Death doesn’t lie, but people do. Soon after news broke of race killings in Urumqi, Xinjiang, on Sunday, July 5, Nathaniel Tan said:
I hope the world pays more attention to this. I really hope the Chinese government stops this heavy handed violence against Muslim minorities (emphasis added).
Turks, kin to the Uyghur Chinese and 4,000km away, did pay attention. Nathaniel Tan’s message is repeated in the exact same fashion in Turkey in nearly daily demonstrations against China. The message is clearly this: the Uyghur is the repressed group, therefore, innocent and no Han was killed by them. Following from that moral inversion, the Han government is responsible for the “heavy handed violence” against Uyghurs instead, even killing them. Below is the ethnic breakdown of those killed in Urumqi because of race:
- Han – 137
- Uyghur – 46
- Hui – 1
- Total – 184 (up from 150+ in initial count)
Death will not lie, but is one to agree with Nathaniel Tan that the 46 Uyghurs (who are Muslims) were killed by the Chinese government? How did the 137 Han die? In whose hands? By the government’s heavy-handed violence?
All know the answers, of course. But, beyond these statistics, there is the nagging question, should there be justice for the families of those killed? Incredulously, Nathaniel Tan’s implicit answer is, “No”. He goes beyond exonerating Uyghurs for the killings, blaming the government instead (as did the Western media), by actually suggesting that anybody from the Muslim Uyghur population who had killed anybody should be let off. Says he:
Mass arrests are (sic!) not the answer.
Murder is justified because there’s an ongoing “mass movement” (PKR’s favourite catchwords and available from Nathaniel Tan’s blog as well).
After A. Kugan was killed in a police lockup, Nathaniel Tan’s PKR buddies were shouting for the heads of the killers. Yet if, elsewhere, 184 were killed in their homes, shops and on the streets, they would count for nothing. Their killers should not be arrested, he says. Such is his morality; 137 lives with one ethnicity is cheap, one life (A. Kugan’s) from another is worth more.
That morality is reflected in his politics where it is obvious as to the reason Nathaniel Tan says the things he said. He is playing minority politics. It is a kind of victimhood, a kind of White man’s guilt-ridden liberal Left politics that say all minorities are innocent, all poor people are pure, all black Americans are good, all wealthier people are scums, and all majority governments tend to be “heavy-handed violent” oppressors. Transport those values into Malaysia, you have the Nathaniel Tan’s PKR buddy clique. In order to play minority politics (for the Chinese, Indians, Christians, and the PAS Malays) in Malaysia, Nathaniel Tan will defend minorities elsewhere, in this case Uyghurs in Xinjiang, even if they killed his mother. This is the way of the liberal Left, of Nathaniel Tan and of minority politics; it is called equal value treatment – minorities everywhere are wherever equal.
Under such an equality, the principle says, we have to defend the minority Uyghurs (never mind if they killed anybody) because we are fighting for the minorities in Malaysia (where Muslims are also the majority). A minority group suddenly killing the majority shatters all the moral equivalence but, what the heck, all is for the politics, you see; even if one kind of life is rendered cheaper than another kind.
This man, his values, his equality principles, and the PKR’s copycat minority politics of his days are mind-boggling, if not perverse. Imagine then the day the PKR comes to power; it could do more damage than a hundred Umnos stacked up.
