Designated terrorist group CAIR is outraged that the United Nations Human Rights Council voted against discussion of the Uyghur Muslim problem in China

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called the United Nations Human Rights Council’s vote against holding a debate on the Uyghur (so-called) genocide “shameful.” CAIR also called on Muslim nations to unite in supporting Uyghur Muslims and other Turkic minorities targeted by the Chinese Communist Party. (But as regular BNI readers know, most Muslim nations couldn’t care less about the Uyghurs)

CAIRThe UN Human Rights Council on Thursday voted against holding a debate on alleged abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic minority groups in China’s Xinjiang region. The draft decision to hold the debate was presented by the United States last month, following the August release of a report stating that China’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang region may constitute crimes against humanity.

Following lobbying by Beijing, the council voted 19-17 against holding a debate, with 11 countries abstaining. Several Muslim nations were among those who voted against holding the debate. (I rest my case)

In a statement, CAIR Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said:

“It is tragic and shameful that the UN Human Rights Council and so many Muslim-majority member nations have refused to even discuss the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign of genocide against Uyghur Muslims.

“The evidence is clear: China has imprisoned over a million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, banned them from practicing Islam, forced them work in factories as slave laborers, raped and sterilized countless women, and destroyed hundreds of ancient mosques, among other crimes against humanity designed to erase Uyghur Muslim culture.”

“The Chinese Communist Party is waging a war against Islam in the Uyghur region of China, and the Muslim world must use our collective economic and political power at the United Nations to expose and stop it.”

Why should the West condemn China’s harsh treatment of its Uyghur Muslims when the Islamic world is actively collaborating with China’s global campaign against the Uyghurs?

In fact, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — a 57-Muslim country consortium that calls itself “the collective voice of the Muslim world” issued a report saying that it “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.”

Daniel Greenfield The war of letters began when 22 countries penned a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minority communities.

The letter in defense of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang was signed by France, Germany, Canada, Sweden and 18 other, mostly Western and European, countries. The case of the missing Muslim signatories was solved when the People’s Republic of China fired back with its own letter signed by 37 countries.

This letter in defense of China’s crackdown on Islam was signed by 16 Muslim countries.  While some of the Muslim signatories were drawn from African countries, the letter was also signed by ambassadors for the leading Arab governments including Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Kuwait. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, also signed on.

“There has been a lot of criticism against Muslim majority countries for their silence on Xinjiang and the repression of the Uighurs,” Bradley Jardine, the director of research at the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and the report’s lead author, told RFE/RL. “But this database shows that it isn’t just hypocrisy from the Islamic world, it’s active collaboration with China.”

United Nations human rights officials estimate that 1 million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities are detained at camps in a vast Chinese internment system. Many former detainees allege they were subjected to attempted indoctrination, physical abuse, and even sterilization.

The United States government and several Western parliaments have labeled China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide, but most governments of majority Muslim states — who increasingly have close financial and political ties to Beijing through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — have remained silent on the issue.

The Muslim world is turning a blind eye to the Uyghyrs.

According to the report, efforts to target Uyghurs and force them back to China have intensified since 2017, when Beijing is believed to have begun its mass internment program in Xinjiang. “Through these practices, the government of China is able to extend its repression and control over the Uighur people across sovereign boundaries,” the report says.

China’s government initially denied the Xinjiang camps’ existence, but has since been on a diplomatic and public-relations campaign to counter the growing outcry against what Beijing has termed “vocational-education centers” by defending them as necessary to combat Islamic extremism.

Concerns over terrorism have been at the heart of official Chinese reasoning for targeting Uyghurs abroad that employs an evolving array of tactics, the report notes, from espionage and cyberattacks to issuing Red Notices via Interpol, an organization designed to coordinate global policing activities.

While Chinese authorities have long viewed the Uighur community with suspicion, and radical Uyghur separatist groups have carried out attacks, the report argues that the 2009 ethnic riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, were a turning point for Beijing.

BELOW: Distressing photos circulating online showed bodies, pools of and abandoned luggage scattered across the terminal floor in the wake of what authorities termed an ‘organised, premeditated, violent Islamic terrorist attack’. Beijing blamed the attack on Muslim  ‘separatists’ from the resource-rich far western Xinjiang where at least 200 people have died in attacks and clashes between locals a security forces.

The riots claimed 200 lives, most of them ethnic Hans, and attacks by extremist Uyghur groups escalated the security situation in Xinjiang in the following years. The unrest led to swift retaliation by Beijing in the name of fighting extremism.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan recently made headlines when he declined to acknowledge or condemn the Chinese government’s alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang during a June 20 interview with the U.S. news outlet Axios.

In December 2020, Beijing ratified a 2017 extradition treaty between the two countries. But the Turkish parliament has yet to follow suit, leaving Uyghurs fearful that the looming decision could see many of them sent back to China at Beijing’s request.

“Turkey was once seen as a safe haven, but no more,” Jardine said. “The West now needs to start looking at expanding its refugee quotas and facilitating Uyghur claims from Turkey and other countries that are complicit in China’s transnational repression.”