Daniel Hannan, who we’ve liked very much here in the past, has an article out today calling out the ‘critics’ of Islamophobia who seem to only focus on the minor things Trump does and says while ignoring the concentration camps where over a MILLION Muslims are being held all because they are Muslim:
China has locked a million Muslims in concentration camps purely because they are Muslims. If that bothers you less than precise definitions of Islamophobia in Britain or unpleasant Tweets by Donald Trump, you need to ask yourself some hard questions. https://t.co/16XJKGay9U
— Daniel Hannan (@DanielJHannan) May 17, 2019
There are roughly 11 million Uighurs in the sparse, arid lands of Xinjiang in northwestern China. At least a million of them — the U.S. Defense Department says it may be as many as 3 million — have been detained in what can only be called concentration camps.
Spokesmen in Beijing claim, somewhat perfunctorily, that these are “educational centers,” teaching the Chinese language and vocational skills. But they don’t really expect anyone to believe that. What they have in fact created is a gulag archipelago: a chain of prison camps, with armed guards and barbed wire, in which a form of cultural genocide is being pursued.
The Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, are being forcibly assimilated into Communist China with a brutality that evokes the Cultural Revolution. They are forced to eat pork, drink alcohol, shave their beards. At the same time, they are subjected to forced labor — yet another reminder that communism, in common with almost every other form of social organization over the past 10,000 years, relies on slavery and that, as the great economist Don Boudreaux likes to point out, capitalism is the one system that tends to eliminate that foul institution.
Hannan says these abominations are barely getting any coverage, while Trump proposing ‘token restrictions’ on Muslims gets a hue and cry from the entire world:
The muted way in which these abominations are covered is puzzling. Sure, there is plenty of hardship in the world. There are wars and refugee crises all over Asia, from Yemen to Burma. But I can’t think of another human rights crisis where there is such a mismatch between the number of people involved and the amount of international interest.
Think of the outrage when President Trump proposed some pretty token restrictions on immigration from a number of Muslim-majority states. There was worldwide condemnation and rage. He was, we were told, validating a form of Islamophobic bigotry that would take us back to the Middle Ages.
Yet when another world power, a totalitarian regime, puts Muslims in concentration camps, the same pundits make mild disapprobatory noises and change the subject. Nor, by the way, does this apply only to American liberals. We find the same double standard among European leftists and, indeed, among commentators and politicians in Islamic countries.
He makes an interesting point.
It’s very much like how liberals in America got so exercised when mosques were attacked in New Zealand but became very quiet when Churches were attacked in Sri Lanka.
Read the rest of his article here…