New York, April 1 - For at least the sixth time this week, a group of activists opposed to the existence of a Jewish state just happened to express the same positions and promote the same attitudes as those who deny the government of China is suppressing and erasing Uighur Muslim culture despite overwhelming evidence it is occurring, and as those who support the mass-murdering, corrupt, terrorist-harboring regime governing Syria, a situation that has caught the activists by surprise, having happened only about a billion times over the last decade.
Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada voiced his surprise yet again Thursday that his political and ideological bedfellows deny as he does the seriousness of China's systematic violation of Uighur human rights, including forced labor, forced sterilization, mass incarceration, and other abuses. He also expressed wonderment that so many of his fellow anti-Zionist-not-antisemites also stan Syrian strongman Basher Assad as he does, and either justify, downplay, or ignore, as Abunimah does, the dictator's hand in the deaths of half a million Syrians over the course of the ongoing civil war in that Arab republic.
"I was just discussing this with some buddies from the UK Labour Party the other day," recalled Abunimah. "We all seem to agree on the same points again and again: that Israel is an Apartheid state that must be destroyed; that China has done nothing but improve the lives of the Uighurs, and that Basher Assad has killed no one but Islamist extremists."
"That coincidence is remarkable enough," he continued. "But then when you also figure into it the uncanny prevalence of Holocaust minimization - if not outright denial - in our respective ranks, well, that's just bizarre. I don't know what to make of it. We're all just so morally... consistent, I guess, is the word."
A member of the far-left segment of Labour's constituency offered an analysis of the intriguing phenomenon. "Diverting attention for even a short time from Palestinian grievances risks undermining the Left as a whole," explained Asa Winstanley. "Acknowledging a so-called 'genocide' taking place in Xinjiang would threaten to overshadow the paramount status that eliminating Jewish sovereignty and security must have for all true progressives. The same goes for the situation in Syria: allowing the world's attention to stray from Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine - a cleansing so thorough that the Palestinian population has increased tenfold since Israel was established - can only end badly. These shared sensibilities govern the overlapping positions of our disparate groups."