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.

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.