Western Media is Lying About Xinjiang (新疆)

I'm about to present you with just five
minutes of edited clips from a Chinese government created documentary so yes it is in a sense propaganda but I think most of you in the audience will be shocked at the extent to which even this propaganda reveals that the Western mainstream press has been lying to you lying in recent months but really now lying for many years about the nature of the political problem in cynjohn and this may lead you to question the extent to which the Western media has also been lying to you with the nature of the solution however brutal however inhumane that the Chinese government has been implementing in the same territory after these few clips I'm going to have a few reflections on why it is that misinformation and outright lies dominate Western journalism on the politics of Asia and why it is that I have absolutely no hope that things will get any better in this field in future over the years this border area of our super fetcher in decision Weger autonomous region has been the scene of the war against terrorism your origin Ebola gender was lieutenant again in 2015 an armed gang attacked a coma in bhaijan County in our Zoo they killed 16 people including three policemen and wounded 18 [Music] this picture from the my monitor shows the brutal killing Wang gongs unit was sent to catch the terrorists larger Alma's job intersect genetic amazed that they get show up terminate column coalition birth every room is not Irish paddy chop see and to say you're not convinced she wouldn't get sick did he terone was the only gang member to surrender oh the others were killed in the police manhunt his grandfather Molitor de niñas turned him in the 74 year old told us at that moment there was no other option Kent madam our Neutral Philip last nigh that modern man nebula a very a coachman with a great purchase jacket i dae-kyun Molitor d says his grandson is responsible for his crime he also says her home had been brainwashed by extremist ideology mainly from others with close links with the East Turkestan Islamic movement now based outside India the etim is seen as a terrorist and a separatist organization throughout the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] chaos was rampant in China's westernmost region violent attacks were targeting civilians of all ethnic groups explosions were frequent in almost all parts of the Rieger autonomous region King John became a battlefield in China's fight against terrorism April 30th 2014 a duty south railway station a knife attack and a suicide bombing three people died and a 70 die were wounded this selfie video shows Rasheed making explosive devices before the attacks he was the main suspect Rasheed learned to make IEDs from an online video produced by the East Turkestan Islamic movement or the Etim well Dustin welcomes marginally smiley a la pêche most the foreign friend Rasheed mentions is is Mahut soup a member of the etim is my yo-yo soup introduce him to two associates to carry out the suicide bombing both of the men died some are you supposed to generate come over to the window - yeah cuz it generates Jets away joning are you a cheater and - just how you bring salsa according to the police is my uuly soup was the black hand of the April 30th attacks he used religion to recruit members taking spiritual control over them he then asked them to carry out violence while he hate outside the country China's police say the April 30th attacks were typical in Shinya in December 2003 China's Ministry of Public Security outlawed the IDI I am it was the first time the government formally recognized that a terrorist group was operating inside the country Hassam xu was killed by Pakistani troops in the same year but the terrorist activities have continued throughout the years the Etim has taken credit for a series of attacks in several Chinese cities these include the 2013 Tiananmen Square car bombing and the 2014 slashing and hacking at the creaming railway station in southwest China Chinese police say these are not isolated incidents before the tournament attack the terrorist group pledge an extremist campaign on a barren hill on the outskirts of raunchy and soon after the Tiananmen attack a radical Islamist group claimed responsibility and wound of future attacks in the Chinese capital they made another machine if a dialogue a minute a labor swappable de allah allah is no belong boo jihadi I'm Elliott 36 American tech a birthday hockey me Tina Papa hymning Sunday I would like to think that anyone who disagrees with my own political approach to this problem would nevertheless have the detachment to recognize that there's a huge gap between the way the Western media presents this issue and reality there is such a huge gap between Western media bias and reality the case tale of this that even a very casual viewing of the other side of the story presented by the government of China is enough to really set off alarm bells to really make us apprehensive and of course what's going on here is much more than just bad journalism anyone has just been casually interested in this issue will now start to question well isn't it a problem that the Western media has so totally distorted the importance of the situation when they're presenting it to politicians and when politicians are kind of mirroring back they're kind of echoing back the assumptions of the journalists you know in their own attempts to sort of pander to the audience to get approval from the crowd there's a problem here with the message presented to the general public there's a problem with the message that's presented to politicians and then the message that comes from politicians in the Western world because the politicians themselves very rarely do research they are for the most part dependent on the journalists as their only source information so we have a society in which it's not the case that politicians are providing journalists with the facts politicians tend to make statements courting the public opinion that are derivative of whatever the as assumed facts are that the journalists are then currently trading it this is a widespread and deep problem and I have to admit it's not new hmm however I do think we now live in an era when this problem is getting worse and it will in future get worse still Oh libraries the why that is I use this term ambulance chaser a great deal and the image of an ambulance chaser is of a lawyer who sees some accident sees some disaster and just decides this is my chance to get famous this is my chance to get on TV this is my chance to make some money and so they run after the ambulance they chase after the disaster the accident whatever it may be without understanding anything about the situation so I mean yes it's originally an idiom used about a corrupt lawyer who was just trying to get famous or make money or just trying to get his face on the evening news and he's getting involved with a complex situation without knowing who's to blame you know who even caused the accident of what the problem was who's the good guy who's the bad guy or how how complex the situation may be but I use the term more broadly to describe a lot of the behavior I see both among journalists and politicians public figures every kind it seems to me that in modern American culture to some extent in Canada England and so on also there's this terrible despicable tendency for people to just throw themselves into any controversy with the presumption of their own moral superiority and the presumption that they're doing something morally positive in repeating what may be really false and harmful informant information to the audience so as I've already described there's a process here whereby the people who present themselves as leaders of public opinion are very often really followers the president United States may just be passively repeating things that he read in the newspaper that morning or that he heard from a TV station like Fox News with the current president but past presidents they read other newspapers but they could be just as derivative in their thinking and in passing on to the public as fact assumptions that may be really dubious in their origins that may the result of very little research and certainly not of informed opinion now what's the cure what's the way out of that well the way out is to have people with real expertise doing real original research and the problem is that that costs money and that the expertise required including just the ability in languages I would say is many more years of hard work and much deeper and broader hard work than the type of work that goes into becoming a medical doctor how many years and how much money does it take for someone to become a normal general practitioner general medical doctor general family doctor working maybe working in a shopping mall sir I see doctors offices and places like shopping malls sometimes mmm doesn't matter much if it's in a hospital or shuttle medical doctors as you may know tend to deal with the same problems again and again they have a very repetitious job and about 25% of their time is spent doing paperwork the impression you get of the life of a medical doctor from watching Hollywood movies and soap operas might be much more dramatic and interested in that but if you just pause and reflect on it being a medical doctor the daily tasks of dealing again and again with complaints of diarrhea and acne and obesity joint pain the most common ailments in any given demographic in any given jurisdiction coming in again and again and of course the almighty common cold the occasional broken arm we tend to very much glamorize how much education is required because the cost is prohibitive but if you spend $30,000 on tuition every year in some cases people spend $50,000 on tuition but you can look it up um nevertheless a medical doctor in the United States of America can expect to earn 200,000 US dollars a year every year after they finished that degree so it just doesn't seem like too much of an imposition to require them to go through so many years of of training now if you started with a white American who spoke no language other than English and was born and raised in New Jersey and this white American let's just say he was very talented in philosophy and politics let's just say it was a white American from New Jersey who had some aptitude in that area he said hey you know what we want to put the money into training you so that you really are prepared to be an expert to do active research and to offer informed opinion on complex political situation in a place like cynjohn China how many years and how much money per year do you think it would take for that hypothetical gentlemen to become profoundly fluent in Chinese fluent enough in Chinese that he could read newspaper articles and political documents from the Chinese government and evaluate verbal statements given by Chinese politicians in in Chinese and how long would it take him to build up the ability in the Turkic language spoken in cynjohn so that he could say listen to radio stations in the local language which is completely unrelated attorneys with my whole different field of study many many years of hard work there so that maybe he could even listen to recorded telephone conversations do this kind of intelligence evaluating work and how many years would it take for him to gain a nuanced balanced knowledge and understanding of just what was going on in local politics I have to ask myself these questions all the time it's so much working and do you want to do the work just to be at the level where when someone mentions a local politicians name you know not the Prime Minister or not the press not it not a major both issue but some local person who's in the administration that comes up with them all where you have knowledge oh yeah yeah I know that guy and when you mentioned his name I can tell you four or five things he's done over the last ten years I know I know something about that politicians political leanings so to have that level of familiarity with local politics at the provincial level at the city level town by town to be able to speak on in this case the efforts of the police of the education system of the military over say the last twenty years and to know at that level of precision what's been going on and to have some sense of the character and motivations of the people at different levels what's been successful what's been tried what's failed you know maybe some of the pilot projects the government tried and then abandoned them what that explains why they adopted a different strategy little later um to train and educate someone to play that role would cost much more money and require much more dedication than training someone to be a normal medical doctor who can deal with the common cold pregnancy twisted ankle diarrhea the regular medical problems that that people commonly have and education in that area I'm in a position to know I'm in a position to complain it costs just as much as the education to become a medical doctor if not much more and the pay you can expect the possible earnings you could ever have if you develop this kind of specialized expertise in political science of Asia shall we say is absolutely zero and that's why people like myself don't develop the expertise we don't get the university degrees we don't go on to that kind of career it's very easy and very lazy to say well everyone's entitled to their own opinion not everyone is entitled to their own facts what we need are people who are capable of carrying out original research what we need are people who are really capable of presenting an informed opinion and given the economics and given the difficulty of accessing any kind of meaningful education of this sort that it's not going to happen the situation is going to get worse and worse and worse and I say that as someone who's sunk years of his life into developing ability with the languages and developing knowledge of the history and development knowledge of the contemporary politics in countries like Cambodia and Laos with a keen awareness that I was one of very very few Western Western voices who had any expertise in that area and could offer kind of unbiased analytical and pro-democracy view of that part of the world and then looking at the road ahead and realizing there was absolutely nothing but penury and personal devastation [Music]