BEIJING, March 3 -- For the world's "most active human rights defender," the latest random killing of 29 innocent civilians at a crowded Chinese train station is too insignificant to be a terrorist activity.

The U.S. Embassy in China has downplayed the severity of the bloody carnage in southwestern Kunming City, calling it on its official Weibo account a "horrible and totally meaningless act of violence," short of calling the murderers "terrorists."

The wording is the continuation of the government's ambiguous stance on China's counter-terrorism drive in Xinjiang, the northwestern autonomous region haunted by suicide bombs and deadly assaults.

In a related development, CNN, which apologized after its biased news photo editing in reporting of the March 14 riot in Tibet's capital of Lhasa in 2008, has again showed its doubts and disbelief, if not irony, by using quotation marks around the word "terrorists" in its latest reportage of the Kunming slaughter.

How the U.S. government and some media described the terrorist attacks in China has revealed their persistent double standard in the global fight against terrorism.

Their leniency for the terrorists is sending signals of encouragement to potential attackers.

This is not the first time they have adopted this double standard on terrorism. In October, CNN published an op-ed article titled "Tian'anmen crash: Terrorism or cry of desperation?" after separatists in a vehicle slammed into the Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, killing five and injuring 40.