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Time to speak up on the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in China
2-09-2022
If standing up for human rights abuses and taking a stand against genocide of Uyghur Muslims in China was an Olympic sport. Canada, U.S. UK, Japan, Lithuania all deserves gold medals for declaring a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. It means their top officials won’t attend the games.
On the other hand, deafening silence from the Muslim world and ignoring the plight of the Uyghurs highlights the cowardice leadership at the helm of Muslim nations.
For years powerful Muslim countries with military might and economic power players, such as Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran that can arm twist China over its treatment of Uyghurs have silently stood by as mere spectators. While China systematically erases the mere existence of Uyghur Muslim population in northwestern province of Xinjiang along with all traces of cultural and religious aspects of Uyghur Muslims by demolishing cultural and religious sites. A province where once stood approximately 24,000 mosques now barely left with approximately 15,000 mosques, most of them destroyed or damaged.
According to human rights groups over the past few years China has built large concentration camps disguised as “re-education center” where over one million Uyghurs are detained, with thousands have been sentenced. According to the Guardian news reports, there are approximately 400 such detention centers that were built over a period of three years.
The human rights groups report that there is insurmountable evidence that indicates Uyghurs are being used as forced labour, and women are being forcibly sterilized.
Wion news reported that in 2018 Chinese authorities demolished a mosque in Suntagh village and converted it into a public toilet.
Guardian newspaper has reported that Chinese government has demolished and destroyed thousands of mosques in Xinjiang province.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) used satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting to map the constructions of detention camps and destructions of Islamic cultural and religious sites. The data is available online under “The Xinjiang Data Project.”
Yet, the incompetent Islamic leadership in leading Muslim nations continues to ignore the plight of the Uyghur Muslims and standing firmly with China’s Communist Party’s despite their recorded human rights violations and genocide of Uyghurs.
Meanwhile, Canada was one of the first countries who took the lead in speaking out against the Chinese atrocities and genocide of Uyghurs. Last year, on February 22, 2021 “Canada’s House of Commons overwhelmingly passed a motion accusing China of committing “genocide” against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the western region of Xinjiang and called for relocating the games if it continues. U.S. lawmakers this week also stepped up calls for a boycott in response to what both the Trump and Biden administrations have called a genocide in Xinjiang.”
On February 26, 2021, the Dutch parliament took Canada’s lead and declared China’s actions constitutes “genocide.”
“The US said this was because of China's "human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang" - against the province's Muslim population.”
British MP Iain Duncan Smith, who represents the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: "The Chinese government commits industrial-scale human rights abuses in the Uyghur Region, Tibet and sends near-daily military incursions into Taiwan's airspace. We cannot lend any legitimacy to China's despotic regime."
Shortly after Canada’s House of Commons passed a motion for a “diplomatic boycott” for the games. editor-in-chief of the state-affiliated, nationalist newspaper Global Times, Hu Xijin,” tweeted “China will seriously sanction any country that follows such a call [for a boycott].
“China's Foreign Ministry said that the US had "clearly violated the Olympic spirit", and "will pay a price for its erroneous actions". However, it has not specified what this price might be.”
Muslim countries by not boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics are not only abetting China’s abysmal record on human rights violations and oppression of Uyghurs but have in fact given their tacit blessing for China to continue its mass atrocities against the Uyghurs.
The Muslim leaders have also exposed their own hypocrisy towards fellow Uyghurs. On one hand we witness Muslim leadership being outraged and expressing their disgust over number of things, such as Palestine-Israel conflict, plight of the Rohingya’s Muslims, over caricatures being published in Europe. However, when facing a military and economic giant it seems as if the cat got their tongue.
Some may even argue that western nations boycotting Beijing Olympics have their own vested interests and are only using the oppression of the Uyghurs to conceal their own true motives, and to a degree they may be correct in that thinking.
However, when does zipping our lips to speak out against oppression, regardless of who the oppressed might be become an Islamic value? “From an Islamic standpoint, supporting an oppressor directly or by extension is not allowed,” Imam Abdullah Mu’mini, the chief of staff of the Iraq-based Global Imams Council, states “Since we consider what is happening to Uyghur Muslims as oppression, we have taken this very stance.”
The silence of the Muslim world over such a crucial issue for the Muslims highlights the growing power of the CCP over Muslim nations. Afterall, China is the number consumer of middle eastern oil. Simultaneously, China has invested billions of dollars of infrastructure through its “Belt and Road” (BRI) projects initiative, across Islamic countries. China has managed not only influence but have also gained leverage over these nations.
The list of biggest beneficiaries of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative include, Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan, along with Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Turkey, and Yemen. In short there is not a single Muslim country who has not yet benefited from China’s generous BRI investments.
It is these BRI investments that had given China and overwhelming leverage over Muslim countries and the leadership at their helm in buying their silence to continue its atrocious human rights violations and genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province - razing their cultural and religious monuments and erasing their very existence.
Abu Sa'id Al-Khudri (May Allah bepleased with him) reported:
The Prophet (PBUH) said, "The best type of Jihad (striving in the way of Allah) is speaking a true word in the presence of a tyrant ruler."
Riyad as-Salihin 194 Hadith 194
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