How about an emergency meeting for US double standards?

For more than a year, the United States has been engaging in a widespread purge of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Many have accused Russia of cybertheft of private data, the placement of propaganda against particular candidates and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the US democratic process.

Hillary Clinton, in her book What Happened, talked at length about how the Russian government had undermined her election to advantage Donald Trump, just like she blamed everyone else but herself in the book for the loss of the election.

To many in the US, anyone trying to intrude on the sacrosanct US election process should not be tolerated. However, the logic does not stand if the US believes it can actually interfere and intervene at will in other countries' domestic affairs.

For example, in a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting on Friday requested by the US mission, the US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley blasted the Iranian government and publicly voiced support for the anti-government protesters.

If you follow the words of US officials, such interference in other countries' domestic affairs is simply a routine. The only difference is that the US rarely applies the same standards to its allies, a reflection of a double standard and the hypocrisy of US government policy.

Besides interfering in other countries' domestic affairs with just words and threats, the US has even intervened militarily such as by arming anti-government rebels in Syria, including some with connections with terrorist groups. The US also has pursued regime change in Iraq and Libya, just to name a few fresh memories.

More recently, the US has assisted the Saudi Arabian military in the bombing of Yemen, resulting in the killing of many civilians and the starvation of millions of people, including many women and children.

Americans are said to love the Confucius quote: "Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to yourself." If that were true, then why make such a big fuss about alleged foreign interference in US election?

To me, the US presidential election probably deserves more domestic and even foreign interference given so many Americans, including some candidates themselves, believe it's deeply flawed.

For example, the Electoral College system is regarded by many as anti-democratic. So are the many superdelegates in the Democratic Party system.

The campaign finance system is getting worse. It literally means that ordinary Americans won't have a chance of even running. In both the 2012 and 2016 elections, candidates Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump all spent hundreds of millions of dollars in their campaigns.

Covering both the 2012 and 2016 elections, I had to figure out whether there was more misinformation than information on a daily basis. And the so-called pristine process was often a race to the bottom, with the probable exception of candidate Bernie Sanders. Unlike what Michelle Obama said, "When they go low, we go high," what most candidates had done was "When they go low, we go lower."

I can go on and on with why US presidential election deserves more intervention. In fact, many US social movements that are often ignored and even suppressed by the government also deserve more global attention.

So when Haley requested an emergency meeting at the Security Council, I am wondering why other countries had not requested similar meetings when the Occupy Wall Street movement erupted in 2011 in hundreds of cities across the US. Police brutality against peaceful protesters was appalling.

Why was there not an emerging meeting when the massive Women's March in Washington took place in January 2017 which drew between 3 million to 5 million protesters, the largest single- day protest in US history? Why was there no emergency meeting when the Black Lives Matter movement swept the US, calling for immediate attention to the dire racial inequality in the world's self-proclaimed greatest nation?

The US may think itself as a superdelegate in the global community, and Haley may think the US a superdelegate in the UN. Such deeply flawed thinking and practice deserve an emergency meeting.

Contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com

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