Apparently China Southern Airlines Xinjiang Branch is trying to counter bad publicity due to the alleged terror attack that diverted an Urumqi to Beijing flight last Friday by drowningBaidu Newsinaseaofpressreleases, all released this afternoon.
Not Terrorists!
Most of them were released on the website avbuyer.com.cn, which is brought to you by the same people who publish the official magazine of the General Administration of Civil Aviation in China (CAAC). Subject matter included: new lounges and VIP services at Urumqi airport, the warming and soothing service provided to delayed Spring Festival travelers (because of the blizzards in Eastern China), saluting Chinese peacekeepers returning home with traditional Uyghur dances, the cleaning and maintenenace of aircraft serving the Xinjiang region, improving ground staff training for the Xinjiang branch, paying attention customer service in Xinjiang, the recollections of a China Southern Xinjiang Branch flight attendant who offhandedly remarks she considered joining the military, and a declaration by the 2008 class of flight attendants for the XJ Branch in which they state that as the “flowers of the Motherland”, they are “customer service and safety defenders”.
Apparently China Southern Airlines Xinjiang Branch is trying to counter bad publicity due to the alleged terror attack that diverted an Urumqi to Beijing flight last Friday by drowningBaidu Newsinaseaofpressreleases, all released this afternoon.
Not Terrorists!
Most of them were released on the website avbuyer.com.cn, which is brought to you by the same people who publish the official magazine of the General Administration of Civil Aviation in China (CAAC). Subject matter included: new lounges and VIP services at Urumqi airport, the warming and soothing service provided to delayed Spring Festival travelers (because of the blizzards in Eastern China), saluting Chinese peacekeepers returning home with traditional Uyghur dances, the cleaning and maintenenace of aircraft serving the Xinjiang region, improving ground staff training for the Xinjiang branch, paying attention customer service in Xinjiang, the recollections of a China Southern Xinjiang Branch flight attendant who offhandedly remarks she considered joining the military, and a declaration by the 2008 class of flight attendants for the XJ Branch in which they state that as the “flowers of the Motherland”, they are “customer service and safety defenders”.
Xinjiang Acting Chairman Nur Bekri during a CCTV interview this weekend
A day after leading the National Peoples Congress in pledging to strike harder against “the three evil forces of terrorists, separatists and extremists”, recently appointed Xinjiang Acting Chairman Nur Bekri said today that an “air disaster” was foiled on board a flight en route to Beijing from Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. China Southern flight flight CZ6901 left Urumqi at 10:35, and was forced to land at Lanzhou, capital of neighboring Gansu Province, at 12:40 Friday, according to China Daily.
Nur Bekri was quoted in China Daily and Reuters as saying “”Who the people involved in the incident were, where they were from, what their aim was and what their background was, we are now investigating,” “Fortunately our air crew took resolute measures, discovered and put a stop to this action promptly. All the passengers, crew and the aircraft are safe,” and that it was “up to the police department to verify” whether it was a terrorist plot, “but we can be sure that this was a case intending to create an air crash.” An anonymous source also told Reuters that two passengers were arrested and an “inflammable material” was found in the toilet.
But what if this was a false alarm? Would the Chinese government admit so, or would they stick to their guns about it being an “attack”? Security expert and internet celebrity Bruce Scheneier has written repeatedly on his blog and for Wired Magazine about what he calls “The War on The Unexpected”, pointing out how US War on Terror policies often makes terrorist threats out of molehills, and authorities have difficulty walking them back:
Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.
This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professorrecycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.
Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim — the person who was different in the first place — for having the temerity to try to trick them.
It’s pretty easy to imagine something like this happening in China, and even worse there’s even less investigative journalism or government transparency to reveal that there was ever a mistake in the first place. China has hardly any publicly available evidence of the various Xinjiang terror incidents reported over the years, and have yet to publicly identified the identities or confessions of terrorists caught in either last years cave raid or the more recent apartment raid. This is surprising for a country where its not uncommon to hold public rallies where convicted criminals are displayed and “the masses cheer”. Given the recent wave of Chinese media reports about being vigilant in the face of Xinjiang terrorism in the run-up to the Olympics, its easy enough to imagine that a paranoid flight attendant on a flight from Urumqi might mistake hand cream left in the toilet for a bomb. The plane makes an emergency landing and the affair is forever after included as a “terrorist incident”. One can be just as skeptical that incidents like the cave raid and the apartment battle were in fact against illegal miners and drug dealers, which can all to easily be lumped under “terrorists” given China’s sloppy and probably purposely vague language in defining the “three evil forces”. Reuters and AFP would be wise to use even more skeptical quotation marks when reporting on “alleged” “attacks”. At this point I’d suggest a 2:1 word-to-“word” ratio.
UPDATE: As an added note, with the exception of Phoenix TV, which reported 8PM local time on Sunday (when foreign outlets and the China Daily English site were breaking it), no Chinese language internet site appears to have reported this news until Monday, roughly 10 hours later. Xinhua’s Chinese language site still appears not have an article on it. Does this mean domestic media was told to sit on the story because of the NPC? They sat on the apartment raid story for a couple of weeks before it was broken to a pro-PRC HK Daily as a rumor, and they could’ve kept it hush hush. In the past China has had a schizophrenic approach to publicizing Xinjiang terrorism – on the one hand, it allowed them to seek legitimacy for the conflict under the rubric of the GWOT, while on the other it contradicted claims that it was all under control. One would think they had, after that experience the past few years, considered a media strategy for publicly releasing information, especially to the foreign press, about incidents during the run up to the Olympics.
Xinjiang Acting Chairman Nur Bekri during a CCTV interview this weekend
A day after leading the National Peoples Congress in pledging to strike harder against “the three evil forces of terrorists, separatists and extremists”, recently appointed Xinjiang Acting Chairman Nur Bekri said today that an “air disaster” was foiled on board a flight en route to Beijing from Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. China Southern flight flight CZ6901 left Urumqi at 10:35, and was forced to land at Lanzhou, capital of neighboring Gansu Province, at 12:40 Friday, according to China Daily.
Nur Bekri was quoted in China Daily and Reuters as saying “”Who the people involved in the incident were, where they were from, what their aim was and what their background was, we are now investigating,” “Fortunately our air crew took resolute measures, discovered and put a stop to this action promptly. All the passengers, crew and the aircraft are safe,” and that it was “up to the police department to verify” whether it was a terrorist plot, “but we can be sure that this was a case intending to create an air crash.” An anonymous source also told Reuters that two passengers were arrested and an “inflammable material” was found in the toilet.
But what if this was a false alarm? Would the Chinese government admit so, or would they stick to their guns about it being an “attack”? Security expert and internet celebrity Bruce Scheneier has written repeatedly on his blog and for Wired Magazine about what he calls “The War on The Unexpected”, pointing out how US War on Terror policies often makes terrorist threats out of molehills, and authorities have difficulty walking them back:
Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.
This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professorrecycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.
Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim — the person who was different in the first place — for having the temerity to try to trick them.
It’s pretty easy to imagine something like this happening in China, and even worse there’s even less investigative journalism or government transparency to reveal that there was ever a mistake in the first place. China has hardly any publicly available evidence of the various Xinjiang terror incidents reported over the years, and have yet to publicly identified the identities or confessions of terrorists caught in either last years cave raid or the more recent apartment raid. This is surprising for a country where its not uncommon to hold public rallies where convicted criminals are displayed and “the masses cheer”. Given the recent wave of Chinese media reports about being vigilant in the face of Xinjiang terrorism in the run-up to the Olympics, its easy enough to imagine that a paranoid flight attendant on a flight from Urumqi might mistake hand cream left in the toilet for a bomb. The plane makes an emergency landing and the affair is forever after included as a “terrorist incident”. One can be just as skeptical that incidents like the cave raid and the apartment battle were in fact against illegal miners and drug dealers, which can all to easily be lumped under “terrorists” given China’s sloppy and probably purposely vague language in defining the “three evil forces”. Reuters and AFP would be wise to use even more skeptical quotation marks when reporting on “alleged” “attacks”. At this point I’d suggest a 2:1 word-to-“word” ratio.
UPDATE: As an added note, with the exception of Phoenix TV, which reported 8PM local time on Sunday (when foreign outlets and the China Daily English site were breaking it), no Chinese language internet site appears to have reported this news until Monday, roughly 10 hours later. Xinhua’s Chinese language site still appears not have an article on it. Does this mean domestic media was told to sit on the story because of the NPC? They sat on the apartment raid story for a couple of weeks before it was broken to a pro-PRC HK Daily as a rumor, and they could’ve kept it hush hush. In the past China has had a schizophrenic approach to publicizing Xinjiang terrorism – on the one hand, it allowed them to seek legitimacy for the conflict under the rubric of the GWOT, while on the other it contradicted claims that it was all under control. One would think they had, after that experience the past few years, considered a media strategy for publicly releasing information, especially to the foreign press, about incidents during the run up to the Olympics.
The third week of February was awfully busy for Xinjiang terrorism news.
First, there were reports of a Uyghur terrorist cell being raided by the police in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. The initial report appears to have been in Singtao Daily, the Hong Kong-based international Chinese language newspaper chain, on February 14th. It said that 18 were killed on February 4th in a huge police assault on an apartment in the Happy Gardens (幸福花园) complex, and two security officers were also killed in the full-scale gun battle. The report was subsequently carried over in smaller web publications on the Mainland like Zaobao, but officials would only confirm that there was an incident, nothing more.
Four days later, on February 18th, Global Times reported that the attack, according to an unnamed government official, happened on January 27th, at the Happy Gardens apartments, two terrorist suspects were killed and another fifteen captured. No police officers were injured, contradicting the previous report. Found at the scene, it was reported, were firearms, homemade explosives and instructive material from “external terrorist organizations”, and the suspects consequently “confessed to their crimes”. The article further mentioned that “the incident reminds us that security concerns are not limited to the Beijing Olympics”. The Chongqing Evening Daily website carried an article the following day from Xinjiang Daily that also included a rendering of the apartment assault (above), though it doesn’t look very authoritative with its two cops and 17 terrorists. A Global Times reporter also investigated the scene, finding little but noting that a local police official may have been removed from his position because the suspects were “right under their noses”.
Wang Lequan
As all this was going on, it was also reported that the Chinese military was rehearsing to combat biological and nuclear threats, while the Hong Kong pro-PRC paper Wen Wei Po said there were fears of such attacks from East Turkestan groups. Even more significantly, Xinjiang Party chief and all-around top guy Wang Lequan gave an extensive interview on Phoenix TV (video below). Notable highlights included
1) Opening with footage of Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble warning of terrorist attacks at the Beijing Olympics, and FBI Director Robert Mueller speaking of his confidence in security during the Olympics, followed by the invocation of September 11.
2) Footage from the video of the “Hotan Conference” in 1996, where the Allah Party, or Hizbollah, of East Turkestan supposedly took oaths to sacrifice themselves to establish an Islamic extremist independent Xinjiang. Xinjiang scholar Yitzhak Shichor saw the same footage(PDF) as part of a Chinese documentary shown to him in 2002, and said of this and one other organization (The Party of Islamic Reformers) “At best, they are – or were –small and loosely organized of little operative value. At worst, they may have been a figment of Chinese imagination or even invented by Beijing. When the Chinese issued their list of “East Turkestan terrorist organizations” on December 15, 2003, these two “parties” have not been included.15 Are these terrorist organizations or not? It seems that Beijing has some doubts, at least.”
3) That after the Yili incident, the East Turkestan Independence Movement launched an assault on vehicles carrying prisoners with a “squadron of 40-50 bicycles”, leaving security forces no choice but to open fire and kill one person. “Voice of America said we killed 1000 people, blahblahblah, which is nonsense, simply not the case.”
4) Wang Lequan puts great emphasis on Document 7, a Politburo directive on Xinjiang stability drawn up in 1997. Before this, he says, the answers to such questions as “What is normal religion, what is illegal religion, what are reactionary religious forces, in the past all this was unclear”. The document clarified, first, that the principle of autonomy must be upheld, but foreign religious influence cannot be permitted. “Secondly, we must always remain comitted to the separation of church and state, not allow religious interference in adminstrative, judicial activities, things like education, health, the One Child Policy, these things…” Wang Lequan seemed to find nothing contradictory in advocating the separation of church and state and simultaneously defining “illegal religion”.
5) Wang Lequan tells that he was target #1 on an assassination list.
6) He wraps up with the tale of Rebiya Kadeer, who he claims funded external separatist forces (doesn’t say who), met with a veteran terrorist named Aisha(?) in Turkey, and spread both secret intelligence and terrible lies to people in the United States, and they released her from prison because she had repeatedly given self-criticism, repented, and there were lots of reasons. It’s not terribly clear. Everybody who supports her and her Nobel nomination, he believes, is being fooled. Most perplexing is Wang Lequan’s rambling last sentence:
Why does it say “冷比娅“? Rebiya’s name in Chinese has the first character “re”, as in “hot”. This has the first character “leng”, as in “cold”. Somebody really tired type this up?
So, coincidence a terrorist raid is revealed at the same time that Wang Lequan makes a rather rare extended appearance and the PLA steps up anti-terrorist training while PRC media in Hong Kong plays up the Uyghur separatist threat?
The third week of February was awfully busy for Xinjiang terrorism news.
First, there were reports of a Uyghur terrorist cell being raided by the police in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. The initial report appears to have been in Singtao Daily, the Hong Kong-based international Chinese language newspaper chain, on February 14th. It said that 18 were killed on February 4th in a huge police assault on an apartment in the Happy Gardens (幸福花园) complex, and two security officers were also killed in the full-scale gun battle. The report was subsequently carried over in smaller web publications on the Mainland like Zaobao, but officials would only confirm that there was an incident, nothing more.
Four days later, on February 18th, Global Times reported that the attack, according to an unnamed government official, happened on January 27th, at the Happy Gardens apartments, two terrorist suspects were killed and another fifteen captured. No police officers were injured, contradicting the previous report. Found at the scene, it was reported, were firearms, homemade explosives and instructive material from “external terrorist organizations”, and the suspects consequently “confessed to their crimes”. The article further mentioned that “the incident reminds us that security concerns are not limited to the Beijing Olympics”. The Chongqing Evening Daily website carried an article the following day from Xinjiang Daily that also included a rendering of the apartment assault (above), though it doesn’t look very authoritative with its two cops and 17 terrorists. A Global Times reporter also investigated the scene, finding little but noting that a local police official may have been removed from his position because the suspects were “right under their noses”.
Wang Lequan
As all this was going on, it was also reported that the Chinese military was rehearsing to combat biological and nuclear threats, while the Hong Kong pro-PRC paper Wen Wei Po said there were fears of such attacks from East Turkestan groups. Even more significantly, Xinjiang Party chief and all-around top guy Wang Lequan gave an extensive interview on Phoenix TV (video below). Notable highlights included
1) Opening with footage of Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble warning of terrorist attacks at the Beijing Olympics, and FBI Director Robert Mueller speaking of his confidence in security during the Olympics, followed by the invocation of September 11.
2) Footage from the video of the “Hotan Conference” in 1996, where the Allah Party, or Hizbollah, of East Turkestan supposedly took oaths to sacrifice themselves to establish an Islamic extremist independent Xinjiang. Xinjiang scholar Yitzhak Shichor saw the same footage(PDF) as part of a Chinese documentary shown to him in 2002, and said of this and one other organization (The Party of Islamic Reformers) “At best, they are – or were –small and loosely organized of little operative value. At worst, they may have been a figment of Chinese imagination or even invented by Beijing. When the Chinese issued their list of “East Turkestan terrorist organizations” on December 15, 2003, these two “parties” have not been included.15 Are these terrorist organizations or not? It seems that Beijing has some doubts, at least.”
3) That after the Yili incident, the East Turkestan Independence Movement launched an assault on vehicles carrying prisoners with a “squadron of 40-50 bicycles”, leaving security forces no choice but to open fire and kill one person. “Voice of America said we killed 1000 people, blahblahblah, which is nonsense, simply not the case.”
4) Wang Lequan puts great emphasis on Document 7, a Politburo directive on Xinjiang stability drawn up in 1997. Before this, he says, the answers to such questions as “What is normal religion, what is illegal religion, what are reactionary religious forces, in the past all this was unclear”. The document clarified, first, that the principle of autonomy must be upheld, but foreign religious influence cannot be permitted. “Secondly, we must always remain comitted to the separation of church and state, not allow religious interference in adminstrative, judicial activities, things like education, health, the One Child Policy, these things…” Wang Lequan seemed to find nothing contradictory in advocating the separation of church and state and simultaneously defining “illegal religion”.
5) Wang Lequan tells that he was target #1 on an assassination list.
6) He wraps up with the tale of Rebiya Kadeer, who he claims funded external separatist forces (doesn’t say who), met with a veteran terrorist named Aisha(?) in Turkey, and spread both secret intelligence and terrible lies to people in the United States, and they released her from prison because she had repeatedly given self-criticism, repented, and there were lots of reasons. It’s not terribly clear. Everybody who supports her and her Nobel nomination, he believes, is being fooled. Most perplexing is Wang Lequan’s rambling last sentence:
Why does it say “冷比娅“? Rebiya’s name in Chinese has the first character “re”, as in “hot”. This has the first character “leng”, as in “cold”. Somebody really tired type this up?
So, coincidence a terrorist raid is revealed at the same time that Wang Lequan makes a rather rare extended appearance and the PLA steps up anti-terrorist training while PRC media in Hong Kong plays up the Uyghur separatist threat?
Jingjing and Chacha, China’s virtual internet cartoon cops, sometimes walk across select webpages on the Chinese ‘net and say “远离淫秽色情倡导文明上网” and “拒色低俗内容弘扬和谐向上”, which translates roughly as “eliminate obscene pornography, support a civilized ‘net” and “resist pornographic, base and vulgar content, promote a harmonious [society]”. Refresh to view again, there are three below.
http://www.sinaimg.cn/home/swf/110_750_01.swf http://www.sinaimg.cn/home/swf/110_750_02.swf http://www.sinaimg.cn/home/swf/110_750_03.swf (Links provided by Feng37, who got them from the guys at Danwei)
So Steven Spielberg has given up on trying to sway the Chinese government to make things happen in Darfur, and resigned (he never signed his contract) as an advisor to the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies.
Mr. Spielberg, it can safely be assumed, has the best of intentions and tried in his own way to work within the system as a voice of “moral authority”, sending a letter to Hu Jintao and trying to get a meeting to discuss his concerns. He did get to meet the Chinese special envoy to Darfur at the UN, but obviously wasn’t satisfied.
So far there seem to be two sides to this. One is Mia Farrow and others who are “jubilant”. Ms Farrow, who started the “Genocide Olympics” campaign, said “His voice and all of the moral authority it gives, used this way, brings a shred of hope to Darfur, and God knows, rations of hope are meager at this time”.
On the other side we have opinions like that shared at Silicon Hutong: “Public efforts by governments, organizations, or individuals from outside of China to coerce or embarrass Beijing into a policy change on matters either foreign or domestic do not work. Instead, they consistently provoke a visceral negative response that is often seen by outsiders as disproportionate or even extreme.”
As SH points out, its not even clear if the Chinese government has enough pull with Khartoum to get them to end the crisis in Darfur. Silicon Hutong argues that “effective diplomacy … also requires tact”, and that Spielberg would have a better chance of success by working discreetly. “How wonderful it would have been to have Mr. Spielberg as a genuine public ambassador, someone with credibility and real pull in China who could help make things happen. Or, indeed, to see China active in the resolution of the Darfur situation, finding out later that Mr. Spielberg and Ms. Farrow played critical roles in driving the process.”
I think there’s another way that no one is talking about here. In a discussion with Feng37, the question was raised about whether the belief that you must work in secret is actually a tactic used by the Chinese government to prevent public embarassments. In other words, if Spielberg worked silently (and not publicized his letter to Hu Jintao or other efforts), he may have simply been strung along with the promise of slow progress until the Olympics were over, only to be ignored afterwards. But one thing that no one, not Mia Farrow, or Spielberg, or the Free Tibet crowd, are not trying, and that’s addressing the Chinese people directly. The assumption on both sides, the idealist Save Darfur campaign and the realist perspective of Silicon Hutong, is that for any movement on the issue you must petition the Chinese government. What about petitioning the Chinese people?
Imagine Spielberg’s statement on Darfur was not in English, and not delivered to Western media and the Chinese government. Imagine, instead, his first and perhaps only statement was in Chinese, and emailed and posted throughout the Chinese Internet. It could’ve read something like this:
Dear Citizens of China,
My name is Steven Spielberg. Some of you may know my name because you’ve seen some of the American movies I’ve directed. Some of you may also know that I have been working with Zhang Yimou planning the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. I want to tell all of you, the Chinese people, why I’m resigning from my post, because ultimately, the Beijing Olympics belong to you, the people of China, and as my employers, you deserve an explanation.
For the past several years, horrible atrocities have been occurring in the African nation of Sudan, and the world has not been doing enough to stop it. UN peacekeepers and aid workers have been expelled from the country, while thousands have been killed. I dearly wish to see peace in Sudan, and I know that the Chinese people feel the same, as they know all too well the horrors of war. The atrocities in Sudan share many similarities to the atrocities brought by the Japanese to China, just as the Nazis committed similar crimes across Europe.
More can be done to prevent these horrors in Sudan today. The Chinese government last year appointed a special envoy to Sudan and made an effort to end the violence, but attacks continue. China has a great deal of influence in Sudan, through its strong economic relationship with the government of that country. I emphatically reject any idea that China is responsible for these tragedies, as some Westerners have suggested. But I do think that China is in a unique position to lead the world in stopping these crimes, by threatening to break off all trade with the government of Sudan. Indeed, did China not naturally wish the same when foreign countries continued to trade with the Japanese Empire?
China is rapidly taking its rightful place among the great nations of the world, and you should be proud. I was and still am truly honored to be associated with the Beijing Olympics. But I have been unable to convince the leaders of China to punish Sudan for its crimes. I am not a diplomat, I am afraid. I have little talent for it, as I am only a film director. But I ask you, the Chinese people, to act on your love of peace and stability, and sever your relationship with Sudan until it stops the violence. Let the Olympics be a symbol of China’s reverence for peace and life that inspires the world. And I will continue to let the world know that the Chinese people stand, always, against the evils of war.
Your humble friend, Steven Spielberg
I’m sure there are better ways to write such an open letter, and no doubt in Chinese there would some perfect phrases to use. But even if it was received as obnoxious or arrogant, Spielberg would have accomplished something new: he would’ve have spoken to the people, not the leaders.
Add: Along the same lines, the Nobel Laureate Open Letter to China at the Save Darfur Campaign could use a Chinese version, couldn’t it? And maybe instead of addressing Hu Jintao, address the Chinese public?
Did One of These Attendants Tackle a “Terrorist”?
Not Terrorists!
Attendants with Peacekeeper Characteristics?
