Published: 2 July 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DAVID AARONOVITCH: Very few people are prepared to ask the difficult question about why so many Muslims focus their anger on Palestine
THE OTHER DAY, the prime minister of Pakistan, the former cricketer and socialite Imran Khan, was interviewed by the American-based Australian journalist, Jonathan Swan.
Swan did something that is rarely done by Western journalists and taxed Khan with his absence of concern for the Uighurs of Xinjiang (Kahn refused to condemn China’s genocidal treatment of the Muslim minority) and his simultaneous anger about Islamophobia in the West.
“I concentrate on what is happening on my border”, retorted Khan. “This is on your border,” replied Swan. And so it is.
In Khan’s case you might excuse his hypocrisy on the cynical grounds of geopolitics. China is his local superpower and Chinese money washes around his area. But his capacity to shut one eye while opening the other as widely as possible is far from unique to him.
Last week, in a rather desultory fashion, I asked a few people on social media who understand the politics to explain to me why it was that recent events in Gaza were now being touted as a major explanation for UK Labour’s apparent difficulties in the forthcoming Batley and Spen by-election.
FULL STORY Why just Gaza? What about the Uighurs and Syrian Muslims? (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Members of the Uighur community living in Turkey, hold a placard with pictures of Uighurs they say they fear are being kept in detention camps in China, Wednesday, February 10 (Mehmet Guzel)
