The Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations wished Muslims a happy holiday on social media — even as the Chinese Communist Party imprisons Muslims in the nation’s Xinjiang province.
The Chinese government is holding members of the Uyghur ethnic minority — many of whom are Muslims — in concentration camps, where they are systematically sterilized and reeducated with communist doctrine.
Nevertheless, the official Chinese social media account gave its “very best wishes” to “all Muslim friends” celebrating the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha.
Very best wishes to all Muslim friends celebrating #EidAlAdha.
Eid Mubarak! pic.twitter.com/447omIGzLn
— Chinese Mission to UN (@Chinamission2un) July 20, 2021
Several commenters replied to the tweet with an image allegedly portraying Chinese concentration camp prisoners.
— Nathan Neuman (@nathan_zinho_) July 23, 2021
During a televised interview last year, BBC journalist Andrew Marr confronted Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming over viral drone footage of the regime’s camps. The video allegedly showed hundreds of blindfolded prisoners forced to kneel in front of a train station in Xinjiang.
“Can I ask you why people are kneeling, blindfolded and shaven, and being led to trains in modern China — what is going on there?” asked Marr. Liu responded: “I do not know where you get this video tape. Sometimes you have transfer of prisons and prisoners.”
“The so-called Western intelligence… make this false accusation against China,” he insisted. “They say, ‘One million of Uyghur has been persecuted.’ You know how big, how many population Xinjiang has? It’s at just about — forty-years ago, it’s at four to five million. Now it’s 11 million people. And people say, you know, we impose, we have an ethnic cleansing, but the population has doubled in the forty years.”
“According to your own local government statistics, the population growth in Uyghur jurisdictions in that area has fallen by 84% between 2015 and 2018,” Marr retorted.
Last week, the United States Senate passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act — sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) — to extend an existing ban on “goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part” by slave labor to those made in the Xinjiang region.
“The message to Beijing and any international company that profits from forced labor in Xinjiang is clear: no more,” commented Rubio in a press release. “We will not turn a blind eye to the CCP’s ongoing crimes against humanity, and we will not allow corporations a free pass to profit from those horrific abuses.”
“Today the Senate is sending a clear message that the United States will not be complicit in the Chinese government’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims,” added Merkley. “Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang are being forced into labor, tortured, imprisoned, forcibly sterilized, and pressured to abandon their religious and cultural practices by the Chinese government.”
“No American corporation should profit from these abuses. No American consumers should be inadvertently purchasing products from slave labor.”