As I mentioned, Red China made the same tactics as in San
Francisco !!!
Pro china sup****ters brought mass of big flags, banners moving around
to cover all Tibet's, Vietnam's, Burma's flags. They had free lunches,
T-****rts and bused from other local cities to the city. Their luggages
piles up on the groups blocking the walkway to the ceremony stage. But
in San Francisco, the torch hadn't made to the gigantic stage
(cameras, lightings, and hundreds of empty chairs on stage)
tuna,
------------
On Apr 26, 10:06 am, 1mitee <haivt...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Herald Sun
> Australia
>
> China sent in the clowns
>
> Andrew Bolt
> April 25, 2008 12:00am
>
> IF I hadn't seen the circus with my own eyes, I'd think the $2 million
> we spent running a torch around Canberra yesterday was wasted.
>
> But I watched almost every comical minute of that three-hour relay of
> the Beijing Olympic torch and thought - hallelujah! - money well
> spent.
>
> Far from blowing yet more cash on the most overhyped s****ts day in
> history, we'd been given a lesson on truth and politics that's worth
> even Kevan Gosper's head in gold.
>
> I don't think we'll soon forget seeing Australian police wrestling the
> Chinese "flame attendants" - actually members of China's People's
> Armed Police - in a confrontation over who had the right to guard the
> torch.
>
> Priceless! Here was a rehearsal for the first Australia-China war,
> live on television. How I laughed.
>
> I loved in particular how our nervous police tried repeatedly to shove
> those blue-tracksuited Chinese ones out of camera shot so at least
> viewers wouldn't see they'd been conned by their politicians. I mean,
> weren't we promised by our Prime Minister those Chinese guards
> wouldn't be there?
>
> In a ceremony filled with cant, hypocrisy, fakes and frauds, that was
> the money shot. The one that showed us the truth at last behind the
> spin. The truth about China, about the Beijing Olympics and about our
> own leaders.
>
> You might remember when it was first rumoured that the torch would be
> run through Canberra with a phalanx of People's Armed Police, which
> the Chinese regime uses to, among other things, impose its will on
> Tibet.
>
> Just what knucklehead thought this was how to advertise a totalitarian
> regime's "friendliness", I do not know. I suspect, though, he's now
> off for re-education of the kind for which the country is famous, and
> which help to inspire all the protests along the torch relay that
> China so amusingly calls "the Journey of Harmony".
>
> And, indeed, those blue guards have given China exactly the publicity
> it deserved and did not want, tangling with protesters in Istanbul,
> London and Paris, and being branded "thugs" by the head of London's
> 2012 Games.
>
> Personally, I thought the guards were a great touch, illustrating the
> hypocrisy of giving the Olympics to an oppressive regime that planned
> to use it not to promote world peace, or whatever the International
> Olympic Federation last claimed, but the dawn of the Chinese century,
> in which its authoritarian values will be ex****ted around the world.
>
> But the Rudd Government fast realised those guards would give it some
> blues of its own, especially given Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was
> already seen by many as too close to autocratic China, and too hostile
> to more democratic allies such as Japan, whose crime was to slaughter
> whales rather than Tibetans.
>
> And so here are the assurances it progressively trotted out. From the
> Attorney-General: "Robert McClelland has denied a re****t that China
> had asked Australia for permission for People's Liberation Army troops
> to help guard the Olympic torch when it comes to Australia."
>
> From Rudd: "If there are representatives from the Beijing Olympic
> Committee attending the torch when it is in Australia, my
> understanding from the Australian authorities is that they would be
> travelling in an accompanying bus."
>
> From Rudd again: "We will not be having Chinese security forces or
> Chinese security services providing security for the torch . . ."
>
> Let's summarise: according to our Government, the Chinese did not ask
> to send military guards, and the guards who actually did arrive would
> not leave the bus, and the ones who did leave the bus would not guard
> the flame. Which, ahem, they did as well.
>
> Is that clear? And so we watched three Chinese guards - actually here,
> actually running with the torch and actually shoving police to get
> closer.
>
> You see, they were under orders higher than Rudd's to protect this
> symbol of China's pride. Only a day earlier, a senior Beijing Games
> official, Qu Yingpu, said in Canberra that these "flame attendants"
> would "use their body to form a kind of defence" if the torch was
> attacked. Hence that arm-wrestling you saw. Hence that lesson in
> Chinese diplomacy and in this Government's credibility.
>
> That wasn't the only joke - and lesson - of the day.
>
> The other memorable image of this "Journey of Harmony" was the torch
> being run past brawling protesters, many bused in by the Chinese
> Government, while a dogfight broke out in the skies above. Somehow a
> battle with a newly muscled China was being staged on our soil, with
> China's regime even mobilising troops.
>
> Some 50 buses, we've learned, were laid on to take thousands of
> aggressively pro-Chinese sup****ters from Sydney and Melbourne to
> Canberra, where they were deployed to drown out and intimidate people
> protesting against China's record on Tibet and human rights.
>
> Indeed, Uighur, Tibetan and other protesters yesterday claimed they'd
> been howled down, abused, punched and kicked by some of the pro-China
> demonstrators, several of whom were arrested.
>
> So who were all these people singing patriotic Chinese songs and
> waving huge red flags for the cameras? Who formed this insta-crowd
> that filled the TV screens and allowed China's Xinhua newsagency to
> re****t back home the bright news that "tens of thousands of
> spectators, many of them enthusiastic Chinese expatriates and
> students, had lined both sides of the streets . . . chanting sup****t
> for the Beijing Olympics"?
>
> They were mainly students from China's elite, it appears - students
> who, as a condition of their visas, had actually signed agreements
> promising "not (to) become involved in any activities that are
> disruptive to, or in violence threaten harm to, the Australian
> community or any group in the Australian community".
>
> And who paid for their free buses to Canberra, and issued all those
> Beijing Games T-****rts and Chinese flags?
>
> Ask Zhang Rongan of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, who
> helped recruit the pro-China protesters, and said the Chinese embassy
> in Canberra "is organising buses, food and places to stay".
>
> Whoever did organise all that sure impressed Ted Quinlan, head of the
> committee in charge of the Canberra torch relay, who admitted: "(It
> is) obviously a well co-ordinated plan to take the day by weight of
> numbers."
>
> Well co-ordinated is right. There was even a plane trailing a "Go Go
> Beijing Olympics" banner that reclaimed the skies from the plane hired
> by the Greens to sky-write "Free Tibet".
>
> Gosh, I thought this was Australia. But as I said, it was worth the $2
> million for this lesson - that it might not quite be. Not always.
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