By Wang Jiaquan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-25 07:31

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blatantly exercised double standards when she turned a blind eye to the recent lootings, beatings and burnings in Lhasa, capital of Tibet autonomous region, and a few other Tibet autonomous counties in Sichuan and Gansu provinces.

Apathetic to the innocent victims, Pelosi betrayed her own words of "moral authority to speak about human rights" when she acted as a defender of the mobsters.

The US Speaker became a muckraker of her own hypocrisy when, out of the so-called concerns about human rights in Tibet, she pompously condemned China in Dharamsala, while enjoying the hospitality of the orchestrators of the riots.

The death toll in the Lhasa riots reached 18 on Saturday, with the news that a family, including an eight-month-old boy, had been burned to death by rioters in their home.

But in her attack on China on Friday Pelosi showed no interest in denouncing the rioters who violated the human rights of the residents of Lhasa and elsewhere.

Pelosi's double standards reveal her motives and those of her kind: their indignation is reserved for those occasions when their interests are best served.

Pelosi and others who claim to be the "police of human rights" are habitually eager to tarnish China, refusing to check the facts and find out the truth about who is really trampling on human rights?

Beneath the double standards lies their intention to serve the interest groups behind them, who want to contain or weaken China.

Pelosi also pierced, unintentionally, the bubble of so-called universal values - values which did not get a mention in her Dharamsala speech.

For years Pelosi, and those like her, have peddled human rights as part of universal values to bring all countries under an international framework dominated by a handful of powers, but their double standards have turned that into a lie.

When Pelosi lashed out in the name of justice in Dharamsala, did not she also feel the whip of her own conscience?

Xinhua News Agency

(China Daily 03/25/2008 page9)