During the past four years, the Chinese Communist Party has undertaken a brutal campaign of repression targeting the Muslim population of its northwestern Xinjiang province. Yet the world’s Muslim countries, who have so often rallied to condemn Israel’s imagined crimes against Palestinians, or the policies of the U.S.-led War on Terror, or even criticism of Islam in Western Europe, have been remarkable silent about this very real, and very cruel, wave of persecution. Ilan Berman explains why:

Over the past several years, as part of the signature foreign-policy initiative known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing has made massive investments throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in everything from infrastructure to telecommunications. In the process, it has succeeded in buying the silence of Muslim states regarding how it treats their co-religionists.

Examples of this passivity abound. Take Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s prior condemnation of China’s domestic conduct petered out after China’s Central Bank offered a $1 billion bailout to stabilize the country’s ailing economy last summer. Or Saudi Arabia, [which like Turkey positions itself as a leader of the Sunni world], where a slew of recent deals made China a key partner in the country’s “Vision 2030” development plan, turning the House of Saud into an apologist for Beijing in the process. And in Pakistan, the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan has repeatedly refused to . . . criticize China’s treatment of the Uighurs because of past assistance from Beijing.

All this compliance was showcased in a July 2019 letter to the United Nations in which no fewer than 37 nations (more than a third of them majority Muslim) officially threw their support behind China’s Xinjiang policy.

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.