The People’s Republic of China which supports the Palestinian “liberation” movement with both rhetoric and guns, criticized by implication today the Munich killings of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes as “harmful to the development of the cause of national liberation and people’s revolution.” Chiao Kuan-hua, Chinese Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, explained in his General Assembly address that his government “has always opposed assassination and hijacking of individuals as a means for waging political struggles and is also opposed to terrorist acts by individuals or a handful of people divorced from the masses.”
But Chiao asserted that “the Chinese people will always stand together with the Arab and Palestinian peoples in their just struggle against aggression,” and he “strongly” condemned Israel for “the recent barbarous aggression and massacres it has committed against Lebanon. Syria and other Arab countries on the pretext of the ‘Munich incident.”
Chiao declared that the “determined actions” by the “heroic Arab people” to “shake off superpower domination” were such as to “command admiration.” He added that “the Arab countries subjected to aggression are fully capable of recovering their sacred territories and the injured Palestinian people regaining their national rights.”
US-USSR IN DEALS
Chiao warned the Assembly not to believe “the sensational nonsense deliberately spread by a superpower that no counter-attack should be made against Israel’s armed aggression for that would spark a world war.” This view, he said, “is meant to scare people.” He charged both the US and the USSR with “creating” a no war, no peace situation in the Middle East “solely…for their respective interests” and to “strike political deals.” He accused the US of “supporting the aggression by Israeli Zionism,” and he accused “the other superpower” of “subverting” Arab governments.
The Chinese diplomat’s comments on Israel, while condemnatory, appeared milder than those he made last year, when he assailed Israeli “aggression” at length and insisted on withdrawal to the 1947 borders. Peking still maintains this position–as Chiao noted today, “on matters of principle China will never retreat”–but the Vice Minister did not elaborate today on the extent of the Arabs’ “sacred territories.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
