China is in the midst of a massive campaign of repression directed at the Uighurs, a Muslim people, speaking a Turkic language, concentrated in the country’s northwestern province. As many as a million people have been placed in prison camps, where they are urged to reject Muhammad for Mao. Outside the camps, Beijing has placed restrictions on public prayer, Islamic schools, and fasting on Ramadan. Although this repression far outstrips anything Palestinians have suffered under Israeli rule, Muslim leaders are almost uniformly silent. Nithin Coca comments:

No Muslim nation’s head of state has made a public statement in support of the Uighurs this decade. Politicians and many religious leaders who claim to speak for the faith are silent in the face of China’s political and economic power. . . . Last summer, Egypt deported several ethnic Uighurs back to China, where they faced near-certain jail time and, potentially, death, to little protest. This followed similar moves by Malaysia and Pakistan in 2011.

This is in stark contrast to how these countries react to news of prejudice against Muslims by the West or, especially, Israel. Events in Gaza have sparked protests across the Islamic world, not only in the Middle East but also in more distant Bangladesh and Indonesia. If Egypt or Malaysia had deported Palestinians to Israeli prisons, the uproar would likely have been ferocious. But the brutal, and expressly anti-religious, persecution of Uighurs prompts no response. . . .

Part of the [explanation] is that money talks. China has become a key trading partner of every Muslim-majority nation. Many are members of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or are participating in China’s “Belt and Road” initiative. In South Asia, this means infrastructure investment. In Southeast Asia, China is a key market for commodities such as palm oil and coal. The Middle East benefits due to China’s position as the world’s top importer of oil and its rapidly increasing use of natural gas. . . .

China’s success at cutting off access to Xinjiang is another reason [these depredations have been ignored.]. A regular dose of videos depicting Palestinian suffering hits YouTube every day. Interviews with tearful Rohingya stream on Al Jazeera and other global media outlets. Palestinian representatives and advocates speak and write in the media. But few images are emerging from Xinjiang due to restrictions on press access and the massive state censorship apparatus. That means the world sees little more than blurry satellite footage of the internment camps. Even Uighurs who have escaped are often only able to talk anonymously, not least because Chinese intelligence regularly threatens persecution of their families back home if they speak up.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.