Inmates told that in the camps Muslims are forced to reject Islam and learn Communist Party songs every day. Other reports say that inmates are forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. While the camps were at first created to battle extremism of Uighur Muslims, now even a long beard – as part of a Muslim identity – can result in being sent to a re-education camp. The consequence is that almost every Uighur Muslim risks to be sent away for ‘re-education’.
The official radio of China’s official Communist Party broadcasted: “Members of the public who have been chosen for re-education have been infected by an ideological illness. They have been infected with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek treatment from a hospital as an inpatient.”
“The religious extremist ideology is a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the people. … If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an incurable malignant tumour,” the radio statement broadcast via WeChat to Uighurs last year, said.
After being confronted by a UN panel a Chinese official says there are “no such things as re-education centres”. According to James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, “Religious belief is seen as pathology”.
“So now they’re calling re-education camps ‘hospitals’ meant to cure thinking. It’s like an inoculation, a search-and-destroy medical procedure that they want to apply to the whole Uighur population, to kill the germs of extremism,” Millward adds. The professor could be right as a later excerpt of the audio broadcast shows that it’s not necessary to commit a crime, but the Islamic ideology itself is already considered extremist.
“Although a certain number of people who have been indoctrinated with extremist ideology have not committed any crimes, they are already infected by the disease. There is always a risk that the illness will manifest itself at any moment (widely known as SJS - Sudden Jihadi Syndrome), which would cause serious harm to the public. That is why they must be admitted to a re-education hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain and restore their normal mind.”
There was a time when author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali believed it all: that, according to Islam, the infidel should die, that the Koran is infallible, that those who violated sharia law — thieves, gays, adulterers — deserved to be stoned to death or beheaded, as they were each Friday in a public gathering place she and her brother called “Chop-Chop Square.”
Today, she is that rare thing: a public intellectual who,
despite death threats and charges of bigotry, calls for an end to Islam — not
just as the faithful know it, but as we in the West think we know it. “The
assumption is that, in Islam, there are a few rotten apples, not the entire
basket,” Ali tells The Post. “I’m saying it’s the entire basket.”
In her book, “Heretic,”
Ali argues for a complete reformation of Islam, akin to the Protestant
reformation of the 16th century. Though her own education led her to reject
Islam and declare herself an atheist, she believes that for the world’s 1.6
billion Muslims, there must be another way.
“If you are a child
brought up to believe that Islam is a source of morality” — as she was, in
Africa and Saudi Arabia — “the Muslim framework presents you with the Koran and
the hijab. I don’t want to be cruel and say, ‘You grow up and you snap out of
it.’ But maybe we who have snapped out of it have not done our best to appeal
to those still in it,” she says.
A
“Useless” Label
In “Heretic,” Ali says
there are three kinds of Muslims. There are the violent, the reformers, and
what she believes is the largest group — those who want to practice as they see
fit and live peaceably but do not challenge the Koran, the Muslim world’s
treatment of women and the LGBT community, or terrorist attacks committed in
the name of Islam.
Yet she refuses to label
this group as moderate. She believes they have done nothing to deserve it.
“I’ve never believed in the word,” Ali says. “It’s totally useless. I think
we’re in a time now where we demand answers from Muslims and say, ‘Whose side
are you on?’ ”
Ali argues for five
amendments to the faith. “Only when these five things are recognized as
inherently harmful and when they are repudiated and nullified,” she writes,
“will a true Muslim reformation have been achieved.”
Those five notions are:
1.
The infallibility of the Prophet Mohammed and the literal interpretation of the
Koran
2.
The idea that life after death is more important than life on earth
3.
Sharia law
4.
Allowing any Muslim to enforce ideas of right and wrong on another
5.
Jihad (holy war)
Rejecting these ideas,
some of which date to the 7th century, is a shocking proposition to the
faithful. “The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world,” Ali writes,
“is precisely its suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting
here.”
Dissent
and Die
Ali has first-hand
experience. In November 2004, after collaborating with the Dutch artist Theo
van Gogh on the documentary “Submission” — which criticized the Muslim world’s
abuse of women — van Gogh was shot to death by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim. The
assassin attempted to decapitate him and stabbed him in the chest, leaving a
note affixed by the knife. It was a death threat against Ali.
She was forced into seclusion and given a 24-hour
security detail. Today, she lives with her husband and young son in the United
States yet remains a target. “In no other modern religion,” Ali writes, “is
dissent still a crime, punishable by death.”
She knows the greatest
criticism she faces is that she is Islamophobic, that she is accusing all
Muslims of adhering to jihad, to abuse, to the establishment of a caliphate. In
the book, Ali cites a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center on Muslims’
beliefs. It found that in Pakistan, 75 percent think those who leave Islam
should be put to death. In Bangladesh, 43 percent thought so. In Iraq, 41
percent.
Those who believe sharia
is the infallible word of God: 81 percent in Pakistan, 65 percent in Bangladesh
and 69 percent in Iraq. She also cites a 2007 Pew study that found that among
18- to 29-year-old American Muslims, 7 percent had favorable opinions of
al Qaeda, and they were twice as likely as older Muslims to believe suicide
bombings in the name of their religion were warranted.
War of
Ideology
This is where Ali thinks
the Obama administration has failed. “He has acknowledged Islamophobia, which
is the worst thing you can do for Muslims who are trying to turn things
around,” she says.
Whether it’s ISIS or al
Qaeda or the Taliban or so-called lone wolves — such as the Boston Marathon
bombers or the Charlie Hebdo attackers or the suicide bomber who blew up 15
Christians in Pakistan last week or the ISIS suicide bombing that left 137
fellow Muslims dead — when these people say they are killing in the name of
true Islam, Ali says, believe them.
She accepts that President
Obama’s administration is attempting a delicate balance — that to declare war
on Islam is exactly what these fighters want — but says more can be done. “Obama
is saying, ‘Listen, Muslims, I’m on your side. I respect your beliefs, and I’d
like you to help me fight these attacks committed in the name of your
religion,’ ” Ali says. “He’s delivering, and they’re not.”
Western Europe, she says,
is turning away from the threat of self-segregating Islamic immigrants at its
grave peril. A 2009 study by the think tank Citivas found 85 operational sharia
courts in Great Britain alone.
“I think with the Arab
world, the West thinks we’re fighting an inferior enemy,” Ali says. “Look at
the language we use: It’s jihad, it’s insurgency, it’s asymmetric.” Ali thinks
the West, and the US especially, should look to the lessons of the Cold War and
recognize we are waging a battle of ideas — that in 17 Muslim majority nations,
the state religion is Islam.
“We did not say the Soviet
system was morally equivalent to ours; nor did we proclaim that Soviet
communism was an ideology of peace,” Ali writes. “In much the same way, we need
to recognize that this is an ideological conflict that will not be won until
the concept of jihad itself has been decommissioned.”
 |
| Dutch director Van Gogh lying dead after a Muslim killed him in Amsterdam. |
The “Mother Lode”
The greatest obstacle to
an Islamic reformation is the diffuse nature of the religion itself. Unlike
Catholicism, there is no leader, no papal equivalent to endorse or denounce
jihad. In fact, there is no hierarchy of any kind, and any man who wishes can
declare himself an imam.
Meanwhile, groups such as
ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban are successful precisely because they have
top-down leadership, codified warfare and an explicit, simple goal. “These
groups are adapting to modern technology, to modern innovations in organization
and management,” Ali says. “They know that without a hierarchy, human beings
understand nothing.”
She is gratified by the
stance taken by Sam Harris, a prominent American neuroscientist and author of
“The End of Faith.” “Sam realizes that among religions, Islam is unique in its
atrocity, that everything we said about [violence in] Christianity and Judaism
was hundreds of years ago. He calls Islam ‘the mother lode of bad ideas,’ which
is extremely brave,” she says.
With “Heretic,” Ali is calling on those Muslims who
reject jihad, acts of terror, and the subjugation of women and infidels to
organize, to challenge, to speak out loudly and often against violence
committed in the name of Allah — and she is calling on the West, to actively
demand it. “This is a transformation of the West as we know it,” she says. “We’re
at the beginning, and what we do right now is going to be consequential.”