To claim now Jatupat Boonpattararaksa is a prisoner of conscience when in 2013-2014 he proved he had no conscience, is as dishonest as calls for him to be released are unacceptable.
August 19, 2016 (ATN) - The Bangkok Post's editorial staff, along with a handful of office-sharing US-funded NGOs are attempting to invoke national - even international - sympathy regarding opposition agitator Jatupat Boonpattararaksa of the so-called "Dao Din" group.
Boonpattararaksa, who elected to put himself on "hunger strike," is now complaining he is ill, while foreign-funded NGOs demand he be released as a "prisoner of conscience." However, releasing him on such grounds is impossible - Boonpattararaksa has already long-since proved he has no conscience, and being an attention-seeking juvenile is not grounds for dismissing the rule of law and releasing a suspected criminal back into public.
"Dao Din" is a transparently pro-Thaksin Shinawatra political front meshed in with US-funded NGOs, pro-Western and pro-Shinawatra "academics" and Shinawatra's own political machine. Since the coup in 2014, this handful of agitators - with the help of the Western media's Thailand-based correspondents - have staged stunts around the country to portray the public as increasingly opposed to the ousting of the Shinawatra government and current attempts to reform and move the nation forward.
So successfully has the Western media manipulated public perception - at least for Shinawatra supporters - when the nation wholly rejected Shinawatra's calls to "vote no" during the August 7 referendum, many broke down into tears of disbelief.
In reality, "Dao Din," and other groups such as the "New Democracy Movement" are merely rebrands of the increasingly reviled and unpopular United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) red shirts.
The Bangkok Post would recently claim in an editorial that "Dao Din" was merely defending civil and human rights while fighting against what it called "exploitation."
However, if this were true, and since the Bangkok Post itself admits "Dao Din" was active even before the coup, where were these "activists" and their repetitive, very public, and disruptive condemnations when Shinawatra's UDD were killing innocent people in the streets just before the coup unfolded?
The answer is, they were silent. They were silent when innocent people who were truly standing up against corruption, exploitation, and lawlessness were being slaughtered by gunfire and grenades in almost nightly attacks.
This silence equates to complicity - since these groups were active, simply just not interested in the murder of innocent people by terrorists who represented groups they clearly support and now work with and for.
"Civil" and "human rights" were apparently not on "Dao Din's" agenda then - at least not the civil and human rights of those whom they disagreed with.
Here we see once again the transparently self-serving, politically-motivated, biased "convictions" of agitators posing as "activists," hiding behind the principles of civil and human rights rather than actually standing up for them.
Their failure to impartially stand up for such rights regardless of who is being victimized proves definitively that they are not interested in advocating rights, but instead simply using rights advocacy as a means to move their own political and personal agendas forward.
For the Bangkok Post and the foreign media they ape on a daily basis to ignore this fact, and to portray "Dao Din" as genuine activists, reveals that just like "Dao Din," the Post itself is hiding behind rather than standing up for any sort of principle.
With this in mind, calls for "Dao Din" member Jatupat Boonpattararaksa to be released from prison merely because he voluntarily has decided not to eat as part of a "hunger strike," are beyond absurd. Should Boonpattararaksa be released, why not simply let every criminal out of prison should they likewise decide to simply stop eating?
In 2013-2014 Boonpattararaksa had an opportunity to prove he was driven by principles and conscience. He proved he wasn't. To claim now he is a prisoner of conscience when in 2013-2014 he proved he had no conscience, is as dishonest as calls for him to be released are unacceptable.
August 19, 2016 (ATN) - The Bangkok Post's editorial staff, along with a handful of office-sharing US-funded NGOs are attempting to invoke national - even international - sympathy regarding opposition agitator Jatupat Boonpattararaksa of the so-called "Dao Din" group.
 |
| Image: Self-serving attention-seekers who were silent when real human rights abuses took place just before - and in fact - which precipitated the coup they now "oppose." "Dao Din" do not stand up for civil and human rights, they merely hide behind them. |
Boonpattararaksa, who elected to put himself on "hunger strike," is now complaining he is ill, while foreign-funded NGOs demand he be released as a "prisoner of conscience." However, releasing him on such grounds is impossible - Boonpattararaksa has already long-since proved he has no conscience, and being an attention-seeking juvenile is not grounds for dismissing the rule of law and releasing a suspected criminal back into public.
"Dao Din" is a transparently pro-Thaksin Shinawatra political front meshed in with US-funded NGOs, pro-Western and pro-Shinawatra "academics" and Shinawatra's own political machine. Since the coup in 2014, this handful of agitators - with the help of the Western media's Thailand-based correspondents - have staged stunts around the country to portray the public as increasingly opposed to the ousting of the Shinawatra government and current attempts to reform and move the nation forward.
So successfully has the Western media manipulated public perception - at least for Shinawatra supporters - when the nation wholly rejected Shinawatra's calls to "vote no" during the August 7 referendum, many broke down into tears of disbelief.
In reality, "Dao Din," and other groups such as the "New Democracy Movement" are merely rebrands of the increasingly reviled and unpopular United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) red shirts.
 |
| Image: When innocent people were being killed by Shinawatra's supporters in the streets in 2013-2014, groups like "Dao Din" and the "New Democracy Movement" were complicit in the violence and abuse of human rights with their silence. |
The Bangkok Post would recently claim in an editorial that "Dao Din" was merely defending civil and human rights while fighting against what it called "exploitation."
However, if this were true, and since the Bangkok Post itself admits "Dao Din" was active even before the coup, where were these "activists" and their repetitive, very public, and disruptive condemnations when Shinawatra's UDD were killing innocent people in the streets just before the coup unfolded?
The answer is, they were silent. They were silent when innocent people who were truly standing up against corruption, exploitation, and lawlessness were being slaughtered by gunfire and grenades in almost nightly attacks.
This silence equates to complicity - since these groups were active, simply just not interested in the murder of innocent people by terrorists who represented groups they clearly support and now work with and for.
 |
Image: Astroturf antics. Shinawatra's daughter proves the
gimmicks of "grassroots activism" in Thailand actually
come from the top down.
|
Here we see once again the transparently self-serving, politically-motivated, biased "convictions" of agitators posing as "activists," hiding behind the principles of civil and human rights rather than actually standing up for them.
Their failure to impartially stand up for such rights regardless of who is being victimized proves definitively that they are not interested in advocating rights, but instead simply using rights advocacy as a means to move their own political and personal agendas forward.
For the Bangkok Post and the foreign media they ape on a daily basis to ignore this fact, and to portray "Dao Din" as genuine activists, reveals that just like "Dao Din," the Post itself is hiding behind rather than standing up for any sort of principle.
With this in mind, calls for "Dao Din" member Jatupat Boonpattararaksa to be released from prison merely because he voluntarily has decided not to eat as part of a "hunger strike," are beyond absurd. Should Boonpattararaksa be released, why not simply let every criminal out of prison should they likewise decide to simply stop eating?
In 2013-2014 Boonpattararaksa had an opportunity to prove he was driven by principles and conscience. He proved he wasn't. To claim now he is a prisoner of conscience when in 2013-2014 he proved he had no conscience, is as dishonest as calls for him to be released are unacceptable.
