Ariana News Agency-\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province is worse than anything seen \u201csince the 1930s,\u201d said a Trump administration official at the launch of a State Department report on global abuses.<\/p>\n The report also highlighted violations by Iran, South Sudan and Nicaragua, but Washington singled out Beijing over its detainment of millions of Uighur and Kazakh Muslims in so-called re-education camps.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, you haven\u2019t seen things like this since the 1930s,\u201d said Michael Kozak, the head of the State Department\u2019s human rights and democracy bureau, in an apparent reference to Nazi Germany and Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union.<\/p>\n \u201cRounding up, in some estimations … Millions of people, putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. It\u2019s just remarkably awful.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking during the same briefing on Wednesday, secretary of state Mike Pompeo told reporters that China was \u201cin a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations\u201d<\/p>\n China hit back with an unusually strongly worded response, accusing the US of groundless accusations fuelled by racism and \u201cideological prejudice\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe also advise that the United States take a hard look at its own domestic human rights record, and first take care of its own affairs,\u201d added foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang on Thursday.<\/p>\n Beijing has long rejected international criticism of its Muslim internment camps, depicting them as vocational training facilities aimed at de-radicalising Islamic extremists. On Tuesday, the governor of Xinjiang said the camps were the same as \u201cboarding schools\u201d.<\/p>\n But Amnesty International has compared the detainment centres to \u201cwartime concentration camps\u201d, and former internees have said they were tortured, forced to renounce their religion, and made to swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n \u201dAt least we\u2019re starting to make them realise there is a lot of international scrutiny on this,\u201d Mr Kozak said. \u201dIt is one of the most serious human rights violations in the world today.\u201d<\/p>\n Donald Trump has been accused of failing to take \u201cmeaningful action\u201d over China\u2019s repressive policies, with a cross-party group of politicians writing to Mr Pompeo earlier this month urging the government to \u201cstand up for the oppressed\u201d.<\/p>\n Mr Trump\u2019s administration has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, including the region\u2019s Communist Party leader, but Beijing has warned of retaliation.<\/p>\n In a riposte to the US human rights report, China\u2019s State Council said America was a self-styled \u201chuman rights defender\u201d with a \u201cflawed and lacklustre\u201d record.<\/p>\n It pointed to the high rate of gun deaths and racial discrimination in the US. The council also cited a lack of media freedom in America, despite China being ranked 176 last year on the Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index \u2013 ahead of only Syria, Turkmenistan, Eritrea and North Korea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China is \u201cin a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations\u201d and is trying to \u201cerase\u201d Islamic culture and religion, the US government has said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_mat_hreflang_tags":[],"addvideo":"","video_duration":"","farsit":"","target":"0","top_stories":"0","top":"0"},"categories":[306],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights"],"acf":{"myctype":"change","target":false,"top_stories":false,"top":false,"farsit":""},"yoast_head":"\n