Well Of Course No One Cares About Muslims in China

Well of course no one cares about the plight of Muslims in China. Least of all, other Muslim countries. The reason for this is obvious - Muslims are not being oppressed by either the United States or Israel. Therefore, no one really cares. To put it in a more general sense, people only care about the violent repression of Muslims, or any pre-modern people, when the "oppressing" is done by moderns. In other words, it's the fault line between the modern and the pre-modern that matters, not the actual acts themselves.

Pre-modern on pre-modern violence is not worth a blip on the global radar. After all, what can you expect from such people? But if a modern society combats the actions of a pre-modern one, it's wall to wall coverage and denunciations at the UN.

Pajamas Media » China Silences the Muslim World

And, of course, Beijing employs brute force. The latest official death toll from this week’s disturbances is 184, but that number appears to undercount the dead. Observers say that this is the most deadly series of riots in China since the Tiananmen massacre twenty years ago, but that assessment is questionable. Ethnic fighting flared in Yining, the capital of the short-lived East Turkestan Republic, in early 1997. The unrest is thought to have led to at least several hundred deaths, and subsequent executions added to the toll.

Yet the death of hundreds, and probably thousands, of Uighurs and the systematic destruction of their culture has been met with an eerie silence from Muslim nations. Nations that expressed incandescent rage at the United States due to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have, up until now, said nothing about Xinjiang. Why?