I see that Tibet is aflame, with at least 100 people dead in street protests.
The broad narrative here is eerily similar to another, somewhat less obscure “conflict zone”: Local activists rise up against a power they regard as a brutal colonial occupier. The occupier fights back. Blood flows in the street. The Tibetans haven’t yet started blowing themselves up in restaurants or mowing down Chinese students with machine guns. When they do, the Palestinian precedent shows, the world will solemnly pronounce them to be locked “in a cycle of violence.”
Actually, do some bare-bones research, and you’ll find that the Tibetans have a far better claim to the world’s sympathy than the Palestinians. After China’s 1950 invasion, Chinese troops killed a million Tibetans — that’s about two decimal orders of magnitude above the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel over the last six decades. (Which means that, if Islamist claims of a “Holocaust” in Gaza and the West Bank are to be believed, then Tibet has suffered at least 100 holocausts. Wow — that’s a lot of Holocausts.) On top of that, there’s the massive flood of ethnic Chinese migrants, who’ve made the Tibetans a minority population within their own territories (for some odd reason, the media never refers to these folks as “settlers”); not to mention the destruction of 6,000 Tibetan monasteries (a figure that is roughly 6,000 more than the number of mosques destroyed by Israel). And on and on it goes — though you never hear about any of this in the media most days.
But no doubt, this month’s violence in Tibet will open people’s eyes, right?
Even as I write this, union leaders in Europe and Canada presumably are hard at work drafting a resolution aimed at boycotting all Chinese products. Student activists are smashing their Leonovo laptops. Engineering departments at campuses all across North America are tearing up their partnership projects with colleagues in China. There will also presumably be a flurry of anti-China resolutions put forward by the United Nations assembly and the UN’s various agencies — especially the Human Rights Council. Jimmy Carter, one supposes, is hard at work on a Tibetan-themed follow-up to Peace Not Apartheid.
As for the Beijing Olympics, they might as well be canceled? Who would go to them now?
Yup. This will all happen. Just you watch. Anything else amount to a “double-standard.” And that’s simply unthinkable.
