Uighurs

With crimes against humanity now on NATO’s doorstep, Westerners are focusing on human rights with concern and alarm not seen since the Cold War. As we do, we must admit that the West’s post-Cold War precepts and priorities downplayed human dignity and human suffering.

Violations of religious freedom have been a significant factor in creating the conditions that marked the “path to genocide.” Therefore, protecting religious freedom will be critical for those looking to walk with the “Rohingya on this path out of genocide.”

The New Right cannot be bothered with foreign threats because they are rationing political capital for an ideological fight at home. That’s bad enough. Even worse, they seem less interested in transcending tyranny and more interested in learning from it.

How should democratic governments, as well as Christian citizens, respond to an Olympics held in an authoritarian regime that holds a million Muslim Uighurs in forced labor camps, represses Christians and other religious minorities, and has clamped down on the once-free inhabitants of Hong Kong?

Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and part-owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, said that “nobody cares about the Uighurs.” Here Aaron Woodall engages the unruled relativism that stands behind Palihapitiya’s woke capitalism.

China can only be substantively challenged by a United States that is fully aware of what the Founders sought to offer the world through enshrining their fervent hope for shared and mutually defended liberty and equality for all.

The common thread across these scenarios is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to keep victims under control and extract profit. This is the defining feature of human trafficking. Fortunately, these heartbreaking, uncivilized practices no longer go unnoticed.

Here is the bad news for Beijing, and the good news for the West. Despite genuine concerns over how an increasingly multipolar world will erode the human rights consensus, the agenda still remains a major obstacle to ideological competitors—both at home and abroad.

China is brimming with optimism about the Taliban in Afghanistan. But a bombing that killed scores of people, including 13 American troops, outside the Kabul airport on August 26 has led many to distrust the Islamic group’s promise to not let anyone use the land-locked country’s soil to target another.