Xinjiang smears have no leg to stand on

On Wednesday, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and several international organizations held a videoconference in which they criticized the "human rights" situation in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

As always, they used such loaded terms as "genocide", "concentration camps" and "massacres" in their blame game against the anti-terrorism and de-radicalization measures being implemented in Xinjiang. These allegations have long been proven to be lies, and so are not worth refuting again here at any length. Suffice to say there is no credible support for their accusations.

However, their pick of such emotionally charged words offer some clues about their own pasts. They use these words because they have committed these crimes in their own history.

The US is a fine one to talk about "genocide", considering the plight of the native Americans that inhabited the land before European immigrants arrived and. Before 1500, the number of native Americans in North America might exceeded 30 million. In 1890, it had dropped as low as 380,000. Is there any other word that better describes the decimation of the natives American peoples than "genocide"?

The similar crimes were committed by British in Africa during the peak of slave trade, which is true of almost all the other major Western powers. A commonly reached consensus is that Africa lost a population of about 100 million due to the slave trade. Even those Africans who survived their trips to the US in the bowels off ships suffered a high fatality rate. This too was a form of "genocide".

"Concentration camps" are of course associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. A total of 6 million Jews died during World War II, the majority of whom died in the concentration camps and death camps.

And "massacres" are crimes done by all the colonial powers, more than once. From Namibia to India, from Africa to Asia, wherever their colonial armies arrived they killed the locals. They are veterans at killing as well as lying and blaming.

It is to be lamented that there should be a need to remind people of the crimes committed by certain Western powers. But it is rather absurd and shameless for them to proclaim themselves as "human rights defenders" while falsely accusing others of crimes they themselves are guilty of. They have absolutely no qualifications to teach others about "human rights", when their own records are so tainted.

On its part, China has long been committed to improving the livelihoods of its people and defending their human rights.

It is time the Western countries sought to make amends for their own human rights violations before pointing accusing fingers at China.