It’s a frightening commentary on the state of freedom in the world today, when in the same week an Iranian women’s-rights lawyer was sentenced to 148 lashes and 38 years in prison, Tehran was appointed to the UN Women’s Rights Committee. That same obscene process appoints wicked human rights abusers, Bolivia, China, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, to make up 13 of the 15 members of the UN Human Rights Council.

And when US President Joe Biden, the putative leader of the free world, concedes after discussing human rights with his Chinese counterpart that, ‘Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow’, we know freedom’s flame is but a flicker. For emphasis, Biden declined ‘to speak out against what he’s (Xi Jinping’s) doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uyghurs in the western mountains of China, and Taiwan…’. In essence, by acquiescing on Chinese human rights abuses, Mr Biden sends a dovish signal to all other UN members practising crimes against humanity.

For President Xi in particular, this was an extraordinary concession. After all, Beijing has battled hard to keep its treatment of minorities a strictly domestic issue.

Mr Biden’s tolerance of Xi Jinping’s behaviour, varies greatly with the contempt he expresses for America’s cultural heritage of ‘slavery and all the vestiges of it’. He publicly declares ‘systemic racism and white supremacy are ugly poisons that have long plagued the United States’. But, what does he mean by ‘systemic racism’? After all Americans twice elected a black president and, in crimes committed versus arrests made, there are no racial disparities.

Nevertheless, US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, repeats the Biden line. After ritualistically accusing Beijing of ‘committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uighurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,’ she recounted her own brushes with racism alleging, ‘Slavery is the original sin of America. It’s weaved white supremacy and black inferiority into our founding documents and principles’.

China took this opportunity to remind the world of America’s discrimination, hatred and, ‘even savage murder, of people of African and Asian descent’. Its deputy UN ambassador sneered, ‘her country’s ignoble human rights record… does not give the country license to get on the high horse and tell other countries what to do’. Allegations of Chinese human rights abuses were dismissed as ‘rumour-mongering through and through and a bare-faced lie’.

But it’s no ‘bare-faced lie’ that more than one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities live in mass internment camps, under intensive surveillance. They receive regular political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation. They can be detained for religious activities such as praying, attending a mosque and growing a beard. It is also true that doctors from leading Chinese hospitals privately admit to harvesting organs from Falun Gong detainees.

Perhaps, in her youth, the ambassador did encounter racism, but it doesn’t seem to have hindered her upward mobility. Yet rather than acknowledge extraordinary progress over the years in rooting out racial discrimination, she and the Biden administration seem determined to smear American exceptionalism, even though that very exceptionalism is what makes the US the number one desired destination for the world’s oppressed.This can be observed daily on its southern borders.

Buoyed by America’s cultural crisis, President Xi  becomes more emboldened by the day. With his sights firmly fixed on a Chinese new world order, using Leninist concepts of power and domination, he capitalises on Washington’s surrender of its moral authority.

He encourages the world to focus on an increasingly divided America. Not only does this enhance China’s relative international standing, but so too, its domestic self-confidence.

By depicting racism as a uniquely Western characteristic, Beijing has successfully distracted attention from its own widespread abuses. In fact, ever since the late 1970s when black students began arriving, racism has been pervasive in China. A top-ranking official recently urged Beijing to ‘strictly control the African people living in Guangdong and other places’.

Multiple reports of inhuman treatment and forceful Covid testing and quarantining have caused outrage among the world’s African communities.

Slavery too, has a place in Chinese history. The ancient Shang and Han dynasties practised it. During the Han period, it is believed five per cent of the population was enslaved. Today, inside the mass internment camps, Muslim minorities work in government-sanctioned forced labour factories. Thousands of others are coerced into manually picking cotton.

Whether this is a cultural norm, as Mr Biden contends or, more likely, the result of institutionalised abuse of political power, is simply academic. Unlike the United States, there will be no civil war to end slavery in China. Nor will there be an enforced Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, colour or for any other reason. Rather, Beijing will maintain its tyranny at home while feeding a network of critical race theory activists busily undermining its enemies abroad.

Since President Biden’s election, these barbarians are no longer at the gate, but operating comfortably from within. Having quickly renounced its cultural heritage and the nation’s founding principles of personal liberty, economic freedom and fiscal restraint, the Biden administration has embraced ‘white guilt’ and become an easy target for the ‘forever needy’, environmentalists and multi-trillion dollar spenders. America is turning in on itself.

For Xi Jinping, this is just what his Chinese doctors ordered. Mr Biden has defined himself as an appeaser and a socialist roader. His messages on human rights are mixed and defensive. He looks weak at home and abroad. Now his administration is equivocating on its intentions to defend Taiwan. No wonder, as China’s world influence and status grows, its contempt for Washington can scarcely be contained.

Abraham Lincoln’s words were never more prophetic. ‘America will never be destroyed from the outside,’ he said. ‘If we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we destroyed ourselves.’