U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Kelly Craft dismissed any analogy between authoritarian regimes and President Trump’s response to the protests following “this awful killing of George Floyd,” voicing support for peaceful protests and condemning China’s hostility to free speech.
“It is brutality, it is intolerable,” Craft said of the police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for several minutes as he died. “We are going to uphold our democracy. We are going to allow people across the country to have peaceful demonstrations and the opportunity to speak freely.”
The Floyd protests erupted over the last week, at a time when U.S. officials have been trying to keep a spotlight on Chinese Communist plans to tighten control over Hong Kong and on the political protests that have paralyzed the former British colony over the last year. Trump’s interest in using the military to end the rioting accompanying the protests drew condemnation from some American leaders and charges of hypocrisy by Chinese officials.
“There is no moral equivalence between our free society, which works through tough problems like racism, and other societies, which do not allow anything to be discussed, because it has — they are of authoritative regimes,” she told reporters Friday.
Senior congressional Democrats have tied the clearing of the park in front of the White House, which was done by police armed with plastic shields and pepper balls, to the Chinese Communist crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989. China and Russia, for their part, have pointed to the unrest to deride the U.S. political system and undermine the appeal of democracy around the world, according to nongovernmental propaganda analysts and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
“There are clear examples of propaganda targeting the United States’s domestic events, including state-owned media broadcasting doctored images of the Statue of Liberty superimposed on domestic scenes to imply chaos to democracy, and PRC proxy media outlets aggressively messaging to Hong Kong and other protesters on multiple social media platforms on such themes,” a State Department spokesman said.
Craft seemed unfazed by China and Russia’s opportunism. “Yes, we have Russia and China that are trying to change the narrative, but that’s normal,” she said, before invoking China’s repression of ethnic or religious minorities. “They are only pushing their agenda toward us in order to hide what they’re doing. I mean, we should ask them, we should challenge them. We should challenge them to compare their record with ours. What are they doing about the Uighurs?”
The envoy took an optimistic view of how the Floyd protests might affect race relations in America. “We have to remember that there is no moral equivalence between our free society and other societies,” she said. “I mean, if you think about how we work through racism, we work through all problems, and we always prevail. Goodness prevails in the United States because we are a country of democracy.”
