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SearchToday in Islamophobia: The UK has called for the United Nation to have access into the Xinjiang detention camps, as French Muslims feel persecuted by the headscarf ban upheld in France. Our recommended read today is on the current eradication of Uighur and other Muslim minority cultures from the Xinjiang region in China.
China
Recommended Read | China is achieving its ‘beauty’ by means of cultural genocide
China's Government has insisted that the mass incarceration facilities in Xinjiang province in the far northwest of the country should not be called reeducation or concentration camps, but rather vocational skills training centers. To read the secret official manual on operating these camps, which has just been disclosed, is to see they actually are brainwashing facilities, cruel, coercive and brutal. The new China Cables are a profoundly important breach of the walls — and a glimpse at cultural genocide. read the complete article
China's UK ambassador: Uighur camps leak is 'fake news'
Leaked documents seen by BBC Panorama detail for the first time China's systematic brainwashing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in a network of high-security prison camps. The Chinese government has consistently claimed the camps in the far western Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training. Reporter Richard Bilton confronted China’s UK ambassador, Liu Xiaoming, over the revelations at a press conference, where the ambassador dismissed them as "fake news". read the complete article
The man behind China’s detention of 1 million Muslims
Now, newly revealed, confidential documents show that the official, Zhu Hailun, played a key role in planning and executing a campaign that has swept up a million or more Uighurs into detention camps. Published in 2017, the documents were signed by Zhu, as then-head of the powerful Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the Communist Party in the Xinjiang region. A Uighur linguist recognized Zhu’s signature scrawled atop some of the documents from his time working as a translator in Kashgar, when Zhu was the city’s top official. Long before the crackdown and despite his intimate familiarity with local culture, Zhu was more hated than loved among the Uighurs he ruled. read the complete article
France
French Laicite and the battle against Muslim women
The French secularism that has marginalised many in the Jewish community is now working overtime to do the same to French Muslims. The latest in a string of bans targeting, very specifically, Muslim women, the French senate voted to forbid veiled mothers from accompanying public school trips - a central pillar of the public school system (trips happen monthly). Many French citizens I spoke with found the ban particularly absurd, and some recalled fond memories of Muslim mothers regularly participating in their own or their children’s lives. read the complete article
India
The Anxiety of Being Muslim in India
In India, Muslims are watching the secular democratic principles of their country crumble. What is it like when your country rejects your family and shakes your faith in multiculturalism? Guest: Rana Ayyub, a contributor to the Washington Post Opinion section and author of Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up. read the complete article
‘We Needed a Modi After the Easter Attacks’
In 2009, four years into his first term as president, Mr. Rajapaksa led the Sri Lankan military to a brutal victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the outfit that waged a three-decades-long insurgency for a separate state for the country’s Tamil minority. After the war, he cast himself as the guardian of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, found immense support among that community’s hard-liners and easily secured a second term in 2010. To many Sri Lankans, Mr. Rajapaksa’s defeat felt like deliverance from repression, ethnonationalist chauvinism and the trauma of the conflict. Those hopes are diminishing now. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the new president, supervised the Sri Lankan offensive against the Tamils. Appointed defense secretary by his brother, he was unsparing in his assertion of Sinhalese might. At least 40,000 Tamil civilians, according to a United Nations tally, were killed in the final days of the war. “We should all fall on our knees and beg for forgiveness for what we did there,” a retired soldier who served on the front lines told me recently. “These people were defeated, at our mercy, but we were encouraged to be merciless. We went mad.” read the complete article
International
UK calls for UN access to Chinese detention camps in Xinjiang
The UK has urged China to give United Nations observers “immediate and unfettered access” to detention camps in Xinjiang, where more than a million people from the Uighur community and other muslim minorities are being held without trial. The call from the Foreign Office was in response to the China cables, a leak of classified documents from within the Communist party which appear to provide the first official confirmation that the camps were designed by Beijing as brainwashing internment centres. The leak prompted the Foreign Office to demand “an end to the indiscriminate and disproportionate restrictions on the cultural and religious freedoms of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.” A spokesperson added. “The UK continues to call on China to allow UN observers immediate and unfettered access to the region.” read the complete article
The Muslim world can no longer ignore China’s persecution of Uighurs
The question is what are we to do when this emerging colossus persecutes the indigenous majority Muslim Uighurs in its western province of Xinjiang? This has also affected other Muslim minorities, including the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz. This is a matter that is especially pressing for the Muslim world. The heartlands of the Islamic world are close neighbors of China, and therefore particularly affected by Beijing’s geopolitical designs for the 21st century. Take the Belt and Road initiative, for example, which aims to build the trade infrastructure that will dominate economic and political relationships on the Eurasian mainland for the rest of the century and will mostly pass through lands in the Muslim world. read the complete article
United Kingdom
Hardline Hindus are pushing the Indian government's agenda on British voters
"I've been to India seven times in the last three years," Blackman said, sipping a cup of chai, his cheeks flushed from canvassing in the cold, ahead of Britain's first December election in nearly a century. "I am well-known for being a very pro-Indian supporter." Across the table, Kuldeep Singh Shekhawat, the head of a UK-based pressure group linked to Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), chimed in: "A hundred percent." Blackman is a three-term member of Parliament for Harrow East, a racially and religiously diverse constituency where 28.2% of the residents are Hindu. The Conservative Party politician has a track record of championing Indian -- more specifically, Hindu -- concerns. read the complete article
Muslim Council of Britain accuses Tories of 'deceit' over Islamophobia as they back Chief Rabbi on anti-semitism
The Muslim Council of Britain - which represents more than 500 mosques and charities - said the party appeared to have turned a "blind eye" to discrimination against followers of the faith. The group renewed its criticism of the Tories on Wednesday as it backed an intervention from the Chief Rabbi over Labour's handling of anti-semitism. In its own statement, the MCB said: "Today's statement by the Chief Rabbi highlights the real fear many British Jews have, regarding the unacceptable presence of anti-semitism in Britain and in politics today. "Racism wherever it comes from - whether from the left or the right - is unacceptable, and not enough is being done. We agree with the Chief Rabbi's observation that some politicians have shown courage but too many have sat silent. But the MCB also trained its fire on the Tories, who have faced criticism after appearing to water down a promised inquiry into anti-Muslim abuse, and sparked outrage with Boris Johnson's own description of women wearing the veil as "letterboxes" in a newspaper column. "It is abundantly clear to many Muslims that the Conservative Party tolerate Islamophobia, allow it to fester in society, and fail to put in place the measures necessary to root out this type of racism. It is as if the Conservative Party has a blind spot for this type of racism. read the complete article