[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]Roll on Beijing!
The dissident run for your life Olympics. Live from the Lenovo/Mao Zedong Stadium.
HG[/quote]
:bravo:
[quote]China alleges Tibetan ‘suicide squads’
By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer,
Tue Apr 1, 2:36 PM ET
China has branded the Dalai Lama a “wolf in monk’s robes” and his followers the “scum of Buddhism.” It stepped up the rhetoric Tuesday, accusing the Nobel Peace laureate and his supporters of planning suicide attacks.
The Tibetan government-in-exile swiftly denied the charge, and the Bush administration rushed to the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s defense, calling him “a man of peace.”
“There is absolutely no indication that he wants to do anything other than have a dialogue with China on how to discuss the serious issues there,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.
Wu Heping, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Public Security, claimed searches of monasteries in the Tibetan capital had turned up a large cache of weapons. They included 176 guns, 13,013 bullets, 7,725 pounds of explosives, 19,000 sticks of dynamite and 350 knives, he said.
“To our knowledge, the next plan of the Tibetan independence forces is to organize suicide squads to launch violent attacks,” Wu told a news conference. “They claimed that they fear neither bloodshed nor sacrifice.”
Wu provided no details or evidence. He used the term “gan si dui,” a rarely used phrase directly translated as “dare-to-die corps.” The official English version of his remarks translated the term as “suicide squads.”
Wu said police had arrested an individual who he claimed was an operative of the “Dalai Lama clique,” responsible for gathering intelligence and distributing pamphlets calling for an uprising.
The suspect admitted to using code words to communicate with his contacts, including “uncle” for the Dalai Lama and “skirts” for the banned Tibetan snow lion flag, Wu said.
Beijing has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of orchestrating violence in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Protests which began peacefully there on the March 10 anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule spiraled out of control four days later.
Chinese officials have put the death toll at 22, most of them Han Chinese; the government-in-exile says 140 Tibetans were killed.
China also says sympathy protests that spread to surrounding provinces are part of a campaign by the Dalai Lama to sabotage the Beijing Olympics and promote Tibetan independence.
The 72-year-old Dalai Lama has condemned the violence and denied any links to it, urging an independent international inquiry into the unrest.
“Tibetan exiles are 100 percent committed to nonviolence. There is no question of suicide attacks,” Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, said Tuesday. “But we fear that Chinese might masquerade as Tibetans and plan such attacks to give bad publicity to Tibetans.”
Experts on terrorism and security risks facing Beijing and the Olympics have not cited any Tibet group as a threat.
Scholars said the claim of suicide squads was a calculated move by China allowing it to step up its crackdown in Tibetan areas.
“There is no evidence of support for any kind of violence against China or Chinese,” said Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at Westminster University in London.
Instead, Beijing is “portraying to the rest of China and the rest of the world: these people are basically irrational” and that there was no room for compromise, he said.
Tuesday’s accusations could also further divide the Tibetan government-in-exile and other groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress, which has challenged the Dalai Lama’s policy of nonviolence, Anand said.
“This is a way of pressuring the Dalai Lama to renounce Tibetans who have created violence,” he said.
Andrew Fischer, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches Chinese development policies in Tibetan areas of China, dismissed Wu’s warnings as “completely ridiculous.”
What China is trying to do “is justify this massive troop deployment, a massive crackdown on Tibetan areas and they’re trying to justify intensification of hard-line policies,” Fischer said.
Drawing from a deep historical reserve of angry rhetoric, Tibet’s tough-talking Chinese Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, recently called the Dalai Lama a “wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast” and deemed the current conflict a “life-and-death battle.” State media has denounced protesting monks as the “scum of Buddhism.”
The campaign against the Dalai Lama has been underscored in recent days with showings of decades-old propaganda films on state television portraying Tibetan society as cruel and primitive before the 1950 invasion by communist troops.
The escalation of the rhetoric to include claims of possible suicide attacks may also touch upon another sensitive issue for China’s communist leadership — unrest in Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region to Tibet’s north, and Beijing’s tight security measures in the area.
Last month, state media reported that a woman had confessed to attempting to hijack and crash a Chinese passenger plane from Xinjiang in what officials say was part of a terror campaign by a radical Islamic independence group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The reports said the woman was from China’s Turkic Muslim Uighur minority.
While the United States has labeled the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization, the State Department alleges widespread abuses of the legal and educational systems by the communist authorities to suppress Uighur culture and religion.
Fischer said China has tried to change the “nonviolent, compassionate” image of Tibetans into one of violence and brutality to draw parallels to the pro-independence stance in Xinjiang.
“If they succeed in portraying them that way, then they can treat them the same way they treat Muslims in Xinjiang,” he said.
AP via Yahoo News[/quote]
PRC preparations for the small arms shooting events.
From what little I could see on BBC today, when the signal wasn’t being blocked, the torch looked like a rugby scrum…every 5min someone was popping out and getting tackled by the tight security.
I wish people would keep politics out of the Olympics.
Me too.
I wish the OC would move the Olympics to some civilized country (like Taiwan!).
Or better yet, just put an end to the damned things. They’re a mockery of whatever values they may have once had.
It must be Charles, the great lord who insisted that he is not going to the Olympics when in the first place, he was not even invited. Hurray to Charles, the great sportman on earth
Screaming Jesus, don’t turn yourself into a low class creature if you can’t beat the game.
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[quote=“beebee”]Screaming Jesus, don’t turn yourself into a low class creature if you can’t beat the game.
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So typical… if one is not a CCP arse-licker, one is low class… what next? Filth? Scum of the Earth?
So, CCP arse-lickers, tell us when and where it is appropriate to voice dissenting political views? How about in Tienanmen Square?
It is not the protesting Tibetans who are polluting sport with politics, but their Chinese overlords.[/quote]
Great column - thanks for the link! 
Usually these protest are always started by people who don’t have the talent or gift to participate in a high caliber athletic game.
If they only lived 1 days of what some of these althetes go through, I think they would think twice about co-opting the games for their personal politics.
How would you like it if Olympic athletes went your workplace to pissed on your career goals?
How would you like it if Tibet were strong enough to invade China and piss all over the Chinese?
After commenting on the torch being “turned off” temporarily in the Paris relay, someone at the office said that the protests are not valid because the protesters are not Tibetan, but the usual group of foreigners, the ones that are always complaining about the same things, today of the PRC, tomorrow is against Starbucks, etc. and that in Europe they should be banned entry in certain countries -hooligan style… :blah:
How would you like it if Tibet were strong enough to invade China and piss all over the Chinese?[/quote]
Do you have any evidence the Chinese are using Tibetans as urinals?
So…then can I bring my ROC flag to any arena?
Who is using the Olympic athletes as urinals? You started this line of argument.
I wasn’t aware of any Olympic athlete oppressing Tibetans. If you have evidence the Olympic athletes are oppressing Tibetans, thus become valid targets of Tibetans, please go right ahead and share.
Tsk, tsk, ac. You’re being disingenuous, and its really unbecoming. You know that the torch of oppression is a symbol of China. China has spent some 30 billion dollars to prepare for the Beijing Olympics and China has missed no opportunity to make political hay from its award of the games and the presentation of the same.
China has nobody but itself to blame for the embarrassment if is now experiencing.
Really the torch is from Greece, you know the people who claim to be the originators of European culture. So I don’t see how it became a Chinese symbol (I know the Chinese invented a lot of things too).
Looks like you’re more interested in the 30 billion China spent. You know it’s impolite to talk about money in polite company. How uncouth…
In Chinese hands, it is the Flame of Shame. 