My Take | Please, America, show some shame over the war in Gaza

There is hypocrisy, and then there is just being ludicrous. Some rights activists have taken to calling the United States president “Genocide Joe”. So now may not be the best time for his top diplomat, Antony Blinken, to use the G-word against China over the Uygurs.

In the latest State Department report, it is claimed that “in Xinjiang, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] continues to carry out genocide, crimes against humanity, forced labour, and other human rights violations against predominantly Muslim Uygurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups”.

Deradicalisation and reeducation against Muslim extremism and terrorism? That period of “repression”, if you would like to call it that, has essentially ended, even according to a highly critical UN human rights report against Beijing.

But what about economic development, integration and assimilation for the Uygurs? Well, that must be some sort of genocide. When you can’t prove actual genocide, as in physical extermination, Western propagandists fall back on “cultural genocide”, whatever that means.

But all that compared to what?

Washington is about to commit a giant foreign aid package worth US$95 billion, of which US$26 billion will go to Israel. That is on top of the many billions already handed to Israel since the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7. The US has provided weapons, intelligence and special forces support to enable a scorched-earth siege of Gaza that is rendering the Palestinian territory uninhabitable, even when the war ends. Meanwhile, the death toll is quickly approaching 2 per cent of the targeted population.