As if to prove his prosecutors’ point, four former United States consuls general in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, are continuing a highly coordinated campaign in the Western media to squeeze the last ounce of propaganda value out of disgraced former Next Media boss Jimmy Lai Chee-ying.

Lai is on trial in Hong Kong under the National Security Law for Hong Kong (NSL) for conspiracy to collude with foreign forces during the 2019-20 anti-government riots, among other charges. If convicted, the 76-year-old will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. The US must be thinking it’s better to make a “martyr” out of an alleged traitor.

The same foreign forces are hard at work covering for Lai’s activities that led to the charges and to cast doubts and to lie about the independence and integrity of Hong Kong’s judiciary.

At the same time, politicians in the US Congress have been demanding that the White House extend sanctions against Hong Kong and Chinese mainland officials to target Hong Kong’s judges and prosecutors as well. If that’s not foreign inference, I don’t know what is.

The fact that the four former diplomats sent their joint statement as a letter to the editor of the right-wing Wall Street Journal — which has led the charge in the US media in trying to discredit Lai’s trial — gives the game away.

As told by prominent Hong Kong journalist and author Nury Vittachi in 1995, when Lai’s Apple Daily was launched, L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and his wife Minky Worden, already had a close association with Lai.

The American couple worked as political busybodies against China for the next three decades. Crovitz’s wife, Worden, had advised Hong Kong opposition groups, according to Vittachi. As a director of global initiatives for Human Rights Watch, a group often criticized for its close ties with the US government, she was closely involved in a major, if unsuccessful, US campaign against the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.

It’s remarkable that US diplomats, including these former ones, fret so much about a former media boss in Hong Kong facing an open and transparent trial while actively ignoring or denying severe human rights breaches against journalists — such as killing them and denying them medical treatment ¬— because their allies and their government commit them

Crovitz was on the corporate board of Apple Daily that made the ultimate decision to shut down the newspaper. Lai’s former longtime right-hand man, Mark Simon, was a retired US military intelligence officer and ex-head of Republicans Abroad in Hong Kong; no wonder Lai used to have such easy access to top US politicians and officials on Capitol Hill, where they rolled out the red carpet every time he visited.

Given the longstanding American nexus, is it surprising that The Wall Street Journal publishes periodic editorials glorifying Lai and demonizing Hong Kong?

It’s remarkable that US diplomats, including these former ones, fret so much about a former media boss in Hong Kong facing an open and transparent trial while actively ignoring or denying severe human rights breaches against journalists — such as killing them and denying them medical treatment ¬— because their allies and their government commit them.

Yes, the US government, their government! You probably have never heard of Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen, war commentator and blogger, who died in January in Kharkiv, Ukraine, after a prolonged period of medical neglect in prison. You won’t read about his case in The Wall Street Journal.

Ukrainian authorities jailed him for supposedly being pro-Russian, that is, arguing Ukraine couldn’t win the war because the regime of Volodymyr Zelensky was dictatorial and corrupt, and the US was just prosecuting another brutal and senseless proxy war. According to a media statement issued by Lira’s father, the US State Department and the US embassy in Ukraine completely ignored his son’s plight, despite his US citizenship and the leverage Washington had over Kyiv.  

Remember Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks? Many people around the world do, unlike the Australian government, which prefers to forget all about him. Confined in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London for almost five years — under conditions denounced by the United Nations human rights inspectors and other rights groups as inhumane — following involuntary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years, Assange is fighting extradition to the US on obscure spy charges. His real crimes? Exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in a February statement, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described Israel’s “scorched-earth” military operation in Gaza as “the deadliest, most dangerous conflict for journalists in recent history”. At least 122 journalists and media workers have been killed since October, many alongside their family members, including young children.

How were they killed? Mostly with heavy American-made weapons weighing up to 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) that are guaranteed to level entire neighborhoods in the world’s most densely populated strip of land.

That’s ok, though: If the US and its close allies do it, it’s not war crimes or human rights breaches. The lives of Palestinian journalists don’t count anyway; they are all “Hamas propagandists” who had what was coming to them from the Israel Defense Forces, the “most moral military in the world”, says Israel. Seriously!

But Lai, facing an open court with transparent laws, being transported in air-conditioned Correctional Services vehicles, well, that’s “political repression”.

The author has been a senior writer for a number of leading Hong Kong publications, including Oriental Daily News.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.