China Attacks Israel by Comparing Anti-Hamas Operation to Uyghur Genocide

A Chinese government propaganda post published on social media this week suggested China’s genocidal treatment of the Uyghur Muslims is more humane than Israel’s operation against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

The French caption “Sans titre” means “no comment needed,” or as it might be said in American vernacular, “’nuff said.” The meaning is clearly that China’s horrendous systematic abuse of the captive Uyghur population has brought the Uyghurs peace and prosperity, compared to Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

China has been credibly accused of genocide by governments around the world, including the United States, for herding millions of Uyghurs into

gigantic concentration camps and forcibly “re-educating” them to embrace Chinese Communist dogma instead of their religion. Inmates of the camps have been hideously abused and tortured outright.

The regime in Beijing has used forced abortions and contraceptives to trim down the Uyghur population. Survivors of the camps are sold to Chinese companies as forced labor, creating an enormous moral hazard for foreigners who do business with China. Entire industries, including garment production and seafood, are tainted with Uyghur slave labor.

A worker carries a bag of picked cotton on October 20, 2005, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region city Maigaiti, China. Xinjiang is one of China’s largest cotton production areas with about 1/3 of the total output of cotton in China. (Chien-min Chung/Getty Images)

In January 2021, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally declared China’s abuse of the Uyghurs to be genocidal. Last month, 51 United Nations member nations issued a joint declaration condemning China for crimes against humanity and called on Beijing to end its ongoing violations of Uyghur human rights.

Uyghur activists and human rights experts said they were shocked and disgusted by China’s propaganda, as quoted by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Wednesday:

“I see the pictures, but do you see people there, it just shows buildings. Genocide comes in all different ways, bombs don’t need to be dropped,” Ramila Chanisheff, President of the Australian Uyghur Tangritagh Women’s Association (AUTWA), told Yahoo News Australia after seeing the post.

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Dr Melanie O’Brien, Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota and President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars told Yahoo News she was “shocked” to see the post because state-run Chinese social media accounts are usually far more measured.

“You can certainly commit genocide without razing buildings to the ground,” she said, echoing Chanisheff’s words.

“There’s no way you can compare this. There’s no tiny street in East Turkistan where you can even speak or throw a rock,” U.K. Director for the World Uyghur Congress Rahima Mahmut told Newsweek. East Turkistan is the historic Uyghur name for the territory China calls “Xinjiang.”

“China has destroyed the very essence of Uyghurs’ lives and identity, not just their homes,” added Salih Hudayar, prime minister for the Uyghurs’ East Turkistan government-in-exile.

“Those who willingly accept this propaganda are only green-lighting Beijing’s aggressive colonialism and genocide,” he said.

Hudayar said that if Uyghurs were given anywhere near the funding pumped into Palestinian causes by the world community, they could have built a “prosperous, independent East Turkistan” on their own.

The backlash was apparently too much for China’s director of cultural affairs in Pakistan, Zhang Heqiang, who originally retweeted the post from the Chinese embassy in Paris, but later deleted his own post.