by Xinhua writer Wang Xinyi

BEIJING, March 24 (Xinhua) -- Sanctions-addicted Washington is again slapping "penalties" on other countries, targeting Beijing recently with a repeatedly trumped-up charge of human rights violations.

Its ideologically-driven move involving visa restrictions on Chinese officials is yet another malicious trick to contain Beijing by trying to stir up trouble and inflict turmoil on Chinese territory with unwarranted "human rights" allegations.

In fact, the United States has long abused the concepts of "human rights" as a pretext to trample upon international norms and clamor for pressure on other countries including China and as a fig leaf to disguise its despicable history and morbid obsession with supremacy.

It has been peddling completely fabricated lies about Xinjiang such as the so-called "genocide" and "forced labor," based on which it went on to ban imports from there, pressure allies to take sides and politicize the Beijing Winter Olympics.

But lies cannot bear scrutiny. The Uygur population in Xinjiang has doubled to more than 12 million over the past 40 years, while the gross domestic product there has surged by more than 200 times in the past six-plus decades. Absolute poverty has been eliminated. Jobs in the cotton industry pay well and are competitive.

Any sober mind can tell that the more Washington seeks to attack others as a self-proclaimed human rights "preacher," the more it exposes itself as a de facto human rights violator at home and abroad.

In its short history, the United States physically slaughtered, geographically expelled and culturally assimilated Native Americans, and conducted systemic ethnic cleansing against Native Americans over more than a century after the country was founded.

During the period between 1887 and 1933, Native Americans lost about 90 million acres of land. From the end of the 15th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the Indian population nosedived from 5 million to 250,000 -- a real genocide.

There are approximately 500,000 child farmworkers in the United States, and up to 100,000 people were trafficked into the country for forced labor annually over the past five years, studies showed.

Meanwhile, behind a lucrative private prison business is a significant number of U.S. prisoners who have been forced to work for nearly nothing.

In a new poll jointly conducted with NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the Associated Press found that black Americans, many of whom held hope in Democrats' promises on racial justice initiatives in 2020, are especially pessimistic about future progress in achieving racial equality in policing.

Instead of waking up to its bleak reality at home of rampant gun violence, a widening wealth gap, a botched COVID-19 response leading to the death of over 970,000 Americans and deeply entrenched racial divisions stifling people like George Floyd, Washington has chosen to find fault with the human rights records of other countries.

Human rights are "now being used as a cudgel, as a pretext" for the West, especially the United States to "dominate the globe," Daniel Kovalik, human rights expert and lawyer at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has warned.

Washington's latest decision to divert billions of dollars in frozen Afghan assets to the families of 9/11 victims is rubbing salt into the wounds of millions of suffering Afghan people. By robbing the Afghan people of their life-saving money, it has aggravated the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

To salvage itself from a credit bust, Washington is faced with two choices: to quit using human rights as weapons to destabilize and smear other countries and focus instead on rectifying its own human rights abuses, or perhaps, to sanction itself first so as to disprove the "double standard" charges often leveled at it by people across the world. ■