As a working journalist, am I concerned about what's happening to press freedom in Hong Kong?
Absolutely.
But am I going to be lectured on it by plaster saints like the US and its cronies?
Absolutely not.
Let me tell you why.
Imagine if a Chinese journalist blows the lid on a plethora of present day "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" perpetrated by China. And imagine if this journalist breaks the news from another country, but is about to be extradited to China to be imprisoned for the rest of his life or worse. The whole world would self-combust in collective outrage.
Well , there is no such Chinese journalist.
There is, however, a giant of an Australian journalist in such a predicament and the villain of the piece is the United States, not China. I'm talking about Julian Assange, and even as I speak, he continues to be victimised, vilified and crucified in a slow execution right before our eyes.
What did he do to deserve it?
He told the truth.
He dared to be the ultimate journalist, exposing American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the slaughter of civilians, the killing of journalists, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and Washington's secret war on Yemen where mass murder still continues under the auspices of the White House.
Fun fact - all of these are undeniable crimes secretly documented by the US government itself; they were just not meant to be exposed by Assange.
The US was so embarrassed, and so hell-bent on vengeance, that it orchestrated a global campaign to destroy him with the complicity of vassal states like Britain and Australia.
Assange took refuge at Ecuador's embassy in London for seven years before British police dragged him out and threw him into a maximum-security prison that houses, terrorists, murderers and rapists.
Nearly three years later, after a sham trial in a kangaroo court, with the flimsy case against Assange thoroughly discredited, Britain's much-vaunted justice system has paved the way for his extradition to the US, where he faces certain death.
They have already dehumanised and reduced him to a suicidal, stroke-ridden, physical and mental wreck of a man, but they're not done with him yet.
Speaking of kangaroo justice, not a word, not a peep, out of the Australian government over this appalling persecution of its own citizen. They're all laser-focused on worrying about journalists in Hong Kong instead. Perhaps we should be flattered by all the love and attention.
By the way, we also know now that the CIA actually plotted to assassinate Assange in London, even exploring the option of murdering him in a street shoot-out.
Go democracy!
I quote American journalist Chris Hedges: "Julian Assange committed the empire's greatest sin - he exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Labour, Trump or Biden - it does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds."
Is there no limit to the insufferable hypocrisy of these gangsters in glass houses, these emperors who have no clothes? They defecate all over human rights and press freedom in the name of national security whenever it suits them, calling it "justice".
When some other country they don't like does anything of that sort, it's "repression".
How convenient.
Here I quote another astute political commentator from the West, George Galloway: "If Julian Assange were a Chinese journalist and publisher, he'd have the Nobel Prize. He would be the centrepiece of Human Rights Day. If Chinese crimes rather than American crimes had been revealed by Assange, he would now be the poster boy for the Winter Olympics' boycott campaign."
What they're doing to this brave man who has done more for journalism than any of us is a travesty, an atrocity, an abomination.
Until and unless they free Assange, the US, the UK and Australia - and any other nation in bed with this menage a trois of morally bankrupt Western powers, pardon my French - have no right to preach human rights and press freedom to the rest of us.
Flush your own faeces first before you lecture us on sanitation.
Yonden Lhatoo is the Chief News Editor of the South China Morning Post
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