Page 261 - Communist Chinas Policy of Oppression in East Turkestan

257

for their own ends. The most important of these was China.
China tried to portray the United States' reaction to terrorism as "a
war against Muslims," and issued a message in October, 2001. That

message said, in essence, that China wanted to cooperate with the
Western world against the Islamic terrorists in East Turkestan.
Yet that statement by China is a clear contradiction. The people of
East Turkestan are waging an entirely justified struggle to protect their
own values and culture, live according to their own religion, and speak
their own language. For many years now, that struggle has been waged
on a purely democratic platform, as a result of the good sense of the
East Turkestan leaders. There may be individuals or groups in East
Turkestan who are inclined to the use of violence, just as in any other
society, but that does not change the fact that the struggle of East
Turkestan is justified. The real terrorist force in the region, as we have
seen throughout this book, is the Chinese regime, which is waging a
long-term campaign of genocide against the innocent Muslims of East

Turkestan.
Western commentators were not slow to express this fact. Former
U.S. Senator Jesse Helms was one of these. An example is an article ti-
tled "Beware China's Ties to the Taliban" in the October 14, 2001, edition
of The Washington Times, just after China's propaganda initiative. Helms
had served for many years as Republican party senator for North
Carolina, and had been a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. In his article, he described how deceptive China's move to
gain the support of the United States and the West really was. He stated
that there were close links between China and the Taliban regime, and
that China was hostile both to Islam and to the West:
…The second rationale for working with the Chinese is the weird as-
sumption that China and the United States share a common interest in

Harun Yahya - Adnan Oktar