Showing posts with label Tibet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tibet. Show all posts

Friday, May 9, 2008

Tibetan takes Olympic flame to Everest top

No irony here. "A Tibetan woman took the Olympic torch the last steps to the top of Everest on Thursday, realising “a dream of all Chinese people."

I'll bet they took the "back way" up from the Chinese side rather than from the Tibetan side..


FROM DAWN.COM:

Tibetan takes Olympic flame to Everest top


EVEREST BASE CAMP, May 8: A Tibetan woman took the Olympic torch the last steps to the top of Everest on Thursday, realising “a dream of all Chinese people”.

“Long live Tibet!” and “Long live Beijing!”, the climbers, all wearing red, shouted joyously into a TV camera after unfurling the Chinese national flag, the Olympic flag and a flag bearing the Beijing Olympic logo.

The ambitious project to take the torch to the Himalayan peak was cast as the highlight of the relay ahead of the Games, which start in exactly three months’ time.

“We have realised a promise to the world and a dream of all the Chinese people,” base camp commander Li Zhixin told reporters after being mobbed by jubilant friends and colleagues.

China has spent billions of dollars on staging the Olympics, eager to project the image of a modern and vibrant country. But protests during the international leg of the torch relay have bruised Chinese pride and provoked a surge of nationalist sentiment.—Reuters

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Dennis Prager answers the question "Why do ‘Palestinians’ get much more attention than Tibetans?" His conclusion is not encouraging: "The world is unfair, unjust and morally twisted. And rarely more so than in its support for the Palestinians — no matter how many innocents they target for murder and no matter how much Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates their media — and its neglect of the cruelly treated, humane Tibetans."

FROM JEWISHWORLDREVIEW.COM:


Why do ‘Palestinians’ get much more attention than Tibetans?
By Dennis Prager
The long-suffering Tibetans have been in the news. This happens perhaps once or twice a decade. In a more moral world, however, public opinion would be far more preoccupied with Tibetans than with Palestinians, would be as harsh on China as it is on Israel, and would be as fawning on Israel as it now is on China.

But, alas, the world is, as it has always been, a largely mean-spirited and morally insensitive place, where might is far more highly regarded than right.

Consider the facts: Tibet, at least 1,400 years old, is one of the world's oldest nations, has its own language, its own religion and even its own ethnicity. Over 1 million of its people have been killed by the Chinese, its culture has been systematically obliterated, 6,000 of its 6,200 monasteries have been looted and destroyed, and most of its monks have been tortured, murdered or exiled.

Palestinians have none of these characteristics. There has never been a Palestinian country, never been a Palestinian language, never been a Palestinian ethnicity, never been a Palestinian religion in any way distinct from Islam elsewhere. Indeed, "Palestinian" had always meant any individual living in the geographic area called Palestine. For most of the first half of the 20th century, "Palestinian" and "Palestine" almost always referred to the Jews of Palestine. The United Jewish Appeal, the worldwide Jewish charity that provided the nascent Jewish state with much of its money, was actually known as the United Palestine Appeal. Compared to Tibetans, few Palestinians have been killed, its culture has not been destroyed nor its mosques looted or plundered, and Palestinians have received billions of dollars from the international community. Unlike the dying Tibetan nation, there are far more Palestinians today than when Israel was created.

None of this means that a distinct Palestinian national identity does not now exist. Since Israel's creation such an identity has arisen and does indeed exist. Nor does any of this deny that many Palestinians suffered as a result of the creation of the third Jewish state in the area, known — since the Romans renamed Judea — as "Palestine."
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