Chairman Gallagher's Opening Remarks at "The Chinese Communist Party’s Ongoing Uyghur Genocide" Hearing
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On the first night of Ramadan, as Muslims around the world commemorate Prophet Mohammed receiving the first revelations of the Quran, we are here to face a horrifying truth.
The Uyghurs, many of whom practice the Muslim faith, are being erased. Genocide is occurring. This time at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
We are privileged to have with us many members of the Uyghur community. We are deeply grateful for your bravery, and we know that it has come at great cost.
As we prepare to hear first-hand testimony from the CCP’s concentration camps, I would like to turn to Elisha Weisel, whose father, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Weisel, singularly captured the horrors of the holocaust in his book Night.
Without objection, the video will be added to the record and the clerk will play the video. Video Plays
Tonight, we have two guests whose stories will take us to the center of the universe, to the place where the world’s moral attention should be focused – to Xinjiang.
These two women were both inside the concentration camps. They are first hand witnesses to the systemic, unimaginable brutality.
Witnesses to the attempted elimination of a people, a culture, a civilization.
Witnesses to the largest extra-judicial mass internment of a religious minority since the Holocaust.
Witnesses to erasure. That’s why Elie Wiesel swore to fight those who would forget. Who would avert their gaze.
The least we can do on this committee is to make sure that in fifty years—when the Xinjiang genocide is remembered as one of the abominations of the 21st century—no corporate executive, no policy maker, no investor, no university president can look their grandchildren in the eye and claim they didn’t know.
I now recognize the Ranking Member, Raja Krishnamoorthi, for his opening statement.