As regular readers of this site know, I’m not exactly a fan of the ideology of Islam. From what I’ve seen of it and what I’ve seen this ideology make its adherents do, it’s the great ‘wrong’un’ of the world’s faiths. Unlike comparable monotheisms such as Judaism and Christianity, Islam and its religious functionaries appear to be almost incapable of taking into account later knowledge or even engaging in critical analysis of its scripture. For example both of the rule based monotheisms Judaism and Islam have in their scripture the commandment to execute adulteresses. But, Judaism has moved past this as more knowledge has accumulated and more humanity and more compassion for flawed individuals has become the norm. No matter how hard I dig I can’t find any case in the modern world where a Jewish community has executed an adulteress. In modern Islam on the other hand, in places like Afghanistan and under the ISIS group, the execution of women for trivial matters is all too common.

It is this inflexibility along with the vile and violent hatred that the ideology of Islam engenders in all too many of its followers that causes me to despise it. However, my dislike for the ideology, does not in the main cause me to hate the individual who may be in Islam either willingly or unwillingly or who may have the brains to reject the more hateful parts of Islamic scripture. In the case of individuals I believe that the best way forward is to show them what Islam really is and not what they may have been told by parents or Imams or religious educators. I believe that showing ordinary Muslims the horrors of Islam may persuade some to leave and find a better path.

However what I cannot condone, even though I dislike the ideology of Islam immensely, is what is being done to Muslims in China. What the Chinese government is doing goes way beyond what could be morally acceptable by any reasonable person and has morphed into something that we might have expected from the Third Reich, namely ethnically and religiously targetted sterilisations, among other myriad oppressions.

According to a report by the Associated Press, the Uighur people, who are mostly but not entirely Muslim, are being targetted by the Chinese Communist Party for forced contraception, forced sterilisations and forced abortions should they have more than the permitted number of children. Previously the Uighur people were allowed some leniency from China’s one child policy that was brought in by a previous Communist government to slow down China’s population growth. But now things have changed. Now the Uighur Muslims of China are being being targetted for oppression of the sort that characterise dictatorial regimes like that of the Chinese Communist Party.

The forced birth control and abortions, the concentration camps that the Chinese Government has set up in order to ostensibly ‘re-educate’ Uighurs to love the Communist Party along with the police raids on Uighur homes in order to search for ‘hidden children’, look to me to be suspiciously like genocide. The Chinese Communist Party is trying to eradicate the Uighur people, not just the Uighur culture or their particular brand of Islam, but the people themselves.

I think that no matter how much one may hate or dislike a particular ideology, whether that be Nazism, Communism or Islam, the ordinary people who are governed by that ideology should not be equally disliked. I believe that it was the Religion Of Peace website that came up with the warning not to judge Islam by the Muslims that you know and not to judge Muslims by the Islam that you know. In other words, the individual is often very separate from the ideology and may not be as guilty of wrong as would be the ideology itself.

Although I dislike Islam immensely, I cannot condone or support what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to the Uighurs, it’s wrong, it’s oppression, it is genocide. Yes, I admit that there are a few headcase jihadists in the Uighur group, but that number appears to be relatively small and that also doesn’t excuse what the Communists are doing. I have to speak up against what the Communists are doing to the Uighurs and I hope that others, including those who are vehemently opposed to the ideology of Islam can do something similar.