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China putting minority Muslims in 'concentration camps,' U.S. says

b_tterc_p 8y ago
The photo and caption are telling > Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education centre Below a picture of a barbed wire prison
acqq 8y ago
Whenever you read something like that that the "U.S. says" remember that the "U.S. said" for a long time that WMDs exist in Iraq and used that claim for a war. It turned out it was a complete fabrication, and that there were even helpers, e.g. Britain and Germany. So "UK said" it too and it was later completely obvious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier "much of the work in the Iraq Dossier had been plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a 13-year-old thesis produced by a student at California State University. The most notable source was an article by then graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi" Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admit... Even older (Gulf War) claims of the "enemy" killing babies in the incubators were a complete fabrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony "The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah." It "was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized" "On January 6, 1992, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by John MacArthur entitled "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?"[57]" "The story earned MacArthur the Monthly Journalism Award from The Washington Monthly in April 1992, and the Mencken Award in 1993."
- sasasassy 8y ago
  There is vast evidence for these camps, heck, you can see them in google maps. https://theintercept.com/2018/08/13/china-muslims-uighur-detention/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/13/china-muslims-uighur-det... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_camps https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/if-you-enter-a-camp-you-never-come-out-inside-chinas-war-on-islam https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/if-you-enter-a...
  - acqq 8y ago
    I don't dispute that there is something that can be seen in the google maps. I also don't dispute that the "camps" have some numbers of people in them. What I am claiming is that we should be very careful in evaluating what exactly among all the claims is true. E.g: - what is meant by "concentration camps"? Is the naming correct or a pure propaganda? I.e. are they comparable to those made by Nazis in WW II? Or, - Are they comparable to the concentration camps in which the U.S. put the people of Japanese origin living in the U.S. during the same war? Or, - Are they comparable to the U.S. prisons? - How many "minority Muslims" are put in the camps? The title itself can be claimed to be "correct" even if the most of the people in the camps aren't minority Muslims and only a few "minority Muslims" are put there. And again, is that the best name for that "camp" etc. - Did the "minority Muslims" in the "camps" perform some subversive activities before, i.e. does some legal ground exist? - What is the treatment of the people in these camps? - How many people are total in these camps and other prisons in China? China has almost 5 times more people than the U.S. so if the total is under 10 million of people, they have still less people in the prisons per citizen than the U.S. has(!) - How can we be sure not to act like we acted after the "WMD" claims or "Nayirah testimony"? Before the discovery much later, you could have also responded that for what was claimed there's "vast evidence."
    - mcphage 8y ago
      > How can we be sure not to act like we acted after the "WMD" claims or "Nayirah testimony"? Is there anyone, anywhere, suggesting we go to war over this? And if not: what the hell are you talking about?
kobayashy 8y ago
Is that considered IP theft?
A2017U1 8y ago
The US is putting minorities into private prisons at far greater rates for nonviolent crimes. The rate of imprisonment is entirely correlated to race. Yes whataboutism, but please think of an actual justification before you respond rather than the usual low effort handwaving it away with a single word. Large powerful countries are carte blanche allowed to get away with horrendous injustices. I'd be eager to hear solutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... > half of all persons incarcerated under state jurisdiction are for non-violent offenses, and 20% are incarcerated for drug offenses (in state prisons; federal prison percentages are higher).
- thoughtstheseus 8y ago
  Wow, I didn’t realize two wrongs make a right. You’ve convinced me.
- sasasassy 8y ago
  What does being a violent or not violent crime have to do with it? What does being incarcerated for committing crimes have to do with "disappearing" for being muslim? How does the US imprisonment rate of 0.716% even compare to putting about 30% of the population in concentration camps?
- deogeo 8y ago
  > please think of an actual justification before you respond Why? Both systems are threats, one internal (from a US perspective), one external. Opposing one does not imply supporting the other, and US sins do not mean China presents less of a threat.
- marak830 8y ago
  No, just whataboutisim. That's it.
geogra4 8y ago
Yeah, sure. And Guaido is the president of Venezuela
mrobot 8y ago
Why does this article keep happening? Do we really think the United States gives a damn or are they just projecting? Any time the United States has a humanitarian concern it's a red flag to me. Xinjiang has abundant oil and mineral reserves, just saying...
- mrobot 8y ago
  Someone named Shawn Zhang tweeted that an 800 year old mosque was demolished in Xinjiang. It was cited in thousands of news articles. He just made it it up. Retracted it after all the articles were published. This all looks like a coordinated campaign by the US and corporate media to make China look Islamophobic.
- mrobot 8y ago
  Counternarrative about US-funded "World Uyghur Congress" separatists instigating this: https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/30/is-china-building-a-police-state-or-countering-western-sponsored-terrorism/ https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/30/is-china-building-a-polic...
  - heraclius 8y ago
    Politico says that this website is part of a Russian government institution.⁰ Perhaps that’s bunkum, but both sides fund propaganda about the other; most of the time, they will fund propaganda about things that are true—I remember Xinhua writing something entirely true about police brutality in the US for example—because true things are more credible. The article, moreover, contains something of a non sequitur. The terrorist attacks it cites are from before the terror attacks. So at the very least the approach the CCP used between that time and the concentration camps was sufficient, and the recent escalation insufficient. It is also worth asking why the Uyghurs became violent in the first place. China was one of the powers that opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan; this, of course, involved the creation of a violent Islam to oppose their rule. The Strike Hard campaign was not obviously born of necessity; the 90s were not a time of substantial strife. Terrorism is something of a weasel word; the use of violence is fairly common and oughtn’t to render an entire people pariahs. Moreover the CCP response is grossly disproportionate—the detention of millions in response to terrorist attacks on the scale of, at most, thousands, is entirely unjustified. As for the use of “separatism” as code for “a priori bad”, this usage is entirely unjustified. It is quite plausible that the Americans are not acting benevolently. That is not an excuse to ignore the plight of the Uyghurs, documented by others.¹ 0. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russia-targets-the-us-military-215247 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russi... 1. https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-securitization-campaign-evidence-from-domestic-security-budgets/ https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-sec... — on the nature of the campaign; https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repression/reverse-engineering-xinjiang-police-mass-surveillance https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repr... — on mass surveillance.
chriscappuccio 8y ago
China also harvests organs from prisoners, including political prisoners. They claim that prisoner harvesting ended in 2015 and the system is 100% voluntary now. That's a blatant lie based on the numbers. They are marketing "halal" organs to Saudis, guess what groups those are coming from? This is a much deeper hole of darkness and depravity than the US prison system ever dreamed of being. It's evil.

The photo and caption are telling > Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education centre Below a picture of a barbed wire prison

acqq 8y ago

Whenever you read something like that that the "U.S. says" remember that the "U.S. said" for a long time that WMDs exist in Iraq and used that claim for a war. It turned out it was a complete fabrication, and that there were even helpers, e.g. Britain and Germany. So "UK said" it too and it was later completely obvious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier "much of the work in the Iraq Dossier had been plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a 13-year-old thesis produced by a student at California State University. The most notable source was an article by then graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi" Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admit... Even older (Gulf War) claims of the "enemy" killing babies in the incubators were a complete fabrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony "The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah." It "was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized" "On January 6, 1992, The New York Times published an op-ed piece by John MacArthur entitled "Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?"[57]" "The story earned MacArthur the Monthly Journalism Award from The Washington Monthly in April 1992, and the Mencken Award in 1993."

sasasassy 8y ago
There is vast evidence for these camps, heck, you can see them in google maps. https://theintercept.com/2018/08/13/china-muslims-uighur-detention/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/13/china-muslims-uighur-det... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_camps https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/if-you-enter-a-camp-you-never-come-out-inside-chinas-war-on-islam https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/if-you-enter-a...
- acqq 8y ago
  I don't dispute that there is something that can be seen in the google maps. I also don't dispute that the "camps" have some numbers of people in them. What I am claiming is that we should be very careful in evaluating what exactly among all the claims is true. E.g: - what is meant by "concentration camps"? Is the naming correct or a pure propaganda? I.e. are they comparable to those made by Nazis in WW II? Or, - Are they comparable to the concentration camps in which the U.S. put the people of Japanese origin living in the U.S. during the same war? Or, - Are they comparable to the U.S. prisons? - How many "minority Muslims" are put in the camps? The title itself can be claimed to be "correct" even if the most of the people in the camps aren't minority Muslims and only a few "minority Muslims" are put there. And again, is that the best name for that "camp" etc. - Did the "minority Muslims" in the "camps" perform some subversive activities before, i.e. does some legal ground exist? - What is the treatment of the people in these camps? - How many people are total in these camps and other prisons in China? China has almost 5 times more people than the U.S. so if the total is under 10 million of people, they have still less people in the prisons per citizen than the U.S. has(!) - How can we be sure not to act like we acted after the "WMD" claims or "Nayirah testimony"? Before the discovery much later, you could have also responded that for what was claimed there's "vast evidence."
  - mcphage 8y ago
    > How can we be sure not to act like we acted after the "WMD" claims or "Nayirah testimony"? Is there anyone, anywhere, suggesting we go to war over this? And if not: what the hell are you talking about?

kobayashy 8y ago

Is that considered IP theft?

A2017U1 8y ago

The US is putting minorities into private prisons at far greater rates for nonviolent crimes. The rate of imprisonment is entirely correlated to race. Yes whataboutism, but please think of an actual justification before you respond rather than the usual low effort handwaving it away with a single word. Large powerful countries are carte blanche allowed to get away with horrendous injustices. I'd be eager to hear solutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... > half of all persons incarcerated under state jurisdiction are for non-violent offenses, and 20% are incarcerated for drug offenses (in state prisons; federal prison percentages are higher).

thoughtstheseus 8y ago
Wow, I didn’t realize two wrongs make a right. You’ve convinced me.
sasasassy 8y ago
What does being a violent or not violent crime have to do with it? What does being incarcerated for committing crimes have to do with "disappearing" for being muslim? How does the US imprisonment rate of 0.716% even compare to putting about 30% of the population in concentration camps?
deogeo 8y ago
> please think of an actual justification before you respond Why? Both systems are threats, one internal (from a US perspective), one external. Opposing one does not imply supporting the other, and US sins do not mean China presents less of a threat.
marak830 8y ago
No, just whataboutisim. That's it.

geogra4 8y ago

Yeah, sure. And Guaido is the president of Venezuela

mrobot 8y ago

Why does this article keep happening? Do we really think the United States gives a damn or are they just projecting? Any time the United States has a humanitarian concern it's a red flag to me. Xinjiang has abundant oil and mineral reserves, just saying...

mrobot 8y ago
Someone named Shawn Zhang tweeted that an 800 year old mosque was demolished in Xinjiang. It was cited in thousands of news articles. He just made it it up. Retracted it after all the articles were published. This all looks like a coordinated campaign by the US and corporate media to make China look Islamophobic.
mrobot 8y ago
Counternarrative about US-funded "World Uyghur Congress" separatists instigating this: https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/30/is-china-building-a-police-state-or-countering-western-sponsored-terrorism/ https://journal-neo.org/2019/01/30/is-china-building-a-polic...
- heraclius 8y ago
  Politico says that this website is part of a Russian government institution.⁰ Perhaps that’s bunkum, but both sides fund propaganda about the other; most of the time, they will fund propaganda about things that are true—I remember Xinhua writing something entirely true about police brutality in the US for example—because true things are more credible. The article, moreover, contains something of a non sequitur. The terrorist attacks it cites are from before the terror attacks. So at the very least the approach the CCP used between that time and the concentration camps was sufficient, and the recent escalation insufficient. It is also worth asking why the Uyghurs became violent in the first place. China was one of the powers that opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan; this, of course, involved the creation of a violent Islam to oppose their rule. The Strike Hard campaign was not obviously born of necessity; the 90s were not a time of substantial strife. Terrorism is something of a weasel word; the use of violence is fairly common and oughtn’t to render an entire people pariahs. Moreover the CCP response is grossly disproportionate—the detention of millions in response to terrorist attacks on the scale of, at most, thousands, is entirely unjustified. As for the use of “separatism” as code for “a priori bad”, this usage is entirely unjustified. It is quite plausible that the Americans are not acting benevolently. That is not an excuse to ignore the plight of the Uyghurs, documented by others.¹ 0. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russia-targets-the-us-military-215247 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russi... 1. https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-securitization-campaign-evidence-from-domestic-security-budgets/ https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-sec... — on the nature of the campaign; https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repression/reverse-engineering-xinjiang-police-mass-surveillance https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repr... — on mass surveillance.

chriscappuccio 8y ago

China also harvests organs from prisoners, including political prisoners. They claim that prisoner harvesting ended in 2015 and the system is 100% voluntary now. That's a blatant lie based on the numbers. They are marketing "halal" organs to Saudis, guess what groups those are coming from? This is a much deeper hole of darkness and depravity than the US prison system ever dreamed of being. It's evil.