If the only problem the previous commenter stated was just some kind of a cult, well, if woudn't be half-bad. But upon reading about the Tibet and basically the Asian Inquisition (not the Spanish one, but the actual witch-burning one from Central Europe), you will see the Tibet in a very different way.

But in fact Tibet was in many ways just about as far from Disneyland as can be conceived. Even by the early 20th century, it was a medieval-esque serfdom and theocracy. It doesn't matter how technical or philosophical someone gets about how Buddhism is non-theistic and Vajrayana is some kind of system of applied psychology, the fact is that powerful lamas were viewed as actual gods and, like a caste system, the underprivileged were regarded as deserving of their lot due to karma. There was a centuries-in-the-making ingrained resistance to outside ideas throughout the region, and those which would include things like modernity and human rights. While the rest of the world was getting stuff like penicillin and effective surgery, the stranglehold that the monastic institutions had on the education-deprived Tibetans prevented any meaningful cross-border dialogue.

All that being said, the CCP was not (and China still is not) some kind of bastion of human rights and openness to ideas. The People's Army would have never been so much as scratched by whatever barely passed for Tibetan soldiers, so they arguably did not need to be nearly so heavy-handed. Assuming it's actually anyone's legitimate responsibility to 'liberate' that place, I suppose that some 'force' might've been required to crack the nut of that massively insular Tibetan world, but there's no way that it was necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing and erasure.

In a parallel universe, the world of Tibet could have been introduced to modernity without being placed under the thumb of the Chinese monolith. So I guess I'm just trying to provide a balanced perspective.

From the Chinese perspective pre-Communism, there would be no issue with Tibetan culture. But even if there were, it isn’t for them to care about or interfere with right?

As for your other comparisons. I don’t see cannibalism or Islamic fundamentalism (Jihad) as being comparable to Tibetan culture. Islam has explicit calls for violence against other belief systems. Tibetan culture does not. I can see treating Islam as a threat because of what it states openly, but it would be weird to group that with Tibetan culture, whether before or after Buddhism.

>Tibetan culture does not.

This is not true. The Chinese view tibetan culture as if it was scientology. There is a lot of evidence of injustices and really cult like backwards practices arising from the culture.

Interesting comments too.

The US could have conditioned most favored nation trade status for China on improving its behavior in Tibet, could have kept them out of the WTO, etc. That would have cost the wrong people money.

Realism. Movements without a realistic goal tend to become quite niche, unless there's another hook to keep them going. With the rise of China as an economic and nuclear power, and one with no interest in even talking about Tibet as something other than a part of their empire, a populist movement to pressure politicians to "Free Tibet" is about as useful as a populist movement to get politicians to conquer the concept of entropy.

People, even very passionate and politically active people, moved on to causes with at least some hope, or at least the perception of hope.

By the time it became clear that things wouldn't have gone that way, the west had bound itself to China too much to be able to do something about Tibet (without reshoring the manufacturing).

The Tibetan issue used to be felt very strongly, even in America, I believe.

It probably largely still is, but it's much less on the forefront, and probably seen as too hard to solve.

And maybe the younger generations don't know it well.

Anyway, if it became more feasible to improve the situation, I think there would be a lot of support and pressure to do it.

Sure, probably not to the point of entering into a war with a nuclear country, but that wouldn't be needed.

The support for Tibet was due to the fascination for the culture, the people and the places, I imagine.

People so peaceful, places so beautiful, and a culture so fascinating, violated in this way. It's just outrageous, and very hard to comprehend.

Of course anyhow, a reshoring anytime soon is extremely unlikely.

I'm not sure what you meant with the racial animus in the Middle East, by the way

The same is true for a number of other causes which upset the CCP such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inner Mongolia, Manchukuo/Manchuria and East Turkmenistan/Xinjiang. These all seem to be politely ignored in discussions of ongoing genocide.

Greater, maybe yes, since more decades passed since the Palestinians expulsion.

Or maybe not, because Tibetans at least can still live there?

Either way, I don't see how can it be much greater

Well, Palestinians do live there: in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in Israel/Egypt-blockaded Gaza, and in Israel proper, under the name of “Arab citizens of Israel”, many of whom identify as Palestinian

While many Arabs fled or were expelled in 1948, not all of them were. Israel wants to call them “Arab citizens of Israel” or “Arab Israelis” not “Palestinians”: some want to go along with that terminological preference, a growing number don’t

(Not all Arab citizens of Israel are of Palestinian origin - some of them are Maronite refugees from Lebanon; there are also many Jewish Israelis of Jewish Arab descent, but in an Israeli context they are identified as Jewish not Arab. There are also Arabs in Israeli-occupied Syria, the Golan Heights, the majority of whom don’t have Israeli citizenship, but a minority do.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinians

We can help all these groups. The answer to "lets help group A" shouldn't be "but what about group B".

There are tons of groups, from A-Z, who have been wronged in one away or another.

To not help one group because so many others are also wronged in maybe worse ways is not productive at all.

Jerusalem has a long-standing theological significance in Islam: it was originally the target of Muslim prayer (the qibla), until Mecca replaced it; Quran 17:1 mentions Muhammad’s supernatural “Night Journey” to the “Farthest Mosque”, which Islamic tradition identifies with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Sunni eschatological traditions also mention Jerusalem as having a role to play in the “end times”.

Aside from theology, Jerusalem also has a great historical significance, in that its reconquest from the Crusaders was considered an important turning point in global Islamic history. Given its position in-between Egypt and Syria, control of Jerusalem has been contested between competing Islamic empires many times over the centuries

By contrast, Xinjiang has no established theological significance in Islam, and its history is a footnote in the overall history of Islam

As did other dominant groups before and after them. In any case the Jewish population's size and influence peaked after a major catastrophe (the Bar Kokhba revolt) some 500 years before the first wave of Islamization even reached the region.

Isn’t this just manufacturing an artificial claim?

What they did was no different from the inevitable self-imprinting both religious movements and settler groups do in places the get traction in - they started to believe in a part-mythical, part factual "origin story" of how they got there and assumed dominance, and that was that. In essence no more "artificial" from the imprinting of any other group that attains dominance in a region over time (including that of the Jews in the area, many centuries previously).

Islam's telling to itself seems to go about like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_significance_of_Jeru...

By way of context: (1) it took a long time for this to happen (specifically in two waves about 550 years apart), and (2) even by the first wave, the Jewish community had already been vastly diminished (in part by expulsion, in part by assimilation as the other commenter notes), and the region had already been long since Christianized.

So there was no major Jewish imprinting to dismantle or oppose by then - or even make reference to, by then. If anything (with Christianity's imprint melting away before them) the region probably started to appear as a tabula rasa to them, in short enough order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(636%E2%80%...

Also, it wasn’t just Jewish people who lived in what is now the territory of Israel in ancient times - it always had a significant population of polytheists (Canaanite, Phoenician, etc), plus two thousand years ago the Samaritans were a massive community of military significance, not the tiny minority they are today. Most of its non-Jewish population converted to Christianity - along with a significant chunk of its Jewish population. And then when Islam came along, the majority of its Christian population converted to Islam (a slow process over many centuries). Arguably, Palestinians are just as much descendants of its ancient population as Jews are, indeed, Palestinians are likely in part descended from Jewish converts to Christianity and Islam.

The Farthest (Al-Aqsa) Mosque being in Jerusalem is a recent invention. The night journey is said to have happened in 621, but the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in 637 when the Muslims captured Jerusalem. So the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Quran is not the one currently called the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Do you have any evidence that Muslims have only "recently" started to claim it is in Jerusalem? From what I understand, they were already claiming that well over 1000 years ago.

> The night journey is said to have happened in 621, but the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in 637 when the Muslims captured Jerusalem. So the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Quran is not the one currently called the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Standard explanation for this: "Al-Aqsa Mosque" has two senses, a broad sense and a narrow sense. In the broad sense, it is the entire complex of Islamic religious structures on the Temple Mount, centered on the Dome of the Rock. In a narrow sense, it is the main congregational prayer hall in that complex, the current building of which was constructed in the 1030s. The 637 structure you mention was a temporary wooden structure, which by the next century was replaced by a much grander stone one, which went on to twice be destroyed by earthquakes.

So, since in the broad sense "Al-Aqsa Mosque" means the whole Temple Mount complex, of course the Temple Mount pre-existed the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 637 (around 5 years after Muhammad's death), and it was there for Muhammad to have supernaturally visited in 621 (if one believes he went on such a supernatural journey, I personally don't)

The Arab-islamic world is made up of autocracies; they don't need to care about a lot, and they indeed showed extremely little concern for the Palestinians as well.

Regarding organ harvesting, the FBI arrested Israeli-connected illegal organ harvesters in the US, as reported by the New York Times. The Palestinians have complained about Israeli organ harvesting, and apparently the US is concerned about their illegal organ harvesting networks too.

For the second, I don't know anything about it

For the Uighurs, there are allegations of 25.000 murders a year for organ harvesting in the Xinjiang.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_Resolution

I've heard concerns about both Tibet and treatment of first peoples in the US (historical and at present).

It would be if I were arguing against sovereignty for tibetans; I am not. I merely ask that people don't treat the movement as any more or less urgent, necessary, or obvious than any other sovereignty movement.

Granted, it was facetious to insert this viewpoint into the conversation about tibet; but arguably it was just as facetious to insert an argument for sovereignty into a conversation about Tibetan script.

I’m personally more concerned with China’s genocide of the Uyghur because you can’t undo such atrocities after a population is gone as happened to many Native American populations. There’s a few relatively tiny “Native American” populations that are still genetically distinct, but a wide range of cultures have been effectively erased with only fragments remaining. Hundreds of dead languages we don’t even know enough about to classify let alone stories.

Imagine if everything from Spain to Japan was referenced as Eurasian culture and thrown into basically the same bucket.

This is by no means a justification for the genocide of native Americans or a way to say they’ve been made whole. But there is simply no fair comparison between their situation today (despite huge injustices in the past) and the situation of Tibetans.

There's thousands of contracts (treaties) that have been broken and voided by the courts as being essentially too old or unenforceable in a modern era because of other other issues such as local populations.

They can't make their own property laws. They're not allowed to own the land and it must be put to trust for the entire tribe that way they can't use it for anything like loan collateral they can't sell it to somebody they can't start businesses easily since that form a collateral isn't available to them. The bureau of Indian affairs forces various Federal regulations on them they shouldn't have to oblige.

The federal government basically tells them what their culture is and often groups fighting to defend those imposed laws are pure whites who have no idea what they are talking about and will not let them improve and advance at all because they have this romantic notion of what it means to be an American Indian I want them still living in hide huts so they can go visit them like a zoo. I shouldn't have to bring up brave New world for this.

Look at the big kerfuffle over the Seminole mascot at the University of Florida. There are many from the tribe that actually liked it because it brought recognition to the tribe but a bunch of do-gooders came in and made a big deal about it even though they had no connection to the tribe. It should have been something for them to discuss and not have to worry about anybody else coming in and trying to force their opinion.

It wasn't too long ago that the trail of tears and forced relocation was the policy we even have the $20 bill with the guy who did that.

You need to rethink what it means to be a sovereign Nation. If the EU came in and took over the US basically said it's for your own good what would you think?

Federally recognised tribes get to run their own elected governments, police forces, court systems, make their own laws, even exempt themselves from provisions of state law in certain cases. Indigenous Australians don’t get any of that

You are right that there are cases in which states or the federal government infringe tribal sovereignty - but at least they have it to begin with. And attempted infringements don’t always succeed - consider the 2020 US Supreme Court case McGirt v Oklahoma, which found that Oklahoma state courts lack criminal jurisdiction (for “major crimes”, which includes murder, manslaughter, rape, arson and burglary) over Native American defendants in the eastern half of the state, such jurisdiction only being possessed by the tribal and federal governments, not the state of Oklahoma.

You can see this dynamic play out across all cultures.

EDIT: some wording.

For example, people can support increased representation of the Welsh language without wanting Wales to secede from the UK.