Nancy Pelosi challenged her own conscience when the U.S. House of Representatives Speaker on Friday condemned China's legitimate actions against violence in Tibet, but turned a blind eye to merciless rioters.

Apathetic to those innocent victims in the recent Lhasa riot, Pelosi lost her own "moral authority to speak about human rights" when she acted as a defender of arsonists, looters and killers.

The U.S. Speaker became a muckraker of her own hypocrisy when, out of the so-called concerns about human rights in Tibet, she pompously condemned China in Dharamsala, while enjoying the hospitality of the orchestrators of the Lhasa riots.

The death toll in the Lhasa riots reached 18 on Saturday, with the news that a family, including an eight-month-old boy, had been burned to death by rioters in their home. But in her attack on China on Friday Pelosi showed no interest in denouncing the human rights violators among the rioters.

Pelosi's double standards reveal her motives and those of her kind: their indignation is reserved for those occasions when their interests are best served.

Finding a leverage to tarnish China, 'human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case - who is it who is really trampling on human rights? China or the rioters?

Her views are like so many other politicians and western media. Beneath the double standards lies their intention to serve the interest groups behind them, who want to contain or smear China.

Pelosi also pierced, unintentionally, the bubble of so-called universal values - values which didn't get a look-in in her Dharamsala speech.

For years Pelosi, and those of her ilk, have peddled human rights as part of universal values to bring all the countries under the international framework dominated by a handful of powers, but their double standards have apparently turned the universal fantasy into a lie.

When Pelosi lashed out in the name of justice in Dharamsala, didn't she also feel the whip of her own conscience?

(Xinhua News Agency March 23, 2003)