by Carmel Kookogey If you’re Muslim living in China today, turning down alcohol, refusing to smoke, or wearing a beard could be treated as a crime. To date, China’s internment camps, which they call “re-education camps,” contain over 1 million Uighurs, who are a minority group made up of mostly Muslims living in the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. They have long been in conflict with the Chinese Communist Party, whose camps are operated with the end goal of Sinicizing religious beliefs, or making them conform to the party’s ideology. The Heritage Foundation held an event last week titled “The Crisis in Xinjiang” to discuss the injustice being perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party and why those who treasure religious freedom should care. Olivia Enos, a foreign policy analyst for the Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, said that Uighurs who visibly live out their religious life are the very reason the Chinese government deems them suspicious. Their religious expressions act as cultural red flags to government authorities, Enos said, and for this reason, the current Uighur crisis in Xinjiang is a repetition of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.…
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