Doubling down on their pressure strategy against Australia, one of China’s top diplomats has tweeted a fake news image of an Australian soldier beheading an Afghan child.
It’s just the latest attack by Beijing on America’s closest Indo-Pacific ally. Furious that Canberra has chosen to stand with the United States and the rule of international law in the Indo-Pacific, China is now waging a diplomatic and economic onslaught against Australia. As of this publication, the tweet remains pinned on Zhao Lijian’s page.
Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, &call for holding them accountable. pic.twitter.com/GYOaucoL5D
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) November 30, 2020
China’s top “wolf warrior” diplomat, Zhao, is a foreign ministry spokesman and a truly fanatical servant of his dystopian regime. In a pathetic example of its censorship double standards, however, Twitter seems to have no problem with this despicable Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Chinese Communists are using this image to exploit an ongoing scandal over the conduct of Australian special operations forces in Afghanistan. But while the concerns raised against some of those forces are serious, the vast majority have served honorably in Afghanistan, we shouldn’t lose sight of the absurd hypocrisy in Zhao’s tweet.
After all, there is no evidence that Australian forces have ever killed young Muslim children. But there is very credible and indeed overwhelming evidence of ongoing Chinese Communist Party atrocities against Muslims. In China’s Xinjiang Province, millions of innocent Uighur Muslims have been imprisoned in reeducation camps, their religious and cultural identities shredded in order to remake them as worker drones for Xi Jinping. This might seem like hyperbole. It is not. Once a Uighur Muslim has gone through Xi’s concentration camp network, they are either deployed as serf labor to some factory on the other side of China — far away from their families. Or they are forcibly sterilized. Or they are simply kept in the vast network of concentration camps.
Australia is a democracy that stands for the protection and betterment of individual life. As with its Afghanistan scandal, Australia is willing to hold itself to account where it falls short of its humanitarian standards. In contrast, China is a totalitarian state where nothing is right or wrong unless the Communist Party says it is so. The contrast between these two very different political systems and interests cuts to the heart of why the U.S. cannot afford to lose this new Cold War.
Unfortunately, President Trump presently appears to be asleep to Australia’s suffering. Rather than stand with this very great ally, Trump continues to spend his days offering inane tweets about an election he has lost. Doing so, he misses an opportunity to better fulfill the responsibilities of his office to the last and score an easy win against both Twitter and China.
