].
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- ” . . . . The author of the New York Times op-ed, Amelia Pang, happens to be a former employee of the Epoch Times, a far-right propaganda arm of a fanatical anti-China cult called Falun Gong [14]. . . .”
- ” . . . . Pang’s op-ed ran just days before the Trump administration formally accused Beijing of genocide [15]. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a far-right rapture-ready [16] evangelical, alleged that China ‘has committed genocide [17] against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.’ The Pompeo State Department provided no evidence to bolster its extreme accusations, yet alleged that China’s campaign of ‘genocide’ began in March 2017. . . .”
- ” . . . . The report both Pang and NPR were citing was not a United Nations document, but rather an investigation by a far-right German academic named Adrian Zenz. . . .”
- ” . . . . To make her case that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide,” Pang misleadingly implied that the United Nations has accused China of the crime – a disinformation tactic that has become common in anti-China reporting in the Western media [8]. But the UN has not done so. . . . ”
- ” . . . . As Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal reported for The Grayzone, Zenz’s estimate that ‘over 1 million’ Muslim minorities are held in ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang was based on a lone report by Istiqlal TV, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists based in Turkey. The outlet provides a friendly platform for extremist supporters of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement [18] (ETIM), a separatist group that seeks to build an Islamic state in Xinjiang, which it calls East Turkestan. ...”
- ” . . . . ETIM, also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is an al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. ETIM, also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is an al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. It is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, European Union, and many countries. Pompeo’s State Department removed ETIM from the US government’s official terrorist list in October 2020, as part of Washington’s intensifying cold war on China. . . .”
- ” . . . . The photo Pang referenced has been heavily circulated by Western media outlets and NGOs, and is upheld as practically the only image proving the existence of ‘concentration camps’ run by Beijing. This characterization is however deeply misleading. The photo was not taken by some courageous prisoner or crusading investigative journalist; it was published by the Chinese government itself, in a press release from 2014 [19] — three years before the State Department claimed the ‘genocide’ began in Xinjiang. In fact, the original image was published on the Xinjiang Bureau of Justice’s own WeChat account, with a watermark identifying it as an official photo taken by Chinese authorities. Western anti-China propagandists have subsequently cropped off the watermark and presented the photo as proof of China caught in the act. . . .”
- ” . . . . At the top of her personal website, Amelia Pang [20] advertises her book, ‘Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods,’ which is due in February 2021. The book’s homepage highlights a blurb written by Orville Schell . . . . Schell also has an eyebrow-raising record of work at the Ford Foundation, a CIA cut-out, in Indonesia from 1964 to 1966 [21], at precisely the time when the country’s US-backed military dictatorship was enacting an actual genocide. With help from the CIA, Indonesia’s dictator Suharto murdered between 1 and 3 million communists, left-wing sympathizers, labor organizers, and ethnic Chinese people, in what the CIA privately admitted was ‘one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,’ alongside the Nazi Holocaust. . . .”
Anti-Asian racism is very much at the forefront of public consciousness at the moment. It would be disingenuous for anyone to claim that the phenomenon was unrelated to the full-court press against China.
Exemplifying that racism is a member of the Pan-Turkist fascist MHP party, which is front and center in the anti-Uighur destabilization effort and the propagation of the “genocide” myth. (We have discussed Pan-Turkist fascism in–among other programs–AFA #14 [22] and FTR #59 [23].)
“. . . . . In 2015, members of the MHP-affiliated Grey Wolves formerly led by Alparslan Türkes attacked South Korean tourists [24] in Turkey, mistaking them for Chinese citizens, in protest of the situation in Xinjiang. Turkish MHP party leader Devlet Bahçeli defended the attacks. ‘How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese?’ the rightist politician questioned. ‘They both have slanted eyes. Does it really matter?’ . . . .”
Yet another incisive, courageous article about the myth of Uighur genocide was published by The Grayzone [25]in March.
The vehicle for launching this propaganda is The Newlines Institute, a subsidiary element of Fairfax University of America.
The founder of Newlines Institute is Ahmed Alwani, Vice-President of the International Islamic Institute, one of the organizations raided by Treasury Department and FBI agents on 3/20/2002 for allegedly funding Al-Qaeda and other Muslim-Brotherhood linked terrorist groups. [26]
Key Elements of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- ” . . . . The report [27], 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 [28], along with similar declarations by the Dutch and Canadian Parliaments [29]. It was published shortly after the release of a remarkably similar report on February 8 that was commissioned by the US government-backed World Uyghur Congress [30], and which alleged that there is a ‘credible case’ against the Chinese government for genocide. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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’ report relies primarily on the dubious studies of Adrian Zenz, the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia [31], and claims made by the US-funded separatist network, the World Uyghur Congress [32]. 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’ [33], 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . The leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the “shadow CIA” private spying firm, Stratfor [34], and a collection of interventionist ideologues. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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 US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition for ACICS [35]. 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 then-President Trump’s Secretary of Education, the infamous privatization activist and oligarch Betsy Devos. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . The Wallenberg Centre has become a haven for anti-China hawks, including Senior Fellows David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State, and David Matas. . . . Kilgour and Matas have extensive ties to the far-right, anti-China religious cult Falun Gong [14]. Both men are regularly contributors to the group’s propaganda arm, The Epoch Times, a media network that The New York Times has described [36] as an ‘anti-China, pro-Trump media empire’ and ‘leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation’. . . . ”
The program concludes with discussion of the Wallenberg family, one of Sweden’s most prominent industrial clans and inextricably linked with both the international cartel system, the Third Reich and–as we see below–the remarkable and deadly Bormann flight capital organization.
The Wallenbergs were centrally involved in numerous cloaking operations for Nazi big business, and also had strong links to the Allied industrial firms undertaking war production.
(The substance and complexities of the cartel system and international fascism were discussed in–among other programs–FTR#511. [37] The overall political and historical context in which the cartels operate–globalization–is analyzed in the introduction to the Books for Download [37] section.)
Exemplifying the family’s position in the Wall Street/cartel pantheon is George Murnane of the Wallenberg holding company A.B. Investor: ” . . . . In November 1940, a voting trust agreement was set up in the United States under which George Murnane was designated by the Wallenbergs’ Enskilda Bank as the sole voting trustee with complete power to vote the American Bosch stock at stockholders’ meetings in the United States. The voting trust arrangement provided that if George Murnane should die, his successor should be named by John Foster Dulles, senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm which represents the Wallenbergs and the Enskilda Bank in the United States. . . .”
One of the most significant of the Wallenbergs’ operations concerned its global monopoly on ball bearings and its shipment of Swedish bearings to offset Nazi Germany’s losses in the costly Schweinfurt raids.
” . . . . It happened that two thirds of Germany’s entire bearing industry was concentrated in a single group of four factories at Schweinfurt. Three of them, accounting for 36 per cent of Germany’s productive capacity, were owned by VKF; and one, accounting for 30 per cent of German capacity, was owned by the only remaining large independent, Fischer A.G.
When American air forces bombed Schweinfurt during the war, in an effort to knock out this strategic point in German industrial production, Schweinfurt was discovered to be one of the most heavily defended spots in Germany. German defenses inflicted a loss of fifty American heavy bombers in one raid alone. When these raids temporarily knocked out Schweinfurt, the effect was largely nullified by shipments of bearings from SKF in Sweden. . . .”
It is this heritage that underlies the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
1. The sole American on a UN panel, Gay McDougall, was the source of the ‘2 million in re-education camp claims’, with zero evidence provided for this claim during their hearing.
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- ” . . . . A spokesperson from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed in a statement to The Grayzone that the allegation of Chinese ‘camps’ was not made by the United Nations, but rather by a member of an independent committee that does not speak for the UN as a whole. That member happened to be the only American on the committee, and one with no background of scholarship or research on China. . . .”
- ” . . . . This is to say, one American member of an independent UN body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims, but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one US individual to the UN as a whole. . . . ”
- ” . . . . In addition to this irresponsible misreporting, Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called “activist group” the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). . . .”
- ” . . . . However, tax documents uncovered by The Grayzone show that a significant portion of this group’s budget comes from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [9], a CIA-linked soft-power group that was founded by the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s to push regime change against independent governments and support “free markets” [10] around the world. . . .”
Summing up: the UN invites a panel of independent ‘experts’ to testify about China’s policies towards minorities, the American on the panel makes unsourced claims of massive re-education camps, and it gets trumpeted across the mainstream Western press as a UN declaration of Chinese concentration camps. It’s a peek at how the sausage is made:
Media outlets falsely claimed the UN reported China is holding a million Uighurs in camps. The claim is based on unsourced allegations by an American commission member, US-funded outfits, and a shadowy government-funded opposition group.
Numerous major media outlets, from Reuters to The Intercept, have claimed that the United Nations has reports that the Chinese government is holding as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in “internment camps.” But a close examination of these news stories, and of the evidence behind them — or the lack thereof — demonstrates that the extraordinary claim is simply not true.
A spokesperson from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed in a statement to The Grayzone that the allegation of Chinese “camps” was not made by the United Nations, but rather by a member of an independent committee that does not speak for the UN as a whole. That member happened to be the only American on the committee, and one with no background of scholarship or research on China.
Moreover, this accusation is based on the thinly sourced reports of a Chinese opposition group that is funded by the American government’s regime-change arm and is closely tied to exiled pro-US activists. There have been numerous reports of discrimination against Uighur Muslims in China. However, information about camps containing 1 million prisoners has originated almost exclusively from media outlets and organizations funded and weaponized by the US government to turn up the heat on Beijing.
A blatant falsehood introduced by Reuters and echoed across mainstream media
On August 10, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination conducted its regular review of China’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The review, which is conducted periodically for all 179 parties to the Convention, has generated a frenzied response by the Western corporate press — one which is uniformly misleading.
On the day of the review, Reuters [38] published a report with an explosive headline: “U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps.”
The claim was feverishly reproduced by outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to denounce China and call for international action. Even The Intercept [39]’s Mehdi Hasan belted out the breathless headline, “One Million Muslim Uighurs Have Been Detained by China, the U.N. Says. Where’s the Global Outrage?”
The impression readers were given was that the UN had conducted an investigation and had formally and collectively made such charges against China. In fact, the UN had done no such thing.
The headline of Reuters’ report attributed its explosive claim to the UN; yet the body of the article ascribed it simply to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. And this committee’s official website makes it clear that it is “a body of independent [40] experts,” not UN officials.
What’s more, a look at the OHCHR’s official news release [41] on the committee’s presentation of the report showed that the only mention of alleged re-education “camps” in China was made by its sole American member, Gay McDougall. This claim was then echoed by a Mauritanian member, Yemhelhe Mint Mohamed.
During the committee’s regular review of China, McDougall commented that she was “deeply concerned” about “credible reports” alleging mass detentions of millions of Uighurs Muslim minorities in “internment camps.” The Associated Press [42] reported that McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing.” (Note that the headline of the AP news wire is much weaker than that of Reuters: “UN panel concerned at reported Chinese detention of Uighurs.”)
Video of the session confirms that McDougall provided no sourcing to back up her remarkable claim.
This is to say, one American member of an independent UN body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims, but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one US individual to the UN as a whole.
In an email to The Grayzone, OHCHR spokesperson Julia Gronnevet confirmed that the CERD was not representative of the UN as a whole. “You are correct that the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is an independent body,” Gronnevet wrote. “Quoted comments were made during public sessions of the Committee when members were reviewing State parties.”
Thus the OHCHR implicitly acknowledged that the comments by McDougall, the lone American member of an independent committee, were not representative of any finding by the UN as a whole. The report by Reuters is simply false.
‘Credible reports’ from US government-funded opposition group with zero transparency
In addition to this irresponsible misreporting, Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called “activist group” the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
Conveniently left out of the story is that this organization is headquartered in Washington, DC and funded by the US government’s regime-change arm.
CHRD advocates full-time against the Chinese government, and has spent years campaigning on behalf of extreme right-wing opposition figures.
CHRD is not at all transparent about its funding or personnel. Its annual [43] reports [44] contain notes stating, “This report has been produced with the financial support of generous donors.” But the donors are never named.
Publicly available 990 IRS filing forms reviewed by The Grayzone show that the organization is substantially funded by government grants. In fact, in 2015 virtually all of the organization’s revenue came from government grants.
CHRD’s 2015 form 990 [45] discloses that $819,553 of its $820,023 revenue that year (99.94 percent) came from government grants. A measly $395 came from investments, with another $75 from other sources.
According to its 2016 form 990 [46], CHRD received $859,091 in government grants in that year.
The governments that provided these grants have not been disclosed. The Grayzone did not receive a response to several emailed interview requests sent to the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
However, tax documents uncovered by The Grayzone show that a significant portion of this group’s budget comes from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [9], a CIA-linked soft-power group that was founded by the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s to push regime change against independent governments and support “free markets” [10] around the world.
In 2012 [47], the NED gave the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders $490,000. In 2012 [47], it got a $520,000 grant from the NED.
In 2014 [48], the NED gave the group another $514,068.
This massive stream of funding continued: $496,000 from the NED in 2015 [49], and another $412,300 in 2016 [50].
This NED grant in 2015 constitutes more than 60 percent of the $819,553 in government grants CHRD received that year. The governments that provided the additional $323,553 in funding have not been disclosed.
A search of the NED’s grants database [51] further confirms that this CIA-linked US government soft-power organization allocated approximately half a million dollars in 2014 and 2015 to “support the work of Chinese human rights defenders.”
CHRD has used its generous funding to provide grants [52] to opposition activists inside China, bankrolling dozens upon dozens of projects in the country [53].
On its tax forms, CHRD lists its address [54] as the Washington, DC office of Human Rights Watch [55]. HRW has long been criticized [56] for its revolving door with the US government [57] and its excessively disproportionate focus [58] on designated enemies of Washington like China, Venezuela [59], Syria, and Russia.
Human Rights Watch did not respond to an email from The Grayzone inquiring about its relationship with CHRD.
A who’s who of right-wing opposition activists
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders’ forms 990 also reveal that the board of the organization is a Who’s Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.
The chair of the group is the US-based activist Su Xiaokang [60], who proclaimed that the Chinese public supposedly “wants the U.S. to watch over activists, and is disappointed when Washington fails.” Fellow US-based dissident Teng Biao [61] is a CHRD director who has sarcastically boasted of how the Chinese communist party dubbed him a “reactionary [62].”
CHRD’s secretary is the American academic Perry Link, who has built [63] on winding up on the Chinese government’s academic “blacklist [64].” Link testified for the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs [65] in 2014, claiming that the Chinese government is threatening academic freedom in the US.
In his congressional testimony, CHRD secretary Link insisted the US government should crack down on the Chinese government’s Confucius Institute organization and instead fund its own pro-US Chinese-language programs. Link characterized Chinese-language programs as a potential American weapon against the Chinese communist party, arguing they could “very arguably do more to blunt the CPC’s advance than the [B‑2 Spirit Bomber] airplane could.”
These are some of the pro-US, anti-Chinese government figures who lead the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Otherwise, there is very little publicly available information about CHRD. It appears to largely be the brainchild of its international director, Renee Xia, an opposition activist who has publicly called for the US government to impose sanctions [66] on Chinese officials under the Magnitsky Act.
Support for a ‘non violence advocate’ who loves America’s wars
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders’ founder, Xia, was a strong supporter [67] of the imprisoned hard-right neoconservative Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and she campaigned years for his release.
An archived version of the group’s website shows that as far back as 2010 [68], CHRD was vociferously advocating on behalf of Liu, while likening the Chinese government to Nazi Germany.
While Liu Xiaobo became a cause celebre of the Western liberal intelligensia, he was a staunch supporter of colonialism [69], a fan of the most blood-soaked US military campaigns, and a hardcore libertarian.
As writers Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong reported in The Guardian in 2010, Liu led numerous US government-funded right-wing organizations that advocated mass privatization and the Westernization of China. He also expressed openly racist views against the Chinese. “To choose Westernisation is to choose to be human,” Liu insisted, lamenting that traditional Chinese culture had made its population “wimpy, spineless, and fu cked up.”
While CHRD described Liu as an “advocate of non-violence,” he practically worshiped President George W. Bush and strongly supported the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the war in Afghanistan. “Non-violence advocate” Liu was even a fan of America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam, which killed millions of civilians [70].
CHRD’s most recent China report [71] — the one cited by Reuters and other outlets to give credence to the allegations of Uyghur re-education camps — further highlights the organization’s links to Washington and compromised impartiality.
Most sources on the Uighur ‘camps’ story are US government-linked
A look at the sourcing of the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders’ research raises many doubts about its legitimacy. For one, the most-cited source in the CHRD report, accounting for more than one-fifth of the 101 references, is Radio Free Asia, a news agency created by the CIA during the Cold War pump out anti-China propaganda, and still today funded by the US government.
Even The New York Times has referred to Radio Free Asia as a “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA [31].” Along with Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio y Televisión Martí, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia (RFA) is operated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a federal agency of the US government under the supervision of the State Department. Describing its work [72] as “vital to U.S. national interests,” BBG’s primary broadcasting standard [73] is to be “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”
The near-total reliance on Washington-linked sources is characteristic of Western reporting on Uighurs Muslims in China, and on the country in general, which regularly features sensational headlines and allegations.
In addition to CHRD and RFA, it is common for news reports to cite the World Uighur Congress [74], an organization funded by the NED [75]. At a recent NED event, The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal interviewed World Uighur Congress chairman Omer Kanat [9], who took credit for furnishing many of the claims of internment camps to Western media.
Another putative human rights organization whose dubious reports are frequently echoed by Radio Free Asia [76], the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation, is likewise bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy.
This group received a staggering $473,608 from the NED in 2009 [77], along with $240,000 in 2010 [78] and another $187,918 grant in 2011 [79], putting it in the top tier of grantees those years.
The US government’s regime-change arm similarly finances the Uyghur American Association. This group, another source for Radio Free Asia stories [80], raked in $280,000 grants from the NED in 2010 [81] and then again in 2011 [82], along with $265,000 in 2009 [83].
Yet another favorite congressional and mainstream media source for information about China is the Jamestown Foundation [84], a neoconservative think tank founded during the height of the Cold War by Reagan administration personnel with the support of then-CIA Director William J. Casey. Former Jamestown board members include Dick Cheney and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The latest incident of misreporting by Reuters is part of a trend of increasingly hostile, Cold War-like coverage of China by the Western press — one that coincides with Washington’s push for conflict with Beijing . . . .
2. A Gray Zone piece from a couple of months ago about a major mainstream promotion of the genocide claims via a New York Times op-ed written by an American woman of Uyghur ancestry that more or less regurgitated the genocide claims of Adrian Zenz [12]. The op-ed neglected mention that the author, Amelia Pang, was an employee of The Epoch Times from 2011–2016.
That paper is an organ of the Falun Gong [13] cult.
The Gray Zone article does more than detail a major example of mainstream media catapulting this misinformation campaign.
The article underscores how the ‘concentration camp’ claims from the West suddenly erupted in 2017, after the Trump administration basically made a new Cold War with China a major foreign policy objective in keeping with Steve Bannon’s vision of a new Great Powers war [13].
Claims echoed by Zenz but originating from a a lone Uyghur separatist media outlet in Turkey, Istiqlal TV, known for providing a platform to the al Qaeda-affiliated East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
Mike Pompeo’s State Department removed ETIM from the US government’s official terrorist list in October 2020. In other words, when we’re looking at this propaganda effort we’re watching a coordinated high-level international effort to legitimize al Qaeda’s propaganda. Because of shared interests:
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- ” . . . . The author of the New York Times op-ed, Amelia Pang, happens to be a former employee of the Epoch Times, a far-right propaganda arm of a fanatical anti-China cult called Falun Gong [14]. . . .”
- ” . . . . Pang’s op-ed ran just days before the Trump administration formally accused Beijing of genocide [15]. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a far-right rapture-ready [16] evangelical, alleged that China ‘has committed genocide [17] against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.’ The Pompeo State Department provided no evidence to bolster its extreme accusations, yet alleged that China’s campaign of ‘genocide’ began in March 2017. . . .”
- ” . . . . The report both Pang and NPR were citing was not a United Nations document, but rather an investigation by a far-right German academic named Adrian Zenz. . . .”
- ” . . . . To make her case that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide,” Pang misleadingly implied that the United Nations has accused China of the crime – a disinformation tactic that has become common in anti-China reporting in the Western media [8]. But the UN has not done so. . . . ”
- ” . . . . As Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal reported for The Grayzone, Zenz’s estimate that ‘over 1 million’ Muslim minorities are held in ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang was based on a lone report by Istiqlal TV, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists based in Turkey. The outlet provides a friendly platform for extremist supporters of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement [18] (ETIM), a separatist group that seeks to build an Islamic state in Xinjiang, which it calls East Turkestan. ...”
- ” . . . . ETIM, also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is an al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. ETIM, also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is an al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. It is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, European Union, and many countries. Pompeo’s State Department removed ETIM from the US government’s official terrorist list in October 2020, as part of Washington’s intensifying cold war on China. . . .”
- ” . . . . The photo Pang referenced has been heavily circulated by Western media outlets and NGOs, and is upheld as practically the only image proving the existence of ‘concentration camps’ run by Beijing. This characterization is however deeply misleading. The photo was not taken by some courageous prisoner or crusading investigative journalist; it was published by the Chinese government itself, in a press release from 2014 [19] — three years before the State Department claimed the ‘genocide’ began in Xinjiang. In fact, the original image was published on the Xinjiang Bureau of Justice’s own WeChat account, with a watermark identifying it as an official photo taken by Chinese authorities. Western anti-China propagandists have subsequently cropped off the watermark and presented the photo as proof of China caught in the act. . . .”
- ” . . . . At the top of her personal website, Amelia Pang [20] advertises her book, “Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods,” which is due in February 2021. The book’s homepage highlights a blurb written by Orville Schell . . . . Schell also has an eyebrow-raising record of work at the Ford Foundation, a CIA cut-out, in Indonesia from 1964 to 1966 [21], at precisely the time when the country’s US-backed military dictatorship was enacting an actual genocide. With help from the CIA, Indonesia’s dictator Suharto murdered between 1 and 3 million communists, left-wing sympathizers, labor organizers, and ethnic Chinese people, in what the CIA privately admitted was ‘one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,’ alongside the Nazi Holocaust. . . .”
The New York Times recycled flimsy claims by a right-wing apocalyptic extremist to accuse China of “genocide,” in an op-ed by an American with 1/8th Uighur heritage who worked for Epoch Times, a far-right, pro-Trump outlet backed by cult Falun Gong.
The New York Times published a factually challenged op-ed accusing China of committing “genocide” against its Uighur minority. The article sourced its spurious accusations to a right-wing operative who insists his research is part of a divine “mission” against Beijing that is “led by God.”
The author of the New York Times op-ed, Amelia Pang, happens to be a former employee of the Epoch Times, a far-right propaganda arm of a fanatical anti-China cult called Falun Gong [14]. The extremist group preaches that race-mixing, homosexuality, feminism, and science are Satanic plots, and reveres Donald Trump as a God-like figure [85] who was sent down from heaven to destroy the Communist Party of China.
In a statement to The Grayzone, Pang said, “The Epoch Times and the Falun Gong group do not represent my views in any way.”
However, a review of her five years of work at the Epoch Times shows Pang churned out hyperbolic anti-China reporting while publishing at least 17 articles promoting the Falun Gong cult or its cultural front group, Shen Yun.
The New York Times’ decision to run Pang’s commentary was ironic in light of the lengthy feature it published on the Falun Gong propaganda arm [36] in October 2020, which branded the Epoch Times a “leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation” that is “pushing dangerous conspiracy theories” with a “willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right,” and a “growing influence in Mr. Trump’s inner circle.”
In her Times op-ed, Pang deployed her 1/8th Uighur heritage to portray herself and her family as victims of a purported “genocide” carried out by the Chinese government. At the same time, she acknowledged that she has lived her entire life in the United States, and therefore has little familiarity with China and its society.
Pang’s op-ed ran just days before the Trump administration formally accused Beijing of genocide [15]. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a far-right rapture-ready [16] evangelical, alleged that China “has committed genocide [17] against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”
The Pompeo State Department provided no evidence to bolster its extreme accusations, yet alleged that China’s campaign of “genocide” began in March 2017.
The Grayzone has reported extensively on the Western disinformation campaign against China [86], chronicling how discrimination against the Uighurs and other minorities have been spun into accusations of genocide, including claims of “concentration camps” holding millions of detainees [8]. In nearly every case, incendiary corporate media and State Department claims related to the issue rely on questionable research by a single far-right operative with extremist views [87] and a network of anti-China NGOs funded by the US government and the arms industry.
The New York Times has been a central conveyor belt for the transmission of the US information war against China, providing it with a critical patina of journalistic credibility and marketing it to the liberal intelligensia that comprises the Times’ readership.
Former Epoch Times reporter relies on far-right operative in New York Times
The New York Times printed Pang’s op-ed, “It Took a Genocide for Me to Remember My Uighur Roots, [88]” on January 10. The faulty article was a case study in how little evidence corporate media editors require to green light a piece as long as it accuses official US enemies of the most titanic of war crimes.
The Times translated the op-ed from English into both simplified and traditional Chinese so it could be read around the world.
In the article, Pang acknowledged, “I have lived in the United States my entire life,” and “no one [in my family] had ever visited Xinjiang apart from my mother and one aunt, and neither of them had stayed in touch with the relatives they met.”
But she wrote, “my maternal grandmother was half Uighur” – or, her great-grandmother was Uighur, which made her 1/8th Uighur. And in the hyper-identitarian neoliberal culture that now dominates the New York Times newsroom, this was enough to confer unassailable authority upon the author.
Despite her distant connection to China, Pang characterized herself and her family as victims of the Chinese communist party. “China’s forced assimilation policies still reached me,” she wrote, attributing her total lack of knowledge of Uighur culture not to her family’s fairly typical story of assimilation as American immigrants, but rather to Beijing’s supposed cruelty.
“I’m sorry it took a genocide for me to remember I am Uighur,” Pang tweeted.
My essay in the @nytopinion [89] on my family’s lost Uighur roots. I’m sorry it took a genocide for me to remember I am Uighur.https://t.co/nUpmTsFKy6 [90]— Amelia Pang (@ameliapangg) January 11, 2021 [91]
It is notable that the Times was so willing to entertain the accusatory angst of a US pundit with 1/8th Uighur heritage, while it actively ignores and silences the many Uighurs born and raised in China’s Xinjiang province, who support the Communist Party of China and the government’s developmental policies. The de facto policy is similar to its disportionate reliance on quotes from liberal and Islamist exiles from Syria while refusing to quote members of the country’s loyalist majority living inside Syria.
Meanwhile, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have suspended [92] the accounts of prominent Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims [93] who provided an alternative perspective on the conflict. In Western media, only one viewpoint is allowed: that which serves the interest of Washington and its new Cold War.
Pang’s Times article was also significant in the political marker it established: It allowed the newspaper of record to accuse Beijing of genocide, echoing the US government, while maintaining a veneer of independence by doing so through an op-ed.
In her article, Pang moved well beyond criticizing Chinese discrimination against the minority Uighur community and the government’s heavy-handed approach to combating Islamist extremist separatist groups [94] in the region, who have carried out a wave of terrorist attacks targeting both government targets and civilians.
To make her case that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide,” Pang misleadingly implied that the United Nations has accused China of the crime – a disinformation tactic that has become common in anti-China reporting in the Western media [8]. But the UN has not done so.
“In recent years, identifying as Uighur has become a matter of life and death,” Pang wrote. “What started as a cultural genocide has progressed into a literal one, as defined by the United Nations.”
In this deceptively worded line, Pang linked to an article by US government-funded broadcaster NPR, titled “China Suppression Of Uighur Minorities Meets U.N. Definition Of Genocide [95], Report Says.” This article is also misleading.
The report both Pang and NPR were citing was not a United Nations document, but rather an investigation by a far-right German academic named Adrian Zenz.
The Grayzone has previously revealed Zenz [87] to be an extremist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality and claims to be “led by God” against China.
Claims that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims are based largely on two studies. @ajitxsingh [96] & @MaxBlumenthal [97] examine these dubious papers, their US government backers, shoddy methodologies – and the rapture-ready “researcher” Adrian Zenz.https://t.co/jvEy8WvrOO [98]— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) December 25, 2019 [99]
Zenz even told the Wall Street Journal that his highly questionable work on Xinjiang is “like a mission, or a ministry [100]” for him. That is to say, his research is explicitly motivated by his ideology, the precise opposite of social science.
The far-right German academic is the source for practically every Western media report alleging “genocide” and enormous concentration camps in Xinjiang. Zenz, who has not spent a significant period of time in China, and has no evident scholarly expertise on Chinese politics, history, or society, is not so much an academic as he is a right-wing operative.
Zenz has also found time to volunteer his belief that God’s apocalyptic Rapture will soon come, and Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity will, in his words, be “wiped out” and shoved in a “fiery furnace,” as journalist Dan Cohen reported [101].
Adrian Zenz, the primary source of western media reports on Uyghur “concentration camps”, is a German anti-Semite who believes Jews that refuse to convert to Christianity will be “wiped out” and put into a “fiery furnace”.https://t.co/4iMObYmEzC [102] pic.twitter.com/Unc7rvprCN [103]— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) August 10, 2020 [104]
Adrian Zenz works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a right-wing lobby group that was founded by the US government and is linked closely to the Republican Party. His research on Xinjiang is clearly politically motivated by his explicit desire to demonize the Chinese government and eventually overthrow the communist party.
…
As Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal reported for The Grayzone, Zenz’s estimate that “over 1 million” Muslim minorities are held in “concentration camps” in Xinjiang was based on a lone report by Istiqlal TV, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists based in Turkey. The outlet provides a friendly platform for extremist supporters of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement [18] (ETIM), a separatist group that seeks to build an Islamic state in Xinjiang, which it calls East Turkestan.
ETIM, also known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), is an al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. It is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, European Union, and many countries. Pompeo’s State Department removed ETIM from the US government’s official terrorist list in October 2020, as part of Washington’s intensifying cold war on China.
Despite the massive and well-documented flaws in Zenz’s research, Amelia Pang cited him by name in her Times op-ed, echoing his work to accuse China of overseeing a massive increase in “forced sterilizations” in Xinjiang.
In her article, Pang referred to Zenz simply as “an expert on China’s ethnic policies,” conveniently overlooking his extreme-right political views and his work for a US government-linked right-wing lobby group.
Despite his widespread portrayal as an “expert,” it is not clear if Zenz even speaks Mandarin Chinese or Uighur. The academic has not done any public events showing proficiency in either language. When journalists from The Grayzone asked Zenz about his qualifications, he blocked them on social media.
Misleadingly distorting China’s anti-extremism re-education centers
From the very first line, Amelia Pang’s New York Times op-ed was based on distortions. She wrote, “The first time I truly realized I was Uighur was just three years ago, when I saw the now-infamous viral photo of rows of Turkic men in dark blue uniforms, sitting in a concentration camp in Hotan, Xinjiang, a so-called Uighur autonomous region in China.”
The photo Pang referenced has been heavily circulated by Western media outlets and NGOs, and is upheld as practically the only image proving the existence of “concentration camps” run by Beijing. This characterization is however deeply misleading.
The photo was not taken by some courageous prisoner or crusading investigative journalist; it was published by the Chinese government itself, in a press release from 2014 [19] — three years before the State Department claimed the “genocide” began in Xinjiang.
In fact, the original image was published on the Xinjiang Bureau of Justice’s own WeChat account, with a watermark identifying it as an official photo taken by Chinese authorities. Western anti-China propagandists have subsequently cropped off the watermark and presented the photo as proof of China caught in the act.
The photo shows a de-radicalization program at a Chinese detention center in Luopu County, Xinjiang on April 7, 2014.
The Chinese government press release said the event featured talks from local Muslim leaders and presentations focused on “social stability” and “long-term peace” which “clearly clarified the traditional teachings and rules of Islam and righteousness; clarified the serious harm of religious extremism and violent terrorist activities; clarified the importance of the unity and struggle of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang for common prosperity and development; clarified the importance of Xinjiang’s development.”
Other photos taken at the same 2014 anti-extremist event in Xinjiang have never been shared in Western media reports, and for obvious reasons: they depict innocuous scenes that stand at odds with the official US government portrayal.
While the Chinese government has challenged hyperbolic accusations of running “concentration camps,” it has openly admitted to operating de-radicalization centers for Islamist extremists – members of the same separatist organizations that have carried out scores of mass casualty attacks in the Xinjiang region, killing state officials and civilians alike.
It is certainly fair to characterize the tactics used in the Chinese government’s crackdown on extremism and separatism in Xinjiang as heavy-handed, and even repressive, but the reality is a far cry from a campaign of “genocide.”
The term “concentration camp” in Western anti-China propaganda is clearly meant to invoke the mass extermination that took place in Nazi death camps. Washington’s goal is to depict Beijing as a Nazi-like government, in order to justify aggressive US actions against the country and an eventual push for regime change.
The highly suspect research from anti-China activists like Adrian Zenz have absurdly exaggerated the number of people who have passed through these re-education centers. The bottom-feeding pundits desperate to validate Zenz’s shoddy research have resorted to cartoonishly preposterous propaganda [105] that portrays the situation as worse than the Nazi Holocaust.
This cartoonish & insulting propaganda illustrates why @TheGrayzoneNews [106] has challenged dominant US gov’t/media claims on Xinjiang. CJ’s “source” works w/ an NED-funded separatist group. (https://t.co/5KR3ELwaxb [107]). Just as dubious as far-right Adrian Zenz. (https://t.co/1TSEZbXAuA [108]) https://t.co/bScwv9zAmx [109]— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) August 24, 2020 [110]
Before the US initiated its new Cold War with China, Western corporate media outlets openly acknowledged that China faced a major national security threat in Xinjiang in the form of a Wahhabist separatist movement determined to destabilize the entire region and ultimately break away.
In a 2017 report titled “Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China [94],” the Associated Press reported, “Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles.”
The AP continued: “Uighur militants have killed hundreds, if not thousands, in attacks inside China in a decades-long insurgency that initially targeted police and other symbols of Chinese authority but in recent years also included civilians.”
The outlet quoted a Uighur militant who said his group traveled to Syria “to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.” Another extremist said they were basing their movement on Zionism, and hoped to create an Islamist version of Israel in modern-day Xinjiang.
“The end of Syria’s war may be the beginning of China’s worst fears,” the AP wrote.
While Washington has preferred killing Islamist extremists like these with drones and military interventions, China has resorted to re-education centers.
For Beijing, the Xinjiang region is extremely important. It is a key geo-strategic location that lies at the heart of the New Silk Road [111] that will provide an economic bridge between China and Central Asia.
Washington has made it clear that it wants to sabotage Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative [112], an ambitious plan to link Global South nations and recenter Asia in the global economy.
And the United States knows it can throw a massive wrench in China’s plans by encouraging separatist movements in Xinjiang.
This is precisely why Washington’s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout established by the Ronald Reagan administration at the end of the first Cold War, has poured millions of dollars into Uighur separatist groups.
The NED publicly boasted of its support for the Uighur separatist movement on Twitter in December 2020.
To further #humanrights [113] & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy [114] #HumanRightsDay [115] https://t.co/C0LJEyWxq1 [116] pic.twitter.com/OqZdehdxXN [117]— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) December 10, 2020 [118]
The accusations of genocide and concentration camps in China also fail to take into account a global perspective. The United States has less than 5 percent of the planet’s population, but nearly 25 percent of its prisoners [119].
…
Careerism in the new Cold War
Amelia Pang is the author of “Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods,” a book advancing the forced labor allegations made against China by the US State Department.
Though she presents herself as a liberal, Pang supported the Trump administration’s economic attacks on the Chinese government, clamoring [120] for the most aggressive measures available.
In January, the Trump administration announced strict trade policies banning the import of cotton and tomatoes from China’s Xinjiang province, the autonomous region where most Uighurs live.
The right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which employs Adrian Zenz and has extensive links to the US government, claimed credit [121] for helping to advancing the new policy.
Pang took to Twitter to praise the Trump administration’s economic restrictions.
YES. https://t.co/WCTYEoqcf2 [122]— Amelia Pang (@ameliapangg) January 14, 2021 [123]
When Pang published her op-ed with the New York Times, the newspaper of record curiously omitted her five years of work for the Epoch Times from her bio.
Pang’s publicly available LinkedIn profile shows that she worked for the propaganda arm of the Falun Gong cult between 2011 and 2016.
Ironically, the New York Times’ reporting on the Epoch Times [36] acknowledged that many of Falun Gong’s “strident accounts of persecution in China can sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration.”
The New York Times referred to the Epoch Times as a “global-scale misinformation machine that has repeatedly pushed fringe narratives into the mainstream,” noting that the Falun Gong propaganda outlet has even promoted the outlandish QAnon conspiracy theory.
Pang frequently reported on China-related issues for the Epoch Times. Some of her articles included blatant PR [124] for [125] Falun Gong [126], with titles like “Listen: Musicians From Sweden to Mexico Sing for Falun Gong [127].”
Pang’s anti-China Epoch Times reports go all the way back to 2011, when she amplified Falun Gong protests [128] and described China’s National Day, the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, as a “National Tragedy Day to rebuff the Communist Party and its history of violence and atrocity.”
Pang [129] also [130] wrote [131] at [132] least [133] 12 [134] PR pieces openly promoting Shen Yun, a dance form that is used as a cultural front for the Falun Gong cult. In one, she quoted an Obama White House staff member who called it the “best show around the world [135].”
Pang also churned out a puff piece on anti-China separatist leader Rebiya Kadeer [136], the multimillionaire Uighur oligarch who, from inside the United States, previously ran the right-wing group the World Uyghur Congress [32], which is funded by the US government’s NED regime-change arm.
In the fawning profile, Pang herozied Kadeer as the “Dalai Lama of Xinjiang.” Noting that Kadeer was “China’s Richest Woman” and “the seventh richest person in China at the time,” Pang touted the Uyghur separatist leader as “one of the Chinese Communist Party’s top public enemies.”
Not only was Pang aware of the US government funding for Kadeer’s separatist activities, she celebrated it in the article. “Remarkably, Kadeer has managed to get funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and private donors for the two organizations she heads, the Uyghur American Association and the World Uyghur Congress,” Pang wrote.
Pang also noted how, in a private meeting with George W. Bush in 2007, the US president praised Kadeer as “far more valuable than the weapons of [China’s] army or oil under the ground.”
In this Epoch Times puff piece, Pang went so far as to accuse China of “harvesting the organs of live Uyghur prisoners.”
As her source for the accusation, Pang cited a book by Ethan Gutmann, an eccentric American anti-China activist who has testified for the CIA, US Congress, and Knesset [137]. His research has been funded in part by the NED.
Gutmann also worked for neoconservative think tanks like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC [138]) and Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), key institutional forces behind the Iraq War and the push for a war on Iran. Gutmann’s highly ideological research, which is often based on little more than rumors, was called into question even by the former mayor of Taipei [139], Taiwan, Beijing’s principal political rival.
…
The Grayzone contacted Amelia Pang with a request for comment, inquiring if she was aware of the Epoch Times’ close relationship with Falun Gong and if she has had any affiliation with the cult. She replied with just one line: “The Epoch Times and the Falun Gong group do not represent my views in any way.”
Interesting piece by @malipaquin [140] @guardian [141]. A Falun Gong practitioner seeks the Miss World crown – in China http://t.co/aesSV5NIwf [142]— Amelia Pang (@ameliapangg) August 28, 2015 [143]
Anti-China book promoted by influential US regime-change activist
At the top of her personal website, Amelia Pang [20] advertises her book, “Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods,” which is due in February 2021.
The book’s homepage highlights a blurb written by Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, an influential NGO funded by the Rockefeller Foundation [144] and other foundations with historic links to the US intelligence apparatus. [145]
Schell also has an eyebrow-raising record of work at the Ford Foundation, a CIA cut-out, in Indonesia from 1964 to 1966 [21], at precisely the time when the country’s US-backed military dictatorship was enacting an actual genocide. With help from the CIA, Indonesia’s dictator Suharto murdered between 1 and 3 million communists, left-wing sympathizers, labor organizers, and ethnic Chinese people, in what the CIA privately admitted was “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,” alongside the Nazi Holocaust.
Schell undertook his Ford Foundation fellowship in Jakarta when he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley – the same institution where an infamous group of Indonesian economists known as the “Berkeley Mafia [146]” were trained with Ford Foundation funding in the capitalist shock therapy they imposed on Indonesia’s formerly socialist-oriented economy.
The endorsement of Pang’s book by a figure like Schell highlights the usefulness of her writing to Western foreign policy elites. Her work was so useful, in fact, that her many years of employment by a far-right publicity arm for an anti-China cult that even the New York Times has lambasted was apparently necessary to conceal.
———-
5. Anti-Asian racism is very much at the forefront of public consciousness at the moment. It would be disingenuous for anyone to claim that the phenomenon was unrelated to the full-court press against China.
Exemplifying that racism is a member of the Pan-Turkist fascist MHP party, which is front and center in the anti-Uighur destabilization effort and the propagation of the “genocide” myth. (We have discussed Pan-Turkist fascism in–among other programs–AFA #14 [22] and FTR #59 [23].)
“. . . . . In 2015, members of the MHP-affiliated Grey Wolves formerly led by Alparslan Türkes attacked South Korean tourists [24] in Turkey, mistaking them for Chinese citizens, in protest of the situation in Xinjiang. Turkish MHP party leader Devlet Bahçeli defended the attacks. ‘How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese?’ the rightist politician questioned. ‘They both have slanted eyes. Does it really matter?’ . . . .”
. . . . . In 2015, members of the MHP-affiliated Grey Wolves formerly led by Alparslan Türkes attacked South Korean tourists [24] in Turkey, mistaking them for Chinese citizens, in protest of the situation in Xinjiang.
Turkish MHP party leader Devlet Bahçeli defended the attacks. “How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese?” the rightist politician questioned. “They both have slanted eyes. Does it really matter?” Bahceli’s racist remarks coincided with the display of a Grey Wolves banner at party’s Istanbul headquarters reading, “We crave Chinese blood.” . . . .
4. Yet another incisive, courageous article about the myth of Uighur genocide was published by The Grayzone in March.
The vehicle for launching this propaganda is The Newlines Institute, a subsidiary element of Fairfax University of America.
The founder of Newlines Institute is Ahmed Alwani, Vice-President of the International Islamic Institute, one of the organizations raided by Treasury Department and FBI agents on 3/20/2002 for allegedly funding Al-Qaeda and other Muslim-Brotherhood linked terrorist groups. [26]
Key Elements of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- ” . . . . The report [27], 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 [28], along with similar declarations by the Dutch and Canadian Parliaments [29]. It was published shortly after the release of a remarkably similar report on February 8 that was commissioned by the US government-backed World Uyghur Congress [30], and which alleged that there is a ‘credible case’ against the Chinese government for genocide. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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’ report relies primarily on the dubious studies of Adrian Zenz, the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia [31], and claims made by the US-funded separatist network, the World Uyghur Congress [32]. 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’ [33], 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . The leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the “shadow CIA” private spying firm, Stratfor [34], and a collection of interventionist ideologues. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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 US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition for ACICS [35]. 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 then-President Trump’s Secretary of Education, the infamous privatization activist and oligarch Betsy Devos. . . .”
- ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- ” . . . . The Wallenberg Centre has become a haven for anti-China hawks, including Senior Fellows David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State, and David Matas. . . . Kilgour and Matas have extensive ties to the far-right, anti-China religious cult Falun Gong [14]. Both men are regularly contributors to the group’s propaganda arm, The Epoch Times, a media network that The New York Times has described [36] as an ‘anti-China, pro-Trump media empire’ and ‘leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation’. . . . ”
US media hailed a Newlines Institute report accusing China of Uyghur genocide as a “landmark” independent analysis. A look beneath the surface reveals it as a regime change propaganda tool by interventionist operatives at a sham university.
Throughout March 2021, 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 [27], 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 [28], along with similar declarations by the Dutch and Canadian Parliaments [29]. It was published shortly after the release of a remarkably similar report on February 8 that was commissioned by the US government-backed World Uyghur Congress [30], and which alleged that there is a “credible case” against the Chinese government for genocide.
CNN [147], The Guardian [148], AFP [149], and the CBC [150] 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 US 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 [151] 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 US 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 US State Department officials, and ardent supporters of US military interventionism. The report relies most substantially on the “expertise” of Adrian Zenz, the far-right evangelical ideologue [87], whose “scholarship” on China has been demonstrated to be deeply flawed [152], 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 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 US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of FXUA’s accreditor, placing its license in jeopardy.
“New” report regurgitates old, 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 deeply flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by US 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 Adrian Zenz, the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia [31], and claims made by the US-funded separatist network, the World Uyghur Congress [32]. 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” [33], 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 [87], deplores homosexuality and gender equality, and has taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions. A careful review of Zenz’s research [152] 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 DC-based CIA cut-out called the Jamestown Foundation and “The Journal of Political Risk,” a publication headed by [153] former NATO and US national security state operatives.
Trump & Biden admins base their accusation of genocide against China on the bunk research of Christian extremist @adrianzenz [154]Here’s Zenz on the show of anti-gay, Islamophobic @FRCdc [155] Pres. Tony Perkins: “I was actually being prepared by God for this work.” https://t.co/00ZWvHBTE7 [156] pic.twitter.com/dT8nG5oFlC [157]— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 12, 2021 [158]
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 [159].
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 [160] 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 US 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; Adrian Zenz also sits on the advisory board.
David Scheffer, Beth von Schaack, and Gregory H. Stanton — Scheffer and Schaack are both former US State Department Ambassadors-at-Large, while Stanton is a former US 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 deeply partisan, self-described “campaigners” that align closely with US and Western foreign policy goals, advocating for sanctions and intervention against China and other non-aligned nations across the Global South.
Newlines Institute: A collection of regime-change ideologues and “Shadow CIA” operatives
The supposedly independent report accusing China of genocide was published by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy based in Washington, DC and known formerly as the Center for Global Policy. Founded in 2019, the think tank’s stated aim [161] is “to enhance US foreign policy” with a “specialization in Muslim states and societies.”
With extensive ties to the US regime-change establishment, the Newlines Institute is a reliable repository of anti-China material. For example, it has featured the ramblings of Robert Spalding [162], the former Senior Director for Strategy to President Trump and one of the architects of the Trump administration’s 2018 national security doctrine, which formally reoriented US 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 US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the “shadow CIA” private spying firm, Stratfor [34], and a collection of interventionist ideologues. Its contributors represent a who’s who of Syria regime changers who cheerleaded for US 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 US imperialism, including wars on Iraq [163], Libya [164], Yemen [165] and especially Syria. Along with Newlines contributor Michael Weiss, Hassan called for the US military to balkanize Syria [166], 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, US 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 US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute
Faysal Itani, Deputy Director — Former resident Senior Fellow at the US State Department-funded Atlantic Council, which functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO [167] in Washington, DC.
Michael Weiss, Senior Editor – A veteran Israel lobbyist, neoconservative activist and anti-Muslim agitator [168]-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 [169] 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 [170]). A lecturer on digital journalism at Stirling University in the UK, Ahmad recently attacked [171] 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 [172] 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 [173] 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 [174] with members of the Saudi-backed jihadist militia, Jaish al-Islam, and boasted [175] 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 US 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 [176].” In other words, Heras advocated for the mass starvation of Syrian civilians by occupying their wheat fields, a US 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.” [34] It has contracted extensively [177] with the US government, and has trained the radical wing of Venezuela’s opposition [178] 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 [179]. In an internal email obtained by The Grayzone, dated November 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.
Newlines Institute overseen by disgraced 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 [180] 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 [181], 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].”
Indeed, signs point to FXUA/VIU serving as a “visa mill” rather than a legitimate educational institution. As Inside Higher Ed explains [182], 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 [182] of certifying such institutions.
In 2019, Inside Higher Ed reported [183] 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 the student [181] body was largely comprised of international students with an “abysmally poor command” of the English language. The students were charged [181] $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 US Department of Education recommended terminating recognition for ACICS [35]. 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 then-President Trump’s Secretary of Education, the infamous privatization activist and oligarch Betsy Devos.
The Wallenberg Centre: A haven for anti-China hawks and regime-change lobbyists
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 Western imperialism, including interventions in Libya [184] and Syria [185], Iran [186], and Venezuela [187], where Cotler served as legal counsel [188] for far-right, US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Leopoldo López [189]. Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, holds an advisory position at The Wallenberg Centre.
Cotler is also active in Haiti [190], serving as the Minister of Justice in the Canadian administration that worked with the US and France to help overthrow former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. In 2014, Cotler invited Maryam Rajavi [191], leader of the exiled Iranian MEK cult, to speak on Canada’s parliament hill. Four years later, he nominated US and UK-funded Syrian White Helmets for the Nobel Peace Prize [192].
Justin Trudeau taps Irwin Cotler, the Canadian version of Alan Dershowitz, as de facto anti-Palestinian czar. Cotler will lead the center-left government’s assault on free speech and policing of Palestine solidarity organizing. https://t.co/UK7HXdKGlZ [193]— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 26, 2020 [194]
Cotler is an ardent supporter of Israeli apartheid [195] and longtime advisor to Moshe Ya’alon, former Israeli Defense Minister and Chief of Staff of the Israeli military. Cotler has played significant role in the Canadian government’s efforts to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism [196] and smear the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement [197] 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 [69] who called for the privatization and “Westernisation” of China, ardently supported former President George W. Bush, and cheered on US wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
More recently, during the coronavirus pandemic, Cotler echoed calls of right-wing US lawmakers for international legal action [198] and sanctions [199] 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 Fellows David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State, and David Matas, senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, a right-wing organization that describes itself as dedicated to “Israel advocacy” [200].
Kilgour and Matas have extensive ties to the far-right, anti-China religious cult Falun Gong [14]. Both men are regularly contributors to the group’s propaganda arm, The Epoch Times, a media network that The New York Times has described [36] as an “anti-China, pro-Trump media empire” and “leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation”. In 2019, an NBC News exposé [85] 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 [14] 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 [201] determined that the claims made by Kilgour and Matas were unfounded, with experts commenting that their allegations were “not plausible” and “unthinkable.”
5. The program concludes with discussion of the Wallenberg family, one of Sweden’s most prominent industrial clans and inextricably linked with both the international cartel system, the Third Reich and–as we see below–the remarkable and deadly Bormann flight capital organization.
The Wallenbergs were centrally involved in numerous cloaking operations for Nazi big business, and also had strong links to the Allied industrial firms undertaking war production.
(The substance and complexities of the cartel system and international fascism were discussed in–among other programs–FTR#511. [37] The overall political and historical context in which the cartels operate–globalization–is analyzed in the introduction to the Books for Download [37] section.)
Exemplifying the family’s position in the Wall Street/cartel pantheon is George Murnane of the Wallenberg holding company A.B. Investor: ” . . . . In November 1940, a voting trust agreement was set up in the United States under which George Murnane was designated by the Wallenbergs’ Enskilda Bank as the sole voting trustee with complete power to vote the American Bosch stock at stockholders’ meetings in the United States. The voting trust arrangement provided that if George Murnane should die, his successor should be named by John Foster Dulles, senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm which represents the Wallenbergs and the Enskilda Bank in the United States. . . .”
One of the most significant of the Wallenbergs’ operations concerned its global monopoly on ball bearings and its shipment of Swedish bearings to offset Nazi Germany’s losses in the costly Schweinfurt raids.
” . . . . It happened that two thirds of Germany’s entire bearing industry was concentrated in a single group of four factories at Schweinfurt. Three of them, accounting for 36 per cent of Germany’s productive capacity, were owned by VKF; and one, accounting for 30 per cent of German capacity, was owned by the only remaining large independent, Fischer A.G.
When American air forces bombed Schweinfurt during the war, in an effort to knock out this strategic point in German industrial production, Schweinfurt was discovered to be one of the most heavily defended spots in Germany. German defenses inflicted a loss of fifty American heavy bombers in one raid alone. When these raids temporarily knocked out Schweinfurt, the effect was largely nullified by shipments of bearings from SKF in Sweden. . . .”
It is this heritage that underlies the Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
All Honorable Men by James Stewart Martin; Little Brown [HC]; Copyright 1950 by James Stewart Martin; pp. [202] 249–254. [202]
. . . . On May 6, 1940, just before the German blitz swept into Holland, the American Bosch shares were “sold” with the permission of Stuttgart to the Enskilda Bank of Stockholm. The bank put them under the control of a financial holding company named “A.B. Investor.” The transfer agreement created an option to permit Robert Bosch of Germany to repurchase the stock two years after the end of the war. At that time Marcus Wallenberg, who, with his brother, Jacob, controls the Enskilda Bank, was also acting simultaneously as agent of the German Reichsbank in other matters.
In November 1940, a voting trust agreement was set up in the United States under which George Murnane was designated by the Wallenbergs’ Enskilda Bank as the sole voting trustee with complete power to vote the American Bosch stock at stockholders’ meetings in the United States. The voting trust arrangement provided that if George Murnane should die, his successor should be named by John Foster Dulles, senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm which represents the Wallenbergs and the Enskilda Bank in the United States.
While all this legal footwork was keeping’ the legal ownership of Bosch properties abroad in the technical custody of neutral citizens, Bosch of Stuttgart was not hampered in its control over the use of patented Bosch technology by non-German companies. Even as late as June 1941, American Bosch was the only source of supply of fuel injection equipment for naval diesel engines.
The United States Navy wanted to develop a second source of supply, but found that American Bosch had no right to grant a license to any other company to make this patented equipment. The American Bosch company informed the navy that no such license could be granted without the consent of the Robert Bosch firm at Stuttgart.
Finally, on May 19, 1942, the controlling shares of American Bosch Corporation, nominally held by the Swedish firm, A.B. Investor, were taken over by the Alien Property Custodian, On December 29, 1942, an antitrust action against the American Bosch Corporation was concluded by a court order canceling all agreements between American Bosch Corporation and Robert Bosch of Stuttgart, arising out of their “unlawful combination and conspiracy to suppress, limit and control competition between themselves throughout the world.” American Bosch Corporation was required to issue licenses under all of the Bosch patents to American manufacturers without royalties for the duration of the war.
The third case, that of the VKF bearings combine, also involved cloaking operations and the Enskilda Bank. One of the mysteries of World War ll has been the unexplained international relations of the Swedish industrial organization, A.B. Svenska Kullagerfabriken, known as SKF, Sweden’s largest industrial concern and the world’s largest manufacturer of ball and roller bearings. The principal Swedish interest in SKF is held by the Wallenbergs through their Enskilda Bank and its investment subsidiary, A.B. Investor. The actual extent of German or other foreign control, either directly or through the Wallenbergs, has not been disclosed. For many years the active management of SKF was in the hands of Sven Wingquist, the founder of the firm.
In 1941, he gave up the day-to-day management but remained as chairman of the board. From time to time, beginning in 1933 and 1934, Sven Wingquist came into the world spotlight as one of a colorful clique of international adventurers, who gained special notoriety by their buzzing around Edward VIII at the time of his abdication in 1936. They included Axel Wenner-Gren, the yachtsman; Charles Bedaux, inventor of a labor speed-up system; and Jacques Lernaigre-Dubrenil, French banker and vegetable-oil man of West Africa. Axel Wenner-Gren will he remembered as a yachtsman with a remarkable record of coincidences.
He cruised the seas throughout much of the war in his yacht, the Southern Cross, and turned up to rescue survivors of German submarine attacks, beginning with the German sinking of the British ship Athenia in 1939 and continuing through the Caribbean submarine campaign of 1942. At the time, some people speculated about how one yacht could happen along so often when a submarine spotted a vessel; but the coincidences were never explained.
Charles Bedaux, inventor of the “Bedaux System,” a speed-up system for forcing higher labor output in factories, was an American citizen who spent most of his life abroad. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were married in the Bedaux chateau on the Riviera. Bedaux was captured by American forces during the invasion of North Africa while busy building a pipeline to bring vegetable oil from Lemaigre-Dubreuil’s West African domain to the Mediterranean to help relieve the critical German shortage of fats and oils. Bedaux committed suicide in the federal jail at Miami, while awaiting trial for treason. Sven Wingquist and Axel Wenner-Gren had taken an active part after World War I in the German plans to mask the ownership of subsidiaries abroad.
To get around the Versailles Treaty, firms like Carl Zeiss, manufacturers of military optical equipment, set up branches such as the “Nedinsco” firm at Venlo in the Netherlands and carried on as before. The Krupp firm did the same in Spain, Sweden, and other countries. In 1934 the Swedish government discovered that Krupp controlled a block of shares in the Bofors steel and munitions works through a Swedish dummy holding company called “Boforsinteressenten.”
Sven Wingquist, who was chairman of the board of the Bofors steel and munitions works, was one of the two Swedish citizens who had been voting this stock for Krupp at stockholders’ meetings. The Krupp concern controlled approximately one third of Swedish Bofors in this manner and had maintained enough additional voting strength through Axel Wenner-Gren to control the affairs of Bofors.
Sven Wingquist and the Wallenbergs have always claimed that SKF is Swedish-owned and Swedish-controlled. Up till 1928, no one had any reason to doubt this assertion, But in 1928 and 1929, SKF was involved in a series of moves whereby all but one of the important bearing firms in Germany, accounting for 60 per cent of Germany’s bearing industry, were merged into a new concern, the Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken A.G., known as VKF. When these moves were completed, SKF showed on the record as the owner of 99.7 per cent of the stock of German VKF.
The mystery is how SKF could possibly have managed to pay the German owners of the merged firms without giving the Germans either money or some substantial stock interest in the Swedish firm, SKF. The management of Swedish SKF denied that any stock was given to German interests; but they never explained how the German interests were paid off.
In a similar deal in 1928 under which SKF had merged and acquired the principal French bearing companies, SKF issued 14,000,000 kroner, par value, of new SKF shares which they turned over to the French interests in exchange for the controlling shares in the new French concern. This increase of SKF’s capital from 92,000,000 to 106,000,000 kroner, by the issue of 14,000,ooo to the French, gave the French interests among them a 13 per cent participation in Swedish SKF.
In 1929, SKF increased its outstanding shares by another 24,000,000 at the time it acquired ownership and control of the German bearing trust, VKF. At the time of the completion of the German merger, on September 8, 1929, the Frankfurter Zeitung reported that the shares of VKF would not be listed on the German stock exchange and went on to say, “However, the shares of the Swedish parent company, of which a part is already German-owned, will shortly be listed on the Berlin exchange.”
In 1933, a pamphlet published by VKF explained the 1929 deal as part of a plan to assure the German firm an increased export market. The pamphlet reported: “Mainly for this reason, there developed a voluntary dependence on the international SKF concern. In spite of this dependence, it was largely German capital which was interested in the share capital of Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken A.G., amounting to RM 30,000,000, because the former owners are holders of the SKF concern shares and still other shares are in German private ownership.”
The case of VKF of Germany and its international ties through SKF of Sweden, posed a problem in the concentration of German economic power. It was like the case of German VGF and Dutch AKU in the synthetic textile field. While the question of German control as against “neutral” control has never been satisfactorily answered, the “neutral” firm is unquestionably the legal owner of important interests in the United States which were immune from seizure by the Alien Property Custodian during World War 11.
In the case of SKF, the subsidiaries in the United States are SKF Industries, Incorporated, of Philadelphia and SKF Steels Incorporated, of New York. In 1940, Marcus Wallenberg came to the United States to buy up German securities in the American market, presumably for the Reichsbank, as part of the German Economic Ministry’s “repatriation”
program to buy out Germany’s external debt at a few cents on the dollar. He arranged at that time to set up a voting trust which conveyed nominal control of SKF’s subsidiaries in the United States to William L. Batt as voting trustee. Mr. Batt is president of SKF Industries, and, during the war, served as deputy chairman of the War Production Board.
It was Mr. Batt who called at my office in Berlin in the autumn of 1946 soon after the press reported rumors that we were considering action to divorce German VKF from its international partners. He had come to Berlin to confer with General Draper on matters of German recovery; but he also wanted to be assured that nothing would be done to disturb the Swedish interest in the German company, or to reduce the value of the holdings by permitting removal of any of the plants from Germany as reparations.
It happened that two thirds of Germany’s entire bearing industry was concentrated in a single group of four factories at Schweinfurt. Three of them, accounting for 36 per cent of Germany’s productive capacity, were owned by VKF; and one, accounting for 30 per cent of German capacity, was owned by the only remaining large independent, Fischer A.G.
When American air forces bombed Schweinfurt during the war, in an effort to knock out this strategic point in German industrial production, Schweinfurt was discovered to be one of the most heavily defended spots in Germany. German defenses inflicted a loss of fifty American heavy bombers in one raid alone. When these raids temporarily knocked out Schweinfurt, the effect was largely nullified by shipments of bearings from SKF in Sweden.
A special United States mission was sent to Sweden to buy off SKF’s production; but it was only partially successful in this attempt to cut SKF shipments. When the time came to give up German plants as reparations after World War 2, a large part of the plant of the independent bearing firm, Fischer A.G. at Schweinfurt, was packed up and shipped off, leaving VKF with substantially a 100 percent monopoly of German bearing production. . . .
In the context of Swedish industrialists’ participation in the Bormann capital network, we take note of the important role in that organization played by the Wallenberg industrial and financial empire.
6. The Wallenbergs also played a major role in the Swedish component of the Bormann organization.
. . . . An interesting sidelight to this struggle between the Allies and Germany for influence on Sweden is the peculiar role played by Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, members of Sweden’s most important banking family. Marcus headed a government commission which negotiated with Britain and the United States throughout the war. At the same time, his brother Jacob was the chief negotiator for the Swedish government with Nazi Germany. Thus were both sides covered for Swedish business, including the family’s very own substantial economic interests. Following World War II, this family empire was to achieve its most spectacular prosperity, as German investments under the Bormann program matured in their Swedish safe-havens.
In this way, impressive wealth accrued to the Wallenbergs, as well as to the other Swedish and German investment groups controlling large holdings in the many Swedish companies under German dominance in 1944. . . .
[204]7. Institutionalized as an international martyr for his work rescuing European Jews during the Holocaust, Raoul Wallenberg’s reputed work ransoming legal immunity for Heinrich Himmler with those Jews is buttressed by his relationship with German industrialist Ludolph Christensen and–through him–SS General Karl Wolff (right.)
Wolff was Himmler’s personal adjutant.
“‘Swedish Schindler’ death linked to Germany;” The Local [SE]; 1/15/2015. [205]
Raoul Wallenberg was a young diplomat posted in Nazi-controlled Budapest during the war and he saved the lives of thousands of Jews by providing them with Swedish documentation. . . .
. . . . Now, new information links Wallenberg – only the second foreigner to become an honorary citizen of the United States, after British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill – to German businessman Ludolph Christensen.
In the early 1940s, Wallenberg was an executive in the Swedish trading company Mellaneuropeiska AB, which managed to import to Sweden large quantities of foodstuffs, including speciality items such as cigarettes and fruit, which were hard to obtain due to the war.
While these transactions have been well-known, it has now emerged that almost all of them were carried out in cooperation with Ludolph Christensen, according to an article published on the website raoul-wallenberg.eu [206].
What do Swedes know about Raoul Wallenberg? [207]
Christensen was protected by General Karl Wolff, right-hand man of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, which Wallenberg was fighting.
The relationship “shows the complexity of trade relations in times of war and could provide new ways of solving Wallenberg’s disappearance,” the study’s authors, Susanne Berger, Vadim Birstein and Craig McKay, wrote.
New evidence uncovered by the researchers also shows that the German businessman also met Wallenberg at the start of his Budapest mission, in the summer of 1944. . . .