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By Matthew Russell Lee, CJR PFT Video

UN GATE, September 23 -- While UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres covers up his personal financial links to convicted UN briber CEFC China Energy and prepares to hand UNODC to an anti-protester Hong Kong police chief, Inner City Press on September 22 asked a US State Department briefing if the issue will be raised.
 
  The response, on background so unattributed, was that the September 24 meeting with Guterres is President Trump's; there may be a Secretary Mike Pompeo read out afterward. We hope so.

  In other news, Secretary Pompeo will hold multilateral meetings with Pacific Island leaders on Friday September 27, and speak on the 26th at something called the energy resources governance initiative. Still new USUN Ambassador Kelly Kraft may or may not hold a briefing at the Lotte Palace Hotel.

  They said there would be be a meeting on the Uighurs and Xinjiang - and there was,with this testimony: Secretary Pompeo: let’s hear from Jewher Ilham, whose father is serving a life sentence in China as a prisoner of conscience.  MS ILHAM:  Thank you, Secretary Pompeo.  My name is Jewher Ilham, and I am Uighur.  I am grateful to the United States for the opportunity to speak for millions of Uighurs in western China who remain silenced.  It has become a crime to be Uighur in China.  My father, Ilham Tohti, is a well-known economist and scholar.  He never advocated for separatism but is now serving life in prison because he chose to speak out about the right to believe what you choose to believe, the right to worship the way you want to worship, and the right to think what you want to think.  The only thing he was guilty of was publicly calling for peaceful dialogue and reconciliation.   The Chinese Government targets religion to ensure that people of faith do not answer to any greater power than the Communist Party.  In China, authorities have defaced or demolished churches, temples, and mosques throughout the country.  Crosses and minarets have been replaced with hammers and sickles.  Spiritual images have been removed in favor of photos of authoritarians.  The Ten Commandments have been taken down to make room for government propaganda.  Children are forbidden from attending religious services.  We are witnessing the systematic eradication of ethnic and religious minority identities in China.  Beijing believes Islam is a sickness to be treated with an iron fist.  Uighurs are detained for praying to God, fasting during Ramadan, wearing a beard, or simply saying as-salamu alaykum.  Every day, millions of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in China are being abused, drugged, and indoctrinated in the government’s concentration camps.  Outside of these camps, they’re monitored and tracked using high-tech surveillance.  Chinese officials conduct intrusive home stays, looking for signs of religious practice.  Beijing claims it is combating extremism.  Praying to God is not extremism.  Beijing claims it is training unskilled Uighurs to be productive workers.  Medical doctors and university scholars, professors do not need vocational training.  Beijing claims it is fighting separatism.  Practicing religion and speaking native tongues is not separatism.  Chinese authorities believe that religion and people of faith are a threat to peaceful societies.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  Faith is an antidote to hatred, discrimination, and brutality, because faith breeds love, compassion, and tolerance.  America has shown me the true meaning of the universal rights and value enshrined in the UN Charter.  These rights are worth fighting for in China and everywhere else in the world." Hear hear.

The word Cameroon... did not come up. And to keep it that way, Antonio "Golden Statue" Guterres continues to exclude Inner City Press, now 446 days.

  Who gets to decide which media can enter the United Nations to cover this month's United Nations General Assembly high level week?   

  The answer in today's UN, not unlike in any dictatorship whether China or Cameroon, is one man and his small circle of yes-men and a yes-women, with no due process, no right to appeal, no judicial oversight.   

  In this case the man is Antonio Guterres, and the new yes-woman is Melissa Fleming.

  On September 16 Inner City Press was not only banned by this duo from the UNGA high level week but even a "Democracy Day" event. Inner City Press asked Guterres why after he supposedly prayed, nothing. Then he lied about his caring on September 18, video here. He said, "I don't think anyone has been more persistent and more clear in talking to the Chinese authorities in relation to this issue than myself. It is absolutely not true that I've only done discreet diplomacy. On the contrary, if you remember, in my last visit to Beijing, I not only did raise the issue, but I made it public, and I said more publicly. I said that all human rights need to be fully respected in that situation, and I said that it is very important to act in a way that each community feels that their identity is respected and that they belong, at the same time, to the society as a whole. There couldn't be a more clear message.  So if there is an area where I believe I've been doing publicly much more than many other leaders around the world is this, and I will, of course, go on with the clear perspective that we need to act in order to guarantee that, indeed, human rights, all human rights in all circumstances, are fully respected in that situation." All lies.

Fleming previously served as his spokesperson during his tenure at the UN refugee agency UNHCR. Guterres parlayed that into the top UN job by showing great deference to China on its refoulement to North Korea for torture.   

  Guterres took money from Lisbon-based Gulbenkian Foundation during the year after he left UNHCR. Then once despite his feminist rhetoric Guterres shouldered out women candidates to take over the UN with China's support, Guterres omitted these Gulbenkian payments from the UN public financial disclosure he filed covering 2016.  

  When Inner City Press which while reporting daily from inside the UN also covered the UN bribery trial of CEFC China Energy's Patrick Ho in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan asked Guterres about that case, Guterres refused to answer.    

   Worse, Guterres pretended through his spokesman Stephane Dujarric to not have even heard Inner City Press' question when called on at the UN Security Council stakeout about Cameroon and his closeness with 37 year president Paul Biya.   

   On 3 July 2018 Inner City Press was interviewing Biya's long time Ambassador Tommo Monthe outside a meeting of the UN Budget Committee that Monthe chaired.     Suddenly Guterres' security detail, led by UN DSS Lieutenant Ronald E. Dobbins, grabbed Inner City Press' computer and twisted its arm, video here, right in front of Guterres' official Christian Saunders, now conducting cover up for him at UNRWA.  

  After Inner City Press went to file an assault complaint with the NY Police Department on 4 July 2018 but was told the UN is entirely immune, the next day Inner City Press was barred from even entering the UN to continue to cover the UN Security Council, that day a meeting about Yemen as Guterres took money from Saudi Crown Prince MBS.   

  After a review that did not afford Inner City Press a single hearing or opportunity to be heard or to see evidence, the UN on 17 August 2018 formally revoked Inner City Press' 10-year UN media accreditation.    

  Guterres' motive became clear as Inner City Press, awaiting reinstatement, more closely covered the SDNY federal court where it is now fully accredited.   

  Convicted Patrick Ho's CEFC China Energy had been seeking to buy the Partex Oil Company from Gulbenkian Foundation which paid Guterres undisclosed moneys. It was and is, in short, outright personal corruption by Guterres, on which he refuses to answer questions.  

  On 24 August 2019, alongside continuing the cover the SDNY court, Inner City Press submitted a simple application to the UN like hundreds of other media to enter and cover the UNGA High Level week.

 At 4:30 pm on Friday, August 30 her MALU issued a one-line denial of access: "Greetings Matthew Lee from Inner City Press,  Your media accreditation request, with reference no: M5413398, has been declined for the following reason: Media accreditation was withdrawn on 17 August 2018."   

  So Guterres' lawless UN can withdraw a critical media's accreditation for daring to ask why he omitted from his financial disclosure payments from a company selling its oil company to a Chinese government bribery vehicle - then use the withdrawal to automatically deny access to the UN General Assembly, the so-called global parliament of "We the Peoples."   

  If press freedom means anything, and if the UN is anything more than a dictatorship of a single corrupt censor, this cannot stand.

 Inner City Press will be reporting on the UN and its UNGA either way - but demands to be allowed to enter and cover the often shameful deals of undemocratic nations, like the hundreds of their state media that Guterres lets in to praise him.

The peoples demand the fall of this Guterres regime.

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