China, together with Norway and Tunisia, had attempted to get a Security Council meeting on May 14 on the crisis in Palestine, but the U.S. opposed it. Already on May 10th, at the first emergency UNSC consultation on the situation, the Security Council was ready to issue a statement, but it was stopped by the U.S. saying it wanted to give “diplomacy” time to let things wind down. And then again on May 12th, at a second emergency session of the UNSC, the members were ready to release a media statement and it was again stopped by the U.S. The Chinese UN representatives who now chair the Security Council are working overtime to try and get UN action on the situation, but the U.S. is putting up roadblocks. There will be another Security Council meeting held on Sunday, May 16, but it is unlikely that they will lead to a statement by the Security Council because of U.S. stonewalling.
This obstructionism by that great “protector of human rights” the United States was blasted by Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who said that U.S. delays would lead to more violence, which it, in fact, has. “The U.S. claims to care about the human rights of Muslims,” Hua said in her briefing on May 14. “However, as the recent Israel-Palestine clashes swept a large number of Palestinian Muslims into war and sufferings, the U.S. turned a blind eye to their sufferings and even risked universal condemnation to stop the Security Council from speaking up on this. In the meantime, the U.S., together with a handful of its allies like the U.K. and Germany, held a meaningless meeting on the so-called Xinjiang-related issues falsely in the name of the UN based on lies and political prejudice. What is the true intention behind this political farce? The U.S. should know that the lives of Palestinian Muslims are equally precious.” This has exposed the U.S. hypocrisy with its “Xinjiang card.”
The irony of the situation was also underlined by the fact that the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom’s Daniel Nadel had labeled Xinjiang an “open-air prison,” a term that was first used—but in this case, quite accurately—to describe Gaza under Israeli control, a situation which the United States has done its best to totally whitewash on behalf of that other member of this “alliance of democracies,” Israel. This irony of this affair has also been aired extensively in the Chinese media.
