Last week, social media became consumed with a debate over the grotesque comparison between American detention centers for refugees and the Third Reich’s concentration camps. Meanwhile, writes Jonah Goldberg, Beijing has been placing Muslims from the country’s northwest in places far more deserving of the concentration-camp label, albeit without gas chambers or crematoria. He writes:

The Chinese [have created a] gulag archipelago of internment and re-education camps in the Xinjiang province, where an estimated one-million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic people are being held. The Uighurs are a traditionally Muslim minority, and Beijing says they pose a major threat because of Islamic terrorism. The reality is that the Chinese fear separatist movements, Islamic or otherwise, in a resource-rich region three times the size of France.

As a result, the regime is pursuing the largest attempt at cultural annihilation in the 21st century. Religion is heavily regulated throughout China, but it is brutally policed in Xinjiang. According to an analysis of satellite imagery by Agence France-Presse, “30 religious sites were completely demolished while six had their domes and corner spires removed.” . . .

What is both intriguing and infuriating to me is that American politicians refuse to talk about any of this. . . . Among both Democrats and Republicans, Chinese authoritarianism often goes unmentioned, save perhaps as an afterthought. . . . The fact that the Chinese government has put a million Muslims in re-education camps and persecuted Christians, too, is rarely part of the conversation.

One needn’t be blindly moralistic about all of this. China is big, powerful and dangerous. But so was the Soviet Union, and we still managed to tell the truth about it.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.