Muslim Uighurs

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Berlin 1936. Beijing 2022. Must China's Uighurs play the role Jews did in Hitler Olympics?

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Berlin 1936. Beijing 2022. Must China's Uighurs play the role Jews did in Hitler Olympics?

It should be evident to all paying attention that the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will proceed as planned. Forget the meager protests against China’s cruel and immoral treatment of its own. The bad guys appear to be on the verge of another power-play victory.

Never mind the plight of China’s Uighur Muslims, underground Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhists and all the other groups the Beijing government labels a political threat. They’re of no lasting concern to the international elite who are quick to issue public condemnations, but oh so slow when it comes to follow up.

China’s political power — a byproduct of its enormous economic strength — is just too much to counter. And Beijing’s despotic leaders darn well know it.

This recent Associated Press article — “Beijing Olympics open in 4 months; human rights talk absent” — underscores the point. These opening graphs summarize the story quite well. They're also a reminder of the efficacy of traditional wire journalism’s inverted pyramid style. This piece of the story is long, but essential:

When the International Olympic Committee awarded Beijing the 2008 Summer Olympics, it promised the Games could improve human rights and civil liberties in China.

There is no such lofty talk this time with Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics — the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games — opening in just four months on Feb. 4.

Instead, there are some calls for governments to boycott the Games with 3,000 athletes, sponsors and broadcasters being lobbied by rights groups representing minorities across China.

IOC President Thomas Bach has repeatedly dodged questions about the propriety of holding the Games in China despite evidence of alleged genocide, vast surveillance, and crimes against humanity involving at least 1 million Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities. Tibet, a flashpoint in the run up to 2008, remains one still.

“The big difference between the two Beijing Games is that in 2008 Beijing tried to please the world,” Xu Guoqi, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, said in an email to The Associated Press. “In 2022, it does not really care about what the rest of the world thinks about it.”


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Yearenders-palooza finale: 2020 Top 10 religion-news lists from several Getreligionistas

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Yearenders-palooza finale: 2020 Top 10 religion-news lists from several Getreligionistas

OK. This is it. I promise. This is the last GetReligion #2020 Top 10 religion-news post that you’re going to see. I think. And sorry about the Kiss 2020 goodbye concert video with this post (I could not resist).

Let me be clear what this is. A few of us have already written columns or posts evaluating the results of the Religion News Association poll, like this “On Religion” column that I shared here: “Of course the pandemic was top 2020 religion-news story: But which COVID-19 story?”

However, each of us — when creating our own personal lists — saw the religion-news landscape through our own lens. Thus, I thought readers might enjoy seeing all of the RNA poll items — 27 news events and trends were on the ballot — and how some of us arranged them. Some readers, for example, have expressed a desire to explore what was left OFF the list and how the items were described on the official ballot. Read it all at the RNA.org website.

As I said earlier, in the GetReligion podcast and post in which I shared my own ballot (“The year when religion news went viral, and that was a bad thing”), I thought the key was that the COVID-19 crisis was several stories in one. I thought the most important angle was the First Amendment fights, so I wrote:

According to journalists who cover religion, this was the year's biggest story: "COVID-19 pandemic claims lives of many religious leaders and laity, upends death rituals, ravages congregational finances, spurs charitable responses, forces religious observances to cancel or go online and stirs legal fights over worship shutdowns."

But there was a problem on my ballot. The RNA list included another coronavirus item focusing on religious liberty. In some cities and states, officials created pandemic regulations that claimed many institutions — from grocery stores to casinos — provided "essential services." Meanwhile, other institutions — like churches and synagogues — were deemed "non-essential."

The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that religious institutions shouldn't face tougher rules than secular groups and activities. It was wrong, for example, to ban masked priests from hearing confessions – outdoors, 10 feet away from masked penitents – while consumers were lined up at liquor stores.

Ryan Burge, in a post this weekend, had a similar take at the top of his list, stressing First Amendment and Supreme Court issues. The key, he said, was this: “I made a list based on what I thought would have the most lasting impacts into 2021 and beyond.”

So that brings us to new material from other members of the team, starting with Julia Duin. She sent me an email raising another issue with the RNA results:


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Yearenders-palooza: Ryan Burge (Who else?) charts religion and politics in #2020

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Yearenders-palooza: Ryan Burge (Who else?) charts religion and politics in #2020

We now know, apparently, what happens if you force political scientist Ryan Burge into lockdown — but leave the WiFi turned on.

You end up with lots and lots and lots of charts, with most of them focusing on the major role that religion plays in politics and the American public square, in general.

Burge’s work was all over the place during 2020, with good cause. He’s a contributor here at GetReligion, but we keep stressing that journalists (and news consumers) really need to follow his active Twitter feed and his work at the weblog Religion In Public. Here in that blog’s “Year in Review” feature.

Anyway, I wrote Burge and asked him to send me several crucial bytes of his work from 2020, with some quick commentary. You will see that below. I have always appreciated the fact that Ryan’s work tends to poke at stereotypes on the left and the right.

I also asked him for his take on the Top 10 religion-beat news stories and trends of 2020, using the full list of options provided at the start of the Religion News Association poll. I have already offered my own take on that poll here in an “On Religion” column and then here, in a “Crossroads” podcast.

Burge’s commentary on that poll is at the end of this post.

So let’s get started, with Burge’s charts and commentary.


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Final #2020 podcast: The year when religion news went viral, and that was a bad thing

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When you have been studying the Religion News Association’s Top 10 religion stories poll for as many years as I have (starting around 1980), it’s easy to spot patterns.

In normal years, religion-beat specialists tend to place several familiar items at or near near the top of the poll. You can see that by looking at Internet-era polls (click here). Like what?

* Whatever the pope did or said that drew headlines, especially if there was a USA tour.

* Religion affecting American politics (especially following the birth of the Religious Right after Roe vs. Wade). Big Supreme Court decisions often fit into this niche.

* Major religion-related wars or acts of terrorism around the world.

* What happened with liberal Protestantism — especially Episcopalians — and the whole God vs. the Sexual Revolution thing?

* For a decade or so, Southern Baptist warfare was a year-to-year story (stay tuned for future developments).

* Sex scandals involving bad conservative religious groups or leaders (since hypocrisy is more newsworthy than mistakes made by good liberals as they evolve).

As always, the year’s final “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on the results of the RNA poll and what might happen in the year ahead. My own “On Religion” column about the 2020 poll is running in mainstream newspapers this weekend and it will be posted here and at Tmatt.net in a day or so.

This was not, as you would expect, a “normal” year in the poll — unless you want to say that, instead of wars or acts of terrorism, the world experienced a pandemic. COVID-19 showed up twice in the RNA poll and even those two items understated the size and complexity of this story.

Looking forward: How many congregations and clergy will we lose in the next few years because of the impact — in terms of stress, as well as finances — of this pandemic?

Anyway, I thought GetReligion readers might want to see my own ballot in this poll, which was similar to the poll final results (click here for those) — but with some crucial variations. For starters, I took the two RNA coronavirus pandemic stories and turned them into items 1(a) and 1(b) by placing them at the top.

I have added a few bites of commentary to this list. Let me stress that this list is my ballot, but features the RNA-poll wordings that describe each “story” or trend.


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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

It was the kind of open-ended question researchers ask when they want survey participants to have every possible chance to give a good answer.

Thus, a recent 50-state study of Millennials and younger "Generation Z" Americans included this: "During the Holocaust, Jews and many others were sent to concentration camps, death camps and ghettos. Can you name any concentration camps, death camps or ghettos you have heard of?"

Only 44% could remember hearing about Auschwitz and only 6% remembered Dachau, the first concentration camp. Only 1% mentioned Buchenwald, where Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel was a prisoner when the American Third Army arrived.

Another question: "How was the Holocaust carried out?" While 30% knew that there were concentration camps, only 13% remembered poison-gas chambers.

"That was truly shocking. I have always thought of Auschwitz as a symbol of evil for just about everyone. … It has always been the ultimate example of what hate can lead to if we don't find a way to stop it," said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

It was a sobering "wake-up call," he added, to learn that half of the young Americans in this survey "couldn't name a single concentration camp. … It seems that we no longer have common Holocaust symbols in our culture, at least not among our younger generations."

Popular culture is crucial. It has, after all, been nearly 30 years since the release of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," so that landmark movie isn't a cultural reference point for many young people. And it's been 20 years since the original "X-Men" movie, which opens at the gates of Auschwitz, and almost a decade since "X-Men: First Class," which offered a variation on that concentration-camp imagery.

Old movies and school Holocaust-education materials, said Taylor, are clearly being buried in information from social media and Internet search engines.

"The world has changed so much in terms of how information is transmitted," he said, reached by telephone. "Obviously the Internet has transformed how young people take in stories and information. … Twenty years ago, we could assume that most students were being exposed to books by Elie Wiesel" in history classes or "movies like 'Schindler's List' or 'Sophie's Choice.' We cannot assume this anymore."


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Got bias? Pompeo gave a 'divisive' speech, which implies two kinds of insiders were divided

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Let’s just say that I saw — in social media and in personal emails — two very different kinds of comments about the recent speech that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered on the subject of human rights.

Quite a few people, as always, wanted to argue about the contents of the speech itself, especially its urgent emphasis on religious freedom. That’s understandable, in light of waves of images coming out of China of blindfolded Uighur Muslims being shipped off to training camps.

Others were upset about the nature of the relatively short New York Times report about the speech, which ran with this rather blunt lede:

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a divisive speech … calling for the United States to ground its human rights policy more prominently in religious liberty and property rights.

To cut to the chase, some folks were upset by the inclusion of the word “divisive,” saying that this was a loaded, biased word to use in a lede framing the contents of a hard-news story.

Meanwhile, I was actually intrigued by the word “divisive” for a rather different reason, one directly linked to debates about objectivity and fairness in journalism.

You see, if a speech is “divisive” that would imply that people who heard the speech were divided, in terms of their views of its contents. It’s hard to cover a “divisive” speech without presenting accurate, fair-minded content about the views of people on both sides of that divide. Does that make sense?

The problem with the Times peace — #DUH — is that it contains zero input from people who support the views presented by Pompeo and, thus, would be willing to provide information and input that would explain the speech from their point of view.

Maybe this is one of those cases in which there was only one point of view worth quoting, in terms of reacting to Sec. Pompeo’s words?


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New York Times blockbuster uses leaked files to expose new horrors in China's war on Islam

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Early in my journalism career, a veteran investigative reporter gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: The hotter the story, the more you want a document of some kind that you can verify and then show readers. This will build trust.

You can see this principal at work in the blockbuster religion story of the weekend — that New York Times foreign desk report about ongoing and even expanding efforts to lock up and, if need be, brainwash or execute a million or more Uighur Muslims in what can only be called reeducation or concentration camps.

The dramatic double-decker headline includes a nod to the document stash at the heart of it all:

‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

As always, it’s good to tell readers as much as you can tell them about the sourcing, to hang on to as much trust as possible; Thus:

Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including [President Xi Jinping], from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.

This is a stunning, must-read story and it deserves the acclaim that it is getting.

However, I would like to note one religion-shaped hole. A theme running through the report is that Chinese officials are divided over whether or not they will be able to produce a safe, compromised, easy-to-control version of Islam — similar to their own state-sanctioned Christian churches.

The bottom line: It would have required only an extra line or two in this report to note that Chinese officials have also unleashed attacks on independent, underground churches, as well as the crusade against Uighur Muslims. As a rule “conservative” reports on persecuted Christians in China mention the horrors being inflicted on Muslims. Why not take a similar approach in this Times blockbuster?

But back to the crucial documents at the heart of this report.


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China considers three-child policy while India ponders two-child limit due to Muslim birth rates

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I’ve been watching for almost a year now as China has radically changed its child control policies from the infamous one-child policy to an almost-three child policy.

Thirty-five years of forced abortions, sterilizations, hysterectomies and outright murders of any children who managed to survive these procedures have drastically affected the Chinese family and kin structures on which Chinese culture rested. The South China Morning Post said the psychological trauma to Chinese society surpasses the impacts of other calamities, such as the Great Famine of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s.

So … now three children?

Last fall, the Wall Street Journal laid out some hints the government was throwing around. And there is a religion connection to this, so please stay with me.

BEIJING—A government-issued postage stamp of a happy pig family—with three piglets—has raised expectations that China may loosen its family-planning policy yet again.

China Post, the national postal service, on Tuesday unveiled its Year of the Pig stamp for 2019, prompting commentators on social media to speculate that the two-child policy is on its way out.

There is precedent: The ditching of the one-child policy in 2016 was foreshadowed by a Year of the Monkey stamp showing two baby monkeys.

Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—and longtime critic of China’s birth policy—said the government is likely to go further this time. “It’s a clear sign that they are going to abandon all birth restrictions,” Mr. Yi said.

China’s fertility rate is one of the world’s lowest and nowhere near the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. The country disbanded its family planning commission last year.


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For Russia's Jehovah's Witnesses and China's Uighur Muslims, politics trump religious freedom

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Political power has as much to do with religious group fortunes as do the appeal of their message and the commitment of their followers. It's no wonder that the histories of each of the three major monotheistic religions emphasize, and even celebrate, stories of persecution at the hands of repressive political leaders.

Frankly, not much has changed over the centuries, despite any assumptions that modernity has birthed generally more enlightened attitudes toward politically weak minority faiths. Lip service means little when believers face immediate threats.

Here are two examples of politically linked religious persecution that produced international headlines last week.

The first is the dire situation of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia. They’re persecuted by the government, in part because they’ve been deemed insufficiently loyal to the state, because they’re a relatively new sect with no historical ties to the Slavs and because they're a small and politically powerless faith with few international friends.

The second example is, arguably, the even worse situation of China’s Uighur Muslims. Not only does Beijing fear their potential political power, but until now they’ve also been largely abandoned by their powerful global coreligionists, again because of blatantly self-serving political considerations.

The good news here, if that’s not an overstatement, is they've received a modicum of  international lip service of late, even if only — no surprise here — out of political self-interest.

But let’s start with the Jehovah's Witnesses. I’ve previous chronicled their situation here, focusing on how the elite international media has -- or has not -- covered them. Click here and then click here to retrieve two of my past GetReligion pieces.

The latest news out of Russia is pretty bad. Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent declaration of quasi-support for his nation’s Witnesses, a foreign-born member of the group has been sentenced to six years in prison for — well, basically for being a member of the faith.

Here’s the top of a Religion News Service report:

MOSCOW (RNS) —  A Russian court has sentenced a Danish member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to six years on extremism charges in a case that has rekindled memories of the Soviet-era persecution of Christians and triggered widespread international criticism.


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