With backing from the US government’s regime-change arm, an Operation Mockingbird-style website called Coda Story is attacking American journalists who have punctured Washington’s sensationalist narratives against China.
by Ben Norton
Part 5 - Coda Story cites US government-backed Uyghur separatist to smear The Grayzone
by Ben Norton
Part 5 - Coda Story cites US government-backed Uyghur separatist to smear The Grayzone
Coda Story’s defamatory hatchet job attacking The Grayzone’s independent investigative journalism demonstrate the deceptive tactics that have become a hallmark of the outlet.
Notably, Coda Story did not challenge any of The Grayzone’s factual reporting on its merits. Instead, the neocon US government proxy site resorted to defaming The Grayzone by citing highly partisan anti-China separatist activists who are themselves funded by the US government.
Caitlin Thompson, the Coda Story staffer who authored the article, previously worked at Foreign Policy, another hawkish pro-war website that is closely linked to the US national security establishment. Edited until recently by David Rothkopf, who has moved on to a lucrative gig lobbying for the United Arab Emirates, Foreign Policy is itself supported by the UAE, an absolute monarchy that practices modern-day slavery.
The main source Thompson relied on to smear The Grayzone was Nury Turkel, whom she identified simply as a “Uyghur lawyer and the Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.”
What the neoconservative blog curiously failed to mention is that Turkel is a separatist leader whose anti-China organization is, like Coda Story, substantially funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy.
A fan of Turkey’s authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkel has also collaborated with the Trump administration to ratchet up pressure on Beijing, successfully lobbying for US sanctions on China.
Coda Story used Turkel to maliciously accuse The Grayzone of “providing talking points to the Chinese propaganda machine.” To support this defamatory claim, Coda Story pointed to Chinese diplomats posting a link to The Grayzone’s factual reporting on Twitter.
Turkel, for his part, is a key figure in a network of US government-funded anti-China groups that provide talking points to the Trump administration and corporate media.
Nury Turkel is a co-founder and chairman of the board of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), one of the most influential separatist groups in the US. The Grayzone has reported on UHRP’s role in the new cold war on China, documenting how Western corporate media reports on Xinjiang and repression of the Uyghur minority rely overwhelmingly on unsubstantiated, hyperbolic claims made by the organization.
Through the National Endowment for Democracy and other regime-change organs, the US government has poured many millions of dollars into Uyghur separatist groups, who explicitly say that they want to break off China’s western Xinjiang province and turn it into a new state they call East Turkestan.
This is part of Washington’s new cold war strategy against China, which seeks to carve up the country on ethno-sectarian lines, much as the United States and NATO did when they balkanized the former Yugoslavia.
The NED has been bankrolling UHRP since it was founded in 2004. Turkel praised the US government’s regime-change arm in a 2005 press release, which noted that the NED is the UHRP’s main source of funding, providing $126,000 in that year alone.
Since then, US government funding for the Uyghur separatist organization has only increased. A search on the NED grants database shows that the CIA cutout gave UHRP more than $1.2 million in funding in the four years from 2016 to 2019, at an average of approximately $310,000 per year.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project gave its stamp of approval to the Coda Story article attacking The Grayzone by republishing the hatchet job on its website. The UHRP has also reposted other smear pieces against The Grayzone, which never dispute facts and instead rely on baseless insinuations.
As a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel is part of an organization notorious for politicizing religion to advance Washington’s geopolitical goals.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has been widely criticized for racism and bias. Its current vice chair, Tony Perkins, is a far-right Christian extremist who, as The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal first reported, purchased a mailing list from neo-Nazi and former KKK grand wizard David Duke and delivered a speech to the white supremacist Council on Conservative Citizens.
Perkins and other Christian dominionists such as Johnnie Moore and Gary Bauer are seated beside Turkel on this hyper-partisan commission. This July, Turkel hammed it up with Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo – a notorious Islamophobe who once proclaimed that politics is “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”
Following his meeting with Pompeo, Turkel lavished praise on the Trump administration for “elevating human rights as a centerpiece on China policy above anything we’ve seen for at least 4 decades.”
Turkel has also actively lobbied for US government sanctions on China. He has published op-eds writing explicitly, “I urge President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on [China].”
When the Trump administration did impose sanctions on top Chinese officials under the Global Magnitsky Act, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom quoted Turkel, insisting the new punitive measures “represent a major victory for religious freedom and an important step toward holding Communist China accountable for its crimes against humanity.”
While painting China as a dystopian nightmare, Turkel has celebrated Turkey’s repressive leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has jailed more journalists than any country on earth (including more than China, a country 17 times larger than Turkey). In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Turkel portrayed Erdogan as a “rock star,” claiming “Ankara’s concern for the Uighurs has set an example for other democracies.”
Coda Story’s reliance on a right-wing, US-backed separatist figure to attack The Grayzone only proved the point that this outlet elucidated in its reports on Xinjiang: The campaign of new cold war propaganda against China relies almost entirely on opposition groups cultivated and bankrolled by Western governments.
This information warfare is also dependent on a media echo chamber nurtured by Washington, which has been deployed to attack any journalist or public figure that threatens the hostile narrative of the new cold war. Despite its claims of independence, Coda Story is little more than a gear in this vast network.
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