On the night of 1st March, a group of masked men and women dressed in black walked into the busy Kunming rail station and started slashing anyone in sight with meter long cleavers.
Within 12 minutes, the perpetrators killed at least 29 people and injured 130 more before being stopped, leaving behind a trail of bloodied bodies and abandoned luggages.
Many were on their way home to their families that night, but their loved ones will never see them again.
Chinese authorities have officially declared the discriminate mass killing as an organized brutal terrorist attack and evidence at the scene pointed to Xinjiang separatists as being the culprit.
flag of XinJiang separatists found at the scene
Some netizens commented that the fact that they're masked showed that this is not a suicide mission and they expect to get away with it somehow. It's likely that there is a powerful terrorist organization backing the attack and many feared that this is only the first of many worse to come...
Western reactions
In the aftermaths of this tragedy, news of concern and condolences poured in from major news site all over the world. However, certain Western news media seized this as an opportunity to question and criticise China's ethnic policy...
What's with the quotation marks?
I hazard some personal guesses:
1: The web developers were drunk and mistook quotation marks as HTML markups for emphasis.
2: The perpetrators were dressed in black. This confused the reporters, and in proximity to Easter, they thought they are not real terrorists but chocolate terrorists.
But really, who knows ?
And then some do not even bother trying to be neutral...
Most "objective" media award goes to NYT.
This deliberate mangling of semantics did not go unnoticed by Chinese news and netizens, who was quick to call out on the double standard.
“If you say that the Kunming attack is a ‘terrible and senseless act of violence’, then the 9/11 attack can be called a ‘regrettable traffic incident’,” posted Cao Fan on Sina Weibo, China's microblogging site.
Another netizen mocked: “I express my condolences for the setting off of fireworks and burning incident at the Boston Marathon.”
People.cn, a Chinese news outlet, summed up the stark contrast in semantics used by these Western media in response to the Kunming incident and the Woolwich stabbing a year ago.
Terrorism happens everywhere, not just in the United States. The UN General Assembly Resolutions define terrorism in the following broad terms:
Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them;
The Kunming mass stabbing incident is an act of terrorism in any sense of the word.
The semantic manipulation of placing terrorist under quotation marks masked the true nature of the attack, and is not only damaging to the credibility of those news media, but incredibly disrespectful and offensive to the family of the victims and the Chinese people as a whole.
No matter what ideology lies behind the attack, brutality against innocent civilians should never be tolerated and is not deserving of any sympathy. Applying a double standard jeopardizes the ongoing global efforts against the heinous challenges faced by all mankind.
Let's call a spade a spade and put aside our political agenda to recognize that this is not "terrorism" in quotes, but terrorism, period, no quotation marks needed.
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