By Chen Weihua
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| SHI YU/CHINA DAILY |
The storming of the US Capitol in Washington on Jan 6 by a group of Donald Trump supporters has been condemned in the United States and globally. US president-elect Joe Biden has called the group "a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists". Similar terms including "extremists, thugs" have been used by other politicians and media outlets to describe them. And a CNN headline read: Americans watched the Capitol riot in "horror" and "disgust".
The FBI said on Tuesday that it has opened 160 case files and US acting attorney Michael Sherwin said 70 cases have already been filed.
The nationwide crackdown after the riot has been swift and hard.
The reaction this time by the US and indeed most of the Western media outlets and politicians, has been in stark contrast to the one they displayed after the storming of the Hong Kong Legislative Council on July 1, 2019, by hundreds of rioters who broke the glass doors, tore down a metal wall, spray-painted graffiti on the walls, ransacked cabinets and defaced official portraits with rocks and paint.
While the storming of the legislature building in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was much more violent, not to mention the petro-bomb-throwing and vandalism elsewhere in the city, media outlets such as BBC and CNN refrained from calling the rioters even "mobs", and instead referred to them as "protesters". The New York Times called them a "group of activists" in its report on that day.
While Pelosi described the yearlong protests in Hong Kong often marked by violence "beautiful sight", US lawmakers such as Cruz, Hawley, Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio ecstatically fanned the flames. And instead of condemning the mayhem unleashed by the rioters, they seemed to derive a fiendish pleasure out of the violence and lawlessness, and condemned the Hong Kong SAR authorities for taking legal actions against those responsible.
The storming of the Capitol Hill is condemnable and those responsible should be punished. But the attack on the US parliament has once again laid bare the hypocrisy and double standard of the Western media and politicians.
China Daily - 15 Jan 2021
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| Hong Kong Legislative Building attack |
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