The Muslim World Isn’t Coming to Save the Uyghurs

Doing the bare minimum to stand up for human rights isn’t an Olympic sport in the Winter Games, which kick off in Beijing tomorrow, but let’s suppose it was. Gold medals would undoubtedly be awarded to the United States, Britain, Canada, and the handful of other countries whose high-level officials have chosen to shun the Games in protest of China’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, saying that the use of mass detention and forced labor amounts to genocide. Silver would go to countries such as Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands, whose government officials attributed their absence from the Games not to human-rights concerns, but to the pandemic. Bronze would go to the likes of France and the Czech Republic, whose leaders dismissed diplomatic boycotts of the Games as “insignificant” and a “misuse of the Olympic idea.”

Majority-Muslim countries, which have largely chosen to ignore the