On Thursday, the local police of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region arrested five people, all of whom are top executives of Next Digital Ltd and Apple Daily.

Even though the police said clearly in an interview that the five were suspected of conspiracy to commit collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security, conspiracy theories and rumors still emerged among some Western media, calling the move “political”.

Come on! How could a legal move by law enforcement become political?

Apple Daily has long been known in Hong Kong and the national public opinion field for being a veteran in spreading rumors. During the riots that victimized Hong Kong in 2019, Apple Daily incited violence by inventing rumors and spreading lies almost every day. They showed, in a full page, how US agencies trained pupils to do online attacks, and made delicate posters that cast the rioters as heroes. Their incitement lured many young students into becoming cannon fodder for the riot organizers.

Even after the riots were quelled, they still fabricated news of a person beaten by the police over nothing in January 2020, which prompted the Hong Kong police to send four successive letters to Apple Daily as a protest in January.

The case of its founder and controller Jimmy Lai Chee-ying explains why Apple Daily has such an attitude. They take money from Western bosses. In January 2015, Oriental Daily News reported that most of the funds for the illegal act to “Occupy Central” came from Jimmy Lai and the US National Endowment for Democracy, with the latter playing “color revolution” in one country after another.

In June 2019, the month when Hong Kong first suffered from the riots, Western financial capital hyped up the international stock market, which pushed Next Digital’s prices up by 131 percent. Then Jimmy Lai and his group sold it for a lot of money, which is believed to have continued fueling the riots.

That’s why Jimmy Lai faces charges over violations of the National Security Law. The five suspects will get their fair trials, too, and the local judiciary will decide.

Therefore, if certain Western media outlets insist on covering the incident in the “political” page, please do not selectively omit the information about Jimmy Lai getting money from Western bosses.

For those who face an arrest because of what they did deserve the consequences.

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