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Uyghur: British Jewish national target China on Holocaust Memorial Day

Just Earth News | @justearthnews | 29 Jan 2021

Uyghur: British Jewish national target China on Holocaust Memorial Day

Image: Wikimedia Commons

London: A leading British Jewish national said there are chilling similarities between contemporary events in China’s northwest Xinjiang province and the Holocaust.

The Jewish leaders observed Holocaust Memorial Day recently.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial day on  Jan 27 to remember the victims of the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

Mia Hasenson-Gross, executive director of the Jewish human rights organisation Rene Cassin, told Al Jazeera that China was effectively attempting to “eradicate” the Uyghur language, culture and tradition.

“Rather than allowing this to escalate to the point where the Uyghur will become another people whose genocide we remember in [the] future, we have the opportunity now to prevent that from happening,” Hasenson-Gross told Al Jazeera.

“Holocaust Memorial Day is designed to remind us of the atrocities that can happen and the important lessons we need to learn from the early stages of indifference and complicity that enabled these final acts of physical destruction,” she said.

Who are Uyghur Muslims?

Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic minority ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. It is now widely publicized that their human rights are crushed by China and they were sent to "re-education camps" by the communist regime in Beijing.

The Uyghurs are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

An American representative at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in 2018 that the committee had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps" by the Chinese authorities.