Over at the Heritage Foundation’s blog The Foundry, Walter Lohman has an excellent post on democratic and human rights activist Rebiya Kadeer who is currently being blamed by the Chinese government for the Uighur uprising in western China.
Kadeer, President of the Uighur American Association and the World Uighur Congress, is being portrayed by Beijing as “an ironclad separatist colluding with terrorists and Islamic extremists.” Lohman makes the point that the Obama Administration’s reaction to the Uighur uprising is more of the same moral relativism that was exhibited during the Iran demonstrations. He state:
“The White House and Secretary of State have called on ‘all sides to exercise restraint’. Certainly, the Administration is right to condemn violence against innocent civilians, whatever their ethnicity. But to boil the situation down to a moral equivalent, fault-on-both-sides sort of thing is cruel. The Chinese government has a basic monopoly on use of force. And it is the underlying oppression of the central government that has made Xinjiang the powder keg it is.”