It is one of the revealing facts about the international left that it cares deeply about the fate of Palestinians under Israeli power, but next to nothing about China's brutal occupation and colonization of Tibet. European scholars have called for the ostracism of their colleagues from Israel. I missed the part where they want to punish Chinese scholars for the much worse atrocities committed by their nation. But of course the Chinese are communists, and hostile the U.S. Israel is not communist and is an ally of the United States.
China, the country about to host the next Olympics, isn't doing much to clean up the air the athletes will breath. But it is beating the snot out of a lot of Buddhist monks. This from Slate:
The last week's riots began as a religious protest: Tibet's monks were demonstrating against laws that, among other things, require them to renounce the dalai lama. The monks' marches then escalated into generalized, unplanned, anti-Chinese violence, culminating in attacks on Han Chinese shops and businesses, among them—as you can see on the cell-phone videos—the Lhasa branch of the Bank of China.
However the official version evolves, in other words, make no mistake about it: This was not merely vandalism, it could not have been solely organized by outsiders, it was not only about the Olympics, and it was not the work of a tiny minority. It was a significant political event, proof that the Tibetans still identify themselves as Tibetan, not Chinese. As such, it must have significant reverberations in Beijing. The war in Algeria brought down the French Fourth Republic. The dissident movements on its periphery helped weaken the Soviet Union. Right now, I'd wager that Hu Jintao's Tibet policy is causing a lot of consternation among his colleagues.
In 1950-51 China invaded and conquered Tibet. It has since colonized Tibet, so that, I gather, the Chinese are now a majority. The former government of Tibet, which was at once a government and a Buddhist Church, went into exile. Since then, the Dalai Lama, who was once the legitimate head of the Tibetan government, has become the closest thing the Buddhist world has to a Pope. And his authority over millions in Tibet and elsewhere is what the Chinese government cannot abide.
China is bringing its iron fist down hard on the Tibetans. Too bad the rest of the world hardly notices.
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