China putting minority Muslims in 'concentration camps,' U.S. says
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
> Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education centre
Below a picture of a barbed wire prison
Yes whataboutism, but please think of an actual justification before you respond rather than the usual low effort handwaving it away with a single word.
Large powerful countries are carte blanche allowed to get away with horrendous injustices. I'd be eager to hear solutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
> half of all persons incarcerated under state jurisdiction are for non-violent offenses, and 20% are incarcerated for drug offenses (in state prisons; federal prison percentages are higher).
Why? Both systems are threats, one internal (from a US perspective), one external. Opposing one does not imply supporting the other, and US sins do not mean China presents less of a threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
"much of the work in the Iraq Dossier had been plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a 13-year-old thesis produced by a student at California State University. The most notable source was an article by then graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi"
Also:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admit...
Even older (Gulf War) claims of the "enemy" killing babies in the incubators were a complete fabrication:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
"The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah." It "was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized"
"On January 6, 1992, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by John MacArthur entitled "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?"[57]" "The story earned MacArthur the Monthly Journalism Award from The Washington Monthly in April 1992, and the Mencken Award in 1993."
If they simply reported about the U.S. claims, or the sources are the same in some other way, that shouldn't count as "more proof". Again, see the WMD story, and consider how long main stream media in multiple countries hasn't questioned that, now proved false, narration.
> Not that I'm accusing you directly, just I may be doubting your sincerity a little.
What you effectively promote is not even questioning the validity of some claims when it is e.g. "against China" so that as soon as I point the provable U.S. propaganda actions which even resulted in the wars before, I must be paid for that? In reality, those who are spreading the actual propaganda are those who are nicely paid for their work. That's exactly why I advocate extreme caution in unconditionally accepting the inflammatory claims, and the lines involving "Muslims in concentration camps" are obviously very much such.
Where do you get that 30 percent though? That would be at least more than 3 million people!
The biggest claim I know of is, as an example, 1700 out of some specific town of 32,000 inhabitants, and that could be realistic if the said town was indeed the center of the extremist activity, including some kind of preparing a paramilitary organization:
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/target-0629201813250...
Note how that specific claim (of around 5% of that 32000 people town) is first blown up to be "10%" and then put in the title as "One in 10 Uyghur Residents of Xinjiang Township Jailed or Detained in ‘Re-Education Camp’" to bind the title not to the specific town but to the whole province with 11 million residents. Which is again less surprising knowing that it's RFA who publishes it that way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
Paid by U.S. taxpayers, initially directly organized by the CIA. Now it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asia_Foundation
"the US government described the Asia Foundation as a "quasi-nongovernmental organizations" and said that "the core of its budget" was still provided by the US government."
And even that RFA didn't use the "concentration" word.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/13/china-muslims-uighur-det... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/if-you-enter-a...
What I am claiming is that we should be very careful in evaluating what exactly among all the claims is true.
E.g:
- what is meant by "concentration camps"? Is the naming correct or a pure propaganda? I.e. are they comparable to those made by Nazis in WW II? Or,
- Are they comparable to the concentration camps in which the U.S. put the people of Japanese origin living in the U.S. during the same war? Or,
- Are they comparable to the U.S. prisons?
- How many "minority Muslims" are put in the camps? The title itself can be claimed to be "correct" even if the most of the people in the camps aren't minority Muslims and only a few "minority Muslims" are put there. And again, is that the best name for that "camp" etc.
- Did the "minority Muslims" in the "camps" perform some subversive activities before, i.e. does some legal ground exist?
- What is the treatment of the people in these camps?
- How many people are total in these camps and other prisons in China? China has almost 5 times more people than the U.S. so if the total is under 10 million of people, they have still less people in the prisons per citizen than the U.S. has(!)
- How can we be sure not to act like we acted after the "WMD" claims or "Nayirah testimony"? Before the discovery much later, you could have also responded that for what was claimed there's "vast evidence."
Is there anyone, anywhere, suggesting we go to war over this? And if not: what the hell are you talking about?
This all looks like a coordinated campaign by the US and corporate media to make China look Islamophobic.
The article, moreover, contains something of a non sequitur. The terrorist attacks it cites are from before the terror attacks. So at the very least the approach the CCP used between that time and the concentration camps was sufficient, and the recent escalation insufficient.
It is also worth asking why the Uyghurs became violent in the first place. China was one of the powers that opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan; this, of course, involved the creation of a violent Islam to oppose their rule. The Strike Hard campaign was not obviously born of necessity; the 90s were not a time of substantial strife. Terrorism is something of a weasel word; the use of violence is fairly common and oughtn’t to render an entire people pariahs. Moreover the CCP response is grossly disproportionate—the detention of millions in response to terrorist attacks on the scale of, at most, thousands, is entirely unjustified.
As for the use of “separatism” as code for “a priori bad”, this usage is entirely unjustified.
It is quite plausible that the Americans are not acting benevolently. That is not an excuse to ignore the plight of the Uyghurs, documented by others.¹
0. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russi...
1. https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-sec... — on the nature of the campaign; https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repr... — on mass surveillance.