Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered on Tuesday that Russia will work as an ally with the French military to set up joint operations in the fight in Syria. On Monday, French President François Hollande clearly expressed that Paris will team up with Washington and Moscow to tackle the Islamic State. He is hoping to forge an international alliance to jointly smash the terrorist group.

A possible temporary alliance might emerge, a chance that will ease the relationship between Russia and the West. But it will hardly be a deep and long-lasting cooperation.

Only when Western nations are suffering huge losses, or under great pressure, will they be willing to develop collaboration against terrorism with powers like Russia or China. Once there are any changes, their  geopolitical interests and ideology paranoia will regain their importance. Anti-terrorism cooperation between the East and West can only be reached when the latter is in need of more help than the former, and terrorism in the East is always connected to human rights by Western society.

For example, right after Europe was hit by terror attacks, China publicly condemned the terrorists and showed support to France and Europe. However, radical forces in Europe haven't stopped their criticism of China. Certain human right groups and public opinion repeatedly reassert that they do not consider the terrorist and violent actions in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are acts of terror.

The Financial Times quoted human rights groups as saying that most of the attacks by Uyghurs were "carried out with knives or crude explosives" by a group of young people "with grievances against Chinese rule." It has also quoted Amnesty International in calling China's claim of terrorism as "very problematic, very politicized."

The West only recognizes its own style of democracy and accepts only the terrorism it suffers. The egoism of some Westerners has gone to such an extremity that they probably don't deserve the lights that lit up the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai for the victims of the Paris shootings.

We have reiterated that terrorism has deep-rooted reasons, but as long as terrorists launch attacks on innocent people, they have completely lost their entitlement to sympathy. Terrorism should foremost be defined by the act of killing innocents, not the reasons that led to their killings or the tools they used.

Amnesty International and other Western human rights groups have shown more sympathy to the attackers than to people they killed, regardless of the feelings of the Chinese public. These groups have disgusted Chinese people.

The anti-terror alliance between  the West and Russia, although a good thing, may only be of limited scale and won't last long unless the West continues to be a victim of terrorism. We don't wish the West bad luck though. All lives are innocent and terrorism is the enemy of the public.