Anyone who knows me knows I have zero tolerance for analogies between current events and the Holocaust. Generally, comparisons like these make light of the annihilation of the Jewish people. But in the following case, there is no alternative but to compare.
In the past few days, a clip has been making the rounds of social media that shows Uighurs – an ethnic minority in northwest China – kneeling, blindfolded, on a railway platform. Where is the train going? We can only imagine, but the horrifying testimonies exposed in recent years give us a fairly good idea. Not many people have heard of the Uighurs, who live quietly in semi-autonomy. In the past few years, they have started to demand stronger autonomy, and even independence, which the communist government did not particularly like. Unlike other places in the world that are the sites of similar conflicts, this case appears to be completely different.
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Rather than managing the conflict, the Chinese started to use brutal methods of reducing the Uighur birth rate and building concentrate camps, re-education centers that include brainwashing – apparently through physical and sexual violence. According to testimonies by Uighurs who have escaped, many have died in these camps, while others lost their humanity. In 2018, according to UN figures, a million Uighurs were in camps like these.
So how is it that the UN, which put out such a terrifying report, is neglecting them? It's very simple. A quick look at the members of the UN Human Rights Council explains it: Afghanistan, Qatar, Eritrea (which can't be trusted when it comes to illegal immigration, but when it comes to human rights, no problem), Venezuela, and other fighters for human rights. Even the World Health Organization, rather than condemn China for hiding information about the spread of coronavirus, praised the communist superpower for its handling of the crisis.
Even the leaders who are trying to do something, like US President Donald Trump, who applied economic sanctions to China, is catching it from the Right and the Left, because who needs to defend people from genocide when politics is at stake?
The Chinese aren't making much effort to deny that they want to eradicate the Uighurs as a people, and because of the corona pandemic, it seems as if no one really cares. But we should care. It's not only the method – transporting huge numbers of people to camps on trains – that is similar to the Jewish story, but also the intent. Jews who see the video taken by a very brave drone operator won't be able to sleep at night. They mustn't be able to sleep. They have to scream shout, talk, and read about them, and do everything in their power to raise awareness of the Uighurs' situation.
The real danger China poses to Israel is not the increased acquisition of vital infrastructure or an invasion of our lives through G5 technology. The real danger is that without noticing, the sentence by which we live, "Never again," could be emptied of its meaning anywhere on earth.
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