.... that's right. Should Israel now be banned from playing international football (soccer) matches for their abuse of the Palestinians? Should US and British athletes be banned from the Olympic Games for their nations' role in Iraq? Of course not. The entire notion therefore, that the Olympic Games should not be held in China is absolutely prepostrous. The reality is that human rights abuses are not restricted to 'dictatorships' but occur in 'democracies' too. You see, we in the West appear to be extremely selective in our condemnation of human rights abuses. In the US today record numbers of people live in relative poverty and the queues at food kitchens are fast approaching the levels last witnessed during the great depression of the 1930s. But very few journalists describe this as a human rights issue.

Similarly, one would be very hard pressed to read anywhere US human rights abuses in relation to its policy of legalised state killing in the form of capital punishment. This is particularly pertinent given that the US currently ranks second in the world behind Iran as the nation that executes more of its fellow citizens per capita of the population than anywhere else on the planet.

Moreover, as a direct result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, some 1.2 million Iraqi's out of a total population of just 28 million have met with violent deaths, 7 million have been injured and 5 million displaced. As I write this the US client Israel rains American bombs down on the defenceless Palestinian people, but you see, these are not deemed human rights issues because the people affected are not useful to 'us'.

When 'we' abuse human rights, to 'them' in far away places, the media fall relatively silent, but when 'they' are responsible for human rights abuses that negatively impact upon our economic interests, the media work in overdrive to condemn them. This is the central issue that underpins media attention on China's human rights abuses in relation to Tibet.

In London on sunday I witnessed the spectacle of perhaps 1,000 protestors lining the streets venting their anger at the Chinese regime. The media attention that this garnered was so disproprtionate as to be beyond a joke. Full page followed by full page in the mainstream corporate media, through to the almost blanket tv news coverage, was dedicated to this event. Compare and contrast this with the 2 million demonstration against the US-led invasion of Iraq 5 years ago in this very city and one will discover that the time devoted to this historically unprecedented display of public anger was perhaps 10 per cent of that devoted to the Tibet issue. The forthcoming Olympic Games - like all sports - are not inherently politicised as some have argued on this site, rather the West as result of their actions, are actively politicising them.