China - West must stop its double standards on terror attacks

By Liu Jianxi 

A terrorist attack hit London Saturday night less than two weeks after the Manchester bombing. The attack began when a van struck pedestrians on London Bridge; then the suspects left the vehicle and stabbed innocent people in nearby Borough Market. 

The Chinese public immediately condemned the attack online. The incident is similar to a terrorist attack when a car was deliberately crashed in Tiananmen Square in 2013. 

While Chinese netizens are sympathetic about victims and furious at the London terrorists, we also remember how Western media prejudicially reported terror attacks in China. 

In 2014, terrorists randomly stabbed people at China's Kunming Railway Station, leaving 29 dead. In disregard of facts, Western media outlets were reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists, putting quotation marks around the term, and even attributed the attack to the Chinese government's ethnic policies. In the Tiananmen Square terror attack, a car crashed into a crowd near Jinshui Bridge, leaving two passers-by dead. CNN reported the incident with the headline "Tiananmen crash: Terrorism or cry of desperation" and described the terrorists as an oppressed minority, attempting to use "ethnic conflicts" to interpret the violence.

For Western media outlets, ideology seems to be the only criterion for terrorism: those attacking the West are terrorists, while atrocities against socialist countries come from revolt by minority groups that deserve sympathy. The West's double standards on terrorism disregards the human rights of innocent Chinese victims and have tremendously harmed the feelings of Chinese people. More seriously, such double standards are, in essence, acquiescence of terrorism and have boosted the morale of terrorists.

Western double standards will eventually backfire. Lone wolf attacks ripped through Europe in the wake of a series of terrorist incidents in Paris in 2015, posing serious security threats to the whole Western world. How would the West react if Chinese media put quotation marks on London terrorists and attributed the recent terrorist attacks to Western ethnic policies?

We hope that Western media outlets will abandon their double standards in the wake of these tragedies. Terrorism is an enemy of all humankind, and the international community must unite in face of increasingly rampant lone wolf attacks. 

We must cooperate and firmly fight against terrorism in any form. The UK listed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as an Islamic terrorist and separatist organization last year, a move that deserves applause. Double standards on terrorism will only encourage terrorists to commit more violence instead.