While Beijing Abuses Muslims, Palestinians Woo China

When I was a pro-Israel student leader on campus, I often found myself face-to-face with anti-Israel peers who were also active in Muslim student groups. During one particularly tense anti-Israel event, one of these students looked at me and screamed, “Israel systematically targets Muslims! It’s the enemy of Muslims! And nothing you say can change my truth.”

I walked closer to him and said that I was from Iran. I then asked, “Would you and your organization co-host a ‘Free Iran’ protest with us if we planned something together? Iran kills so many Muslims. Over 70 million Muslims are held hostage there, especially women.”

He didn’t answer. So I added, “What if, for just one day, I take off my ‘pro-Israel hat’ and am just a regular Iranian? Would you protest Iran with me and other Iranian students?”

Again, silence. 

Several years later, I attended a pro-Israel counterprotest in Los Angeles. It was Spring 2012 and I was thinking a lot about Syria. So I tried to engage with an anti-Israel protestor who was holding a sign that alleged Israeli abuses against Muslims. I asked him if he would consider joining a march against Bashar al-Assad, because hundreds of thousands of Syrians were at risk of dying. 

He didn’t answer. 

I believe there are many Muslims who are horrified over the treatment of their brothers and sisters in Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries such as Syria and Iran. But I thought about the aforementioned encounters again last week when I read that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was in China to meet with President Xi Jinping. This was Abbas’s fifth visit to the totalitarian country, and China and the PA signed a “strategic partnership”  during this trip.

Back in March, representatives from Iran and Saudi Arabia also met in Beijing when China brokered a diplomatic arrangement between the two states: One a Muslim theocracy whose official name is the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the other the heartland of Islam, home to the Kaaba and the holiest mosque in the world.

For years, China has been committing human rights atrocities against millions of Muslim Uyghurs in its western Xinjiang region. Now, leaders of various Muslim countries are traveling to China to speak with its head of state. 

If a Martian visited Earth, I would describe recent events to it as follows: For years, China has been committing human rights atrocities against millions of Muslim Uyghurs in its western Xinjiang region. Now, leaders of various Muslim countries are traveling to China to speak with its head of state. 

“The Muslim leaders are not happy with China’s treatment of Muslims, correct?” the Martian would rightly assume. 

“They’re perfectly happy with it.”

“So, they are not in China to discuss anything related to Chinese crimes against Muslims?”

“No. The issue didn’t even come up during the various visits,” I would say.

“Have they expressed disapproval of other countries’ treatment of Muslims in the past?”

Bingo.

At this point, the Martian would scratch its head and report back to headquarters, having learned the hard way that humans may be confusing, but their leaders are nothing if not hypocritical. 

Back in 1992, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis had no qualms over supporting Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian genocide. In 2017, when the Rohingya were being systematically annihilated in Myanmar, many Muslim countries in the Middle East responded with outrage and demanded action from an international coalition.

But now, there’s the plight of Uyghur Muslims. In 2019, 22 countries, most of them in the West, released a joint statement criticizing China for its abysmal persecution of Uyghurs and other religious minorities. This includes forced sterilization, mass surveillance, political indoctrination, extrajudicial killings, sending millions to what China calls “re-education centers,” and separating Muslim children from their families in the hope that these kids will forget about Islam. 

One day after that statement, 37 countries issued a joint statement about China as well, but with one notable difference: Their letter enthusiastically defended the country. Did I mention that nearly half of the signatories were Muslim-majority nations? The list included Syria, Qatar, Pakistan, the UAE and yes, Saudi Arabia.

Not only did these countries defend China, but also they actually claimed that Muslim Uyghurs were safe and happy. 

Happy?

As for reports of torture and detention camps, the letter claimed they were “vocational training centers.”

“I was surprised that [Muslim countries] would put it in writing and put their names on it and sign a document to actually praise China,” Azeem Ibrahim, a director at the Center for Global Policy in Washington, D.C., told CNN in 2019. “It’s one thing to keep quiet and abstain. It’s another thing to overtly support [the policies] when there was no need for them to do so.”

The reasons are not surprising: stability, economics and survival. And for the Saudis, cooperation with their biggest trading partner. Along with Egypt and the UAE, Saudi Arabia has signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with China, whose huge Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is projected to cost up to trillions of dollars. Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia were even kind enough to deport Uyghurs back to China, at the country’s request. 

Nearly 150 countries are investing in Beijing’s BRI, which can best be described as a Chinese global infrastructure project. If you really want to know, my fears over the worldwide impact of the BRI sometimes keep me up at night.

Seemingly no Muslim country, including Turkey, has dared to speak out against China. That makes them, as Ibrahim told CNN, wholly “complicit” with the suffering of Uyghurs.

Seemingly no Muslim country, including Turkey, has dared to speak out against China. That makes them, as Ibrahim told CNN, wholly “complicit” with the suffering of Uyghurs. In The Guardian, Nick Cohen described their horrifying persecution as “one of the great crimes of the 21st century.” And it’s happening before our eyes. 

In countries such as Pakistan, criticizing China is considered taboo. In other places, it’s verging on blasphemy. And that’s terrifying. 

“Countries that could not tolerate [Salman] Rushdie’s magical realist novel can live with the mass sterilization of Muslim women,” Cohen wrote in 2020. “It may be a cheap point but it remains true that if a western country were to display one-tenth, one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the brutality that China is inflicting on Muslims, the global left would be burning with outrage.” 

Regarding European events, such as the outrage of Muslim-majority countries over Dutch cartoons or the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, Cohen wrote that many Muslim leaders “will give concentration camps [in China] a conniving wink of approval, but draw the line at cartoons in a Danish newspaper.”

With Abbas’s visit to China last week, I can’t but wonder where the Palestinians fit into all this hypocrisy. Abbas’s Fatah party may be more secular, but would Hamas leaders ever join him in Beijing to sit down at the table with Israeli leaders?  After all, this is the terrorist organization whose name is an acronym for an “Islamic Resistance Movement” and was founded by a Sunni cleric. Can an “Islamic resistance movement” resist China and its torture of Muslim Uyghurs? 

It’s important to mention that China is one of Israel’s most important economic allies. But I would expect Muslim-majority countries to be the first to ask China to ease up its persecution of Uyghurs. And sadly, there seem to be more people who believe lies about Israel’s treatment of Muslims than there are those who even care about the truth when it comes to China’s abuse of Muslims. 

Amazingly, Abbas concluded his China trip last Friday by publicly supporting Chinese repression of Uyghurs and pushing back against Western ideals concerning human rights. Chinese abuses against Muslims, said Abbas, have “nothing to do with human rights and are aimed at excising extremism and opposing terrorism and separatism.” Surely, no one is more committed to opposing terrorism than the chairman of the PLO. 

If Muslim countries (and, on a micro level, leaders of Muslim organizations) haven’t supported the Uyghurs, then who has? Last week, my colleague, Karmel Melamed, reported in JNS that Uyghurs leaders expressed gratitude for the support of Jewish organizations in the U.S. and the UK. 

Melamed’s story shed light on all of the Jewish organizations that are helping the Uyghurs (and American Jewish leaders who are introducing supportive legislation, beginning in California). But after reading the story, I could only think of what Omer Kanat, co-founder and executive committee chairman of the World Uyghur Congress, told JNS. His heartbreaking entreaty was filled with inarguable emet (truth): “It’s truly shameful,” Kanat said. “Are we Uyghurs any less Muslim than other Muslims in the world?”

Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @tabbyrefael