FTR#‘s 1178 1179, 1180: Fascism and The Uyghur Genocide Myth, Parts 1, 2, 3

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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:

1. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
2. ” . . . . 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. . . . ”
3. ” . . . . 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). . . .”
4. ” . . . . 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:

1. ” . . . . 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]. . . .”
2. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
3. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
4. ” . . . . 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. . . . ”
5. ” . . . . 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. ...”
6. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
7. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
8. ” . . . . 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: 

1. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
2. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
3. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
4. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
5. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
6. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
7. ” . . . . 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:

1. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
2. ” . . . . 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. . . . ”
3. ” . . . . 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). . . .”
4. ” . . . . 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:

“No, the UN did not report Chi­na has ‘mas­sive intern­ment camps’ for Uighur Mus­lims” by Ben Nor­ton and Ajit Singh; The Gray Zone; 08/23/2018 ^[8]

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:

1. ” . . . . 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]. . . .”
2. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
3. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
4. ” . . . . 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. . . . ”
5. ” . . . . 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. ...”
6. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
7. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
8. ” . . . . 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. . . .”

1. “NY Times’ pseu­do-expert accus­ing Chi­na of geno­cide worked for far-right cult Falun Gong’s pub­lic­i­ty arm” by Ben Nor­ton; The Gray Zone; 01/28/2021 ^[11]

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?’ . . . .”

“Inside the World Uyghur Con­gress: The US-backed right-wing regime change net­work seek­ing the ‘fall of Chi­na’” by Ajit Singh; The Gray Zone; 03/05/2020 ^[32]

. . . . . 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: 

1. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
2. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
3. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
4. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
5. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
6. ” . . . . 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. . . .”
7. ” . . . . 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’. . . . ”

“‘Inde­pen­dent’ report claim­ing Uyghur geno­cide brought to you by sham uni­ver­si­ty, neo­con ide­o­logues lob­by­ing to ‘pun­ish’ Chi­na” by Ajit Singh; The Gray­zone; 03/17/2021 ^[25]

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.

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; pp. 133–134. ^[203]

. . . . 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. . . .