You shouldn't be surprised. As some of us tried to say in the 1990s and 2000s, the gap between the sacred and the profane was never as wide as religious sentimentalists and liberal multiculturalists believed. They went along with the argument that it was bad taste at best and racism at worst to offend believers. You were "punching down" at largely poor and largely Muslim communities.
We thought they were being wilfully blind. They did not understand how men with real power and malice were manipulating religious outrage to consolidate their rule over their wretched population.
China has stripped away the religious justifications to reveal what was once half-hidden: unadorned and unstoppable power.
In many countries, criticising China is the new blasphemy. Nowhere can you see the power more nakedly displayed than in Muslim-majority regimes.
Once, they tried to murder blasphemous novelists and screamed about their desire to defend the prophet from the smallest insult. Today, they bend their knees and bite their tongues as China engages in unspeakable atrocities against the largely Muslim Uighur population of western China.
One of the great crimes of the 21st century is being committed in front of our eyes. We see it, yet we don't register it.
The Chinese Communist party is reverting to type, and reviving the totalitarian fear of the Mao era. To bring down numbers of the largely Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang, the China scholar Adrian Zenz reports, the Communists are forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive devices.
If they resist, the state sends them to join the one million Uighur people and other Muslim minorities detained in what the state defines as "re-education" camps. A BBC investigation found that China was separating children from their families so they grew up without understanding Islam.
Countries that could not tolerate Rushdie's magical realist novel can live with the mass sterilisation of Muslim women.
It may be a cheap point but it remains true that if a western country were to display one-tenth, one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the brutality that China is inflicting on Muslims, the global left would be burning with outrage.
If you want to be charitable, its silence can in part be explained by logistical difficulties.
Reporters are free to cover China's suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, for the time being at any rate, but cannot get near Xinjiang without taking extraordinary risks. With no footage of their suffering, millions can suffer unnoticed in the dark.
But the main reasons why Muslims suffer in silence is that the Muslim-majority countries that raged against Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo have decided to stay silent. They use the idea of Muslim solidarity only when it suits them.
[How About Because it so Indifferently Received That it Seems Hardly Worth Repeating?]
In July 2019, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and other Muslim-majority states that pose as defenders of the faith helped to block a western motion at the United Nations calling for China to allow "independent international observers" into the Xinjiang region.
Iran issues occasional criticisms but wants Chinese support in its struggle against the Trump administration and so keeps its complaints coded. Their hypocrisy is almost funny, if you take your humour black.
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