Why won't the Arab world buy U.S. lies about Xinjiang?

BEIJING, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- If history is any guide, deception is a common political trick used by Washington to achieve and perpetuate its dominance.

After all, many U.S. scholars, including Stephen Knott, professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College, have concluded that "America was founded on secrets and lies."

In its never-ending propaganda war against China, Washington has recently chosen issues relating to China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region as its new target. To the surprise of many, Washington even came to the point of imposing sanctions on China and disrupting the world's supply chain solely based on its unfounded accusations of "genocide" and "forced labor" of the Uygur population in Xinjiang.

As always, Washington's lies were repeated by only a few of its Western allies, but were met with deafening silence in the overall international community, especially in the Arab world.

Arab countries have resisted Washington's firepower of misinformation and stood firmly with China, supporting China's Xinjiang policy.

If Washington's accusations were true, Arab countries would never sit by idly as they share the same religion as Xinjiang's sizable Uygur population. And the Quran dictates that "The believers are like brothers to one another."

In their interviews with Xinhua, Arab experts said the U.S. fabrications about Xinjiang are going nowhere because more and more Arabs see the contradictions and ironies in U.S. claims and have completely lost faith in the United States' credibility. Moreover, many Arab delegations have first-hand travel experience in Xinjiang and have seen what is happening there.

DISINFORMATION WAR AGAINST CHINA

When an anti-China motion relating to Xinjiang tabled by Washington and its allies at the 51st session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) was rejected in October, loud applause erupted at the conference hall of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Arab countries have been supporting China in the vote.

It comes as no surprise that the Arab world always supports China in its just cause, said Kamal Gaballa, an Egyptian columnist and a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. "Some countries are attempting to hinder China's development, which the Arab people are well aware of."

The Xinjiang issue is "a political issue provoked by the West, who wish to leave the people (in Xinjiang) in poverty and ignorance. The West wishes to make Xinjiang a focal point of tensions and terrorism to impact the development of China," he said.

To entice more countries to vote on the draft decision in October, the United States and its Western allies schemed to package it as a procedural issue, which was supposed to be neutral with no political motives. Washington's other disinformation campaign tactics against China are far less subtle.

Take Washington's outright lie about so-called "genocide" in Xinjiang as an example. U.S. politicians and media have been relentlessly peddling the outrageous accusation to vilify China.

In fact, over the past 60-plus years, the Uygur population in Xinjiang has substantially increased from 2.2 million to around 12 million, with the region's average life expectancy growing from 30 years to 74.7 years.

"How can there be genocide in Xinjiang when the population is growing and the country is working to improve people's economic and social development?" said Gaballa, attributing the population increase to the Chinese government's significant efforts to improve the housing, health, and education sectors there.

For Kawa Mahmoud, secretary of the Central Committee of the Kurdistan Communist Party/Iraq, some Western politicians are apparently turning a blind eye to the dark history of their countries when they falsely accuse China.

"If we open the file of genocide, then colonialism is genocide," Mahmoud said. "The killing of Indigenous people in the United States and Canada is a form of genocide ... They may have attempted to address this by granting some rights and privileges, but this will not erase from memory the terrible acts committed against those people."

The baseless and ridiculous accusation of "genocide" against China is part of Washington's ideological propaganda against China, he said.

These U.S. accusations against China are part of a systemic U.S. strategy to "break the geographical, political, and national unity in other countries" as well as tactics to "incite rifts between the components of one country," said Osama Danura, a Syrian political expert and former member of the Syrian government delegation to the Syria peace talks in Geneva.

"Washington counts on inciting hatred and division among peoples, religions, and other ethnic and racial components of the societies ... as an alternative to direct wars, especially with the declining ability of the United States to wage traditional wars following several failed (military) adventures in Vietnam, Iraq and other countries," he said.

CAULDRON OF TOXIC DECEPTION

In their interviews with Xinhua, Arab experts said that the Arab people will not be easily duped by U.S. lies about Xinjiang because the Arab world is a region well too familiar with American deception.

On April 9, 2003, about three weeks into the invasion of Iraq, U.S. soldiers demolished Saddam Hussein's statue in the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad. The whole world now knows that this war cost hundreds of thousands of lives, threw the Middle East into chaos, and was based on flagrant lies.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council earlier in 2003. "What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

In justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Powell cast Saddam as a major global threat who possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The enduring image from that moment was Powell holding up a tiny vial of white powder, which was supposed to be Hussein's anthrax, and telling the world that the United States had no choice but to go to war.

The years-long war has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, millions displaced and towns and cities destroyed. The occupation and ensuing chaos and insecurity have provided a significant chance for the growth of terrorist groups, including the Islamic State.

No single trace of chemical weapons or WMD has been found in Iraq up till today.

It was not the only time when Washington lied its way into military intervention in an Arab country.

"Don't you remember how, in 1998, U.S. forces bombarded a factory in Sudan under the pretext that it produces chemical weapons, only to have then (U.S.) President (Bill) Clinton later claim that the factory had been mistakenly bombarded? On the basis of a lie, the Americans demolished a factory intended to produce medicines for the people of Sudan and the entire continent," said Kamel Mansari, news director of the French-language daily Le Jeune Independent in Algeria.

For the Arab people, said Danura, "the credibility of the United States has witnessed incessant setbacks."

Washington has also made tremendous efforts to "tarnish the reputation of Islam and create a space of islamophobia in Western societies and create fear of Islam, which encourages racism toward Islamic societies," he added.

For the Egyptian columnist Gaballa, the United States and its allies' credibility "is questioned and is not welcomed at all by the people in the Middle East."

"The United States knows that it is responsible for inciting and provoking escalations in the Middle East," he said.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

When Algerian Ambassador to China Hassane Rabehi visited Xinjiang in August, he was impressed by how the rights of people of all ethnic groups there are well protected.

"The fruit here is so sweet, just like the life of people here," he said then.

In recent years, more than 2,000 government officials, religious personnel and journalists from over 100 countries and organizations, many of whom are from the Arab world, have visited Xinjiang.

"Listening to Western propaganda about the situation in Xinjiang would give you the impression that it is a 'hell-like' region, but the truth is completely the opposite, as journalists and non-political oriented individuals, as well as the Algerian ambassador to Beijing visited Xinjiang and gave their opinion about the situation there," said the Algerian news director Mansari.

Recalling his previous visit to Xinjiang, Mahmoud said that he was "amazed at the development taking place there."

"Now, I think if we go back to this region, we will see other developments. We will see renewal in all fields," he said.

In 2021, Xinjiang's gross domestic product reached nearly 1.6 trillion yuan (about 229.31 billion U.S. dollars), doubling the figure of 2012. Over the past decade, more than 70 percent of Xinjiang's fiscal spending has been directed toward improving people's livelihoods.

During his two visits to Xinjiang in 2010 and 2019, the Egyptian columnist Gaballa said that he was impressed by the number of mosques and the religious freedom there.

"I visited Xinjiang during Ramadan month in 2010, and I saw how the Muslims have complete freedom for practicing their rituals," Gaballa said. "Religious freedom is there for everyone, (and) mosques are open every day and during vacations."

There are 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang, with one mosque for every 530 Muslims. In a nutshell, there are more than twice as many mosques in Xinjiang as in the United States, Britain, Germany and France combined.

"It highlights how much the Chinese government cares about preserving the cultural and religious identity of Xinjiang. It shows that the government does not interfere in the religious rituals in Xinjiang, but protects it from terrorism and other instability factors," said Mansari.

DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY INSEPARABLE

Coming from a region plagued by instability, terrorism, and external military aggression, Arab experts said that the Arab world supports the Chinese government's efforts to promote stability and security in Xinjiang and that the U.S. disinformation campaign against China lacks credibility to them.

"Stability and separatism are critical issues for any country, and no country can tolerate dividing any piece of its territory," said Mansari.

"So the Xinjiang issue is a matter of countering instability and separatism rather than a matter of human rights," he said, adding that "the human rights condition could be seen through the development reached in Xinjiang."

During his second trip to Xinjiang in 2019, Gaballa said that the security conditions were completely different compared to 2010 when "sabotage groups were crippling the development in the region" through terrorist attacks.

"With the prevailing security and the efforts of the central government, everything has changed for the better," he said.

In its relentless smear campaign against China, the West has propagated the lie that the vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang are so-called internment camps where one million Uygur people have been held in detention.

In fact, the U.S. investigative reporting news web Grayzone has revealed that the theory was first proposed and spread by the so-called Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a U.S. nongovernmental organization supported by the U.S. government. The organization came to the ridiculous conclusion only through interviews with eight Uygurs and a rough estimate.

Gaballa said that he had visited those centers, in which the locals were learning the Chinese language, law, and various professions.

"Those who graduate from those centers are qualified to participate in the development of their society, rather than becoming (a potential recruit for) future terrorists," he said.

The rhetoric of the United States and its Western allies against China "were passed during the previous years because of the lack of clarification of the facts," Mahmoud noted. "But things became clear after facts were clarified and after the United States committed double standard practices on terrorism and human rights issues."

After all, said the Iraqi, the United States is the one nation that has set up numerous detention camps in other countries, such as the Guantanamo Bay prison, where shocking violations of human rights have been exposed.