To President Donald J. Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and all other representatives of the American Jewish community:
In early July, a shipment of wigs was seized at the border to the United States, out of suspicion that the hair from which the wigs was made had been taken from the heads of Muslim prisoners held captive in concentration camps in Xinjiang, China. Apple, Nike, and other major American brands are reported to have Uighur slave labor in their supply chains.
The reports that Muslims are being detained, indoctrinated, tortured, conscripted into slave labor, and even suffering medical interventions and organ theft, are shocking to the human conscience. One might say that a person cannot imagine what it is like to be in one of those camps. But in fact, many members of our own community can, because they were in camps not so unlike them as young people. Many more of us are the children and grandchildren of the survivors of those camps. None of us is untouched by the loss and the trauma of that historical catastrophe.
When the German government rounded up and murdered the Jews of Europe, America was slow to act. Rabbis marched on Washington, but they were met with apathy. When America finally did intervene, to its eternal credit, it was already too late for six million of us— a loss from which we will never recover spiritually, and from which we still have not recovered numerically. Numbers in the millions are hard to fathom. But here is another one: the Chinese government is currently holding an estimated one to two million Muslims in these camps— one in ten Uighur men.
On June 17, President Trump signed into law the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. This was a good start. But there is much more to be done. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has been in committee in Congress since March. The legislative branch must act expeditiously to pass that into law. The President must lead the free world not only in condemning the Chinese government but in forcing it to cease this genocide against the Uighur people. The United States must marshal all of its hard power and all of its soft power toward this end.
Private corporations, too, must be forced by the government to investigate their supply chains and to cut ties with suppliers that are using slave labor. Remember that the German government would not have been able to round up the Jews so systematically were it not for IBM’s information technology, or to murder us in death camps had Bayer not manufactured the poison gas.
The Hebrew Bible teaches: Do not stand idly by the blood of your fellow. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. The world, following the Holocaust, vowed: never again. Now is the time to fulfill all of these injunctions, or to bear the guilt of complicity.
Please share the letter across your Jewish networks, and invite others to sign on. If you are interested in getting involved please contact
JMUF.Contact@gmail.com or call us at (781)-609-7362. We are collecting signatures right now, with the goal of building a network and accumulating moral authority which can be deployed and leveraged in a strategic way down the road. If you wish to sign our letter as an organization, please email us at
JMUF.OpenLetter@gmail.com. The full list of signatories is being regularly updated here:
https://bit.ly/3cmBCDm.
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