Readings for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Ezekiel 2: 2-5; Psalm 123: 1-4; 2nd Corinthians 12: 7-10; Luke 4: 18; Mark 6: 1-6
I can't believe that we're still expected to believe that the United States and Great Britain are concerned about human rights or press freedom or that either has any leg to stand on in such posturing.
I mean, how can any of us still believe after the lies about Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the refusal to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the imprisonment of Julian Assange, the demonization of Wikileaks, and the cooperation of the mainstream media (MSM) with all of it.
You're telling me that either London or Washington has the right to pronounce on press freedom? On human rights? Please!
Demonization of China
Nonetheless, they're at it again in relation to China and the desperate campaign of both Great Britain and America to demonize Beijing and its implied invocation of an Asian version of The Monroe Doctrine in relation to Hong Kong [which, by the way, (unlike the U.S. relationship to Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, or Venezuela) is actually part of China.
More specifically, we're supposed to join the MSM and "our" government as well as England's in worrying about the recent shutdown of the Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong - a publication that sounds (and looks -- see above) a lot like The National Enquirer.
Judge for yourself. A recent cover story in The Guardian describes the paper as a tabloid-style publication that has "a chequered history including cheque-book journalism, muckraking and sometimes unethical reporting alongside fearless investigation into government corruption and police brutality."
What? Chequered history? Paying sources for information (probably with money from the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy) and unethical reporting?
Oh, and the paper is owned by billionaire Jimmy Lai who has been imprisoned (according to The Guardian) "on protest-related convictions and national security charges."
So, now it's "Hands across the Planet" for poor Jimmy and his yellow journalism.
Meanwhile Julian Assange wastes away precisely in a British prison for publishing government secrets exactly about U.S. war crimes in Wikileaks - a source that publishes the Washington's own unquestionably true confessions of the criminal acts it desperately wants kept secret from the rest of us.
So let me get this straight: Jimmy Lai's a hero. And we're all supposed to get misty-eyed about the Hong E nquirer's brave reporters. But Julian Assange is a criminal. And Wikileaks doesn't even qualify as journalism.
And, by the way, we're supposed to forget that there was absolutely no press freedom all those years the Brits controlled Hong Kong.
Does anyone else sense the irony?
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