Monday, April 14, 2008
So our big ally in the War on Terror is giving the West a hard time over our treatment of Red China:
The Olympic torch relay will be closed to the public when it reaches Pakistan on Wednesday because of security concerns, a Pakistani government spokesman told CNN.
Instead of the original plan of holding the relay in public streets in Islamabad, the relay will be held in front of invited guests in a stadium, said Lt. Col. Baseer Haider Malik.
The decision to move the relay behind closed doors came a day after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf attacked the West over the protests that have dogged the event.
Musharraf accused Western leaders and media of politicizing the Olympics by criticizing China's human rights record and its policy in Tibet.
"First of all, we consider Tibet an inalienable part of China," he said in an interview with China Daily on Sunday. If "anyone is harboring or abetting the separatists, we condemn that."
Musharraf is in Beijing to meet with various Chinese officials...
..."You cannot superimpose the human rights and democracy environment of a Western country onto other countries," Musharraf added. "That is the error that the West and the Western media makes. This does not work at all and this must stop."...
Now isn't that interesting? May we ask President Musharraf to please exclude himself and anyone else he believes not to be a part of the West (like the other 56 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference) from all the international institutions they are clearly leaching off of and whose founding values they don't share, like the UN and its Human Rights Council? As long as there is such a thing as some level of universal Human Rights, then everyone is going to just have to deal with some criticism.
Unless he thinks that Israel, for one, should start playing by regional standards to solve its problems. Come to think of it, Hama Rules may be the way to go.
