British Jews condemn Uyghur persecution in China on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Jan 28, 2021
London [UK], January 28 : On the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, prominent Jewish figures spoke out over China's state-run campaign against its minority communities including Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province.
Notable people in the British Jews community have warned the world as they drew parallels in the events occurring in Xinjiang province with other historic tragedies, Al Jazeera reported.
Mia Hasenson-Gross, executive director of the Jewish human rights organisation Rene Cassin, said Bejing was effectively attempting to "eradicate" the culture of Uyghurs.
China has been rebuked globally for cracking down on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps, interfering in their religious activities and sending members of the community to undergo some form of forcible re-education or indoctrination.
Beijing, on the other hand, vehemently denied that it is engaged in human rights abuses against the Uyghurs while reports from journalists, NGOs and former detainees have surfaced, highlighting brutal crackdown on the ethnic community.
"Rather than allowing this to escalate to the point where the Uighur will become another people whose genocide we remember in [the] future, we have the opportunity now to prevent that from happening," said Hasenson-Gross, as quoted by 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 added.
During the first commemoration in memory of the victims of the holocaust, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the "universal revulsion at this crime" was one event leading to the UN's founding and drawing up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"But it did not end," he said. "Indeed, today antisemitism is resurgent in many places around the world".
