OxBlog

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

# Posted 10:25 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE ART OF JUXTAPOSITION: Forgive me for being a week late with this one, but I think it's worth pointing out. Last Tuesday, the WaPo ran this Fareed Zakaria column, which does a good job of making the usual case against Bush's unilateral instincts. The anchor for Fareed's column is his observation that Chinese President Hu Jintao has been getting standing ovations throughout Asia while George Bush gets the cold shoulder.

Below Fareed's column, the Post ran this op-ed by Robert Bernstein, a founder of Human Rights Watch. In it, Bernstein discusses the media's tragic lack of attention to massive slave labor camps and widespread police brutality in China. Running alongside Zakaria's column, it makes a devastating point about the moral confusion of those who applaud Hu Jintao while lashing out George Bush. (Greg Djerejian made the same point quite effectively a short while back.)

While criticism of George Bush is certainly deserved, the intensity of the anger directed at the American President demonstrates that his critics abroad have internalized a dangerous double standard that judges aggression against dictators to be a far greater crime than the vicious abuse of millions of one's fellow citizens.
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