I sent a letter to my lifetime role model Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Director Conyers Davis with the help of my friend Timothy Nelson, State Department, a month ago; but I didn't receive any reply from Arnold for my simple wish. Today I saw two videos of Arnold getting drop kicked; I don't need a Lamborghini Arnold, I need your help in raising my voice to help my father, I'm publishing my letter on my personal web page, Hope you will read it.
I am sorry Arnold and the shameful thing that happened to you today. I’m a huge fan of you; as you said nothing worry about; You are still a terminator!
Dear Arnold Schwarzenegger,
I write to you because no one has taken any action so far. My father is among 2.5 million Uyghurs being tortured and suffering in China’s concentration camps and prisons due to their ethnicity. I ask you to act to help me save my father and my people.
The United States can do more than just speak. But for two years it has chosen to do nothing.
You are a man of action and a Republican leader. Could you please help us convince this Republican Administration to act to save millions of lives?
China started building thousands of concentration camps in early 2017 because it thought it could get away with it while the world would keep silent. It figured the U.S. would abandon its moral leadership in the world and took that as license to ratchet up its oppression of the Uyghur minority, subjecting them to an Orwellian mass surveillance state in Xinjiang. For a year, the world kept almost completely silent. Over the past year, the U.S. led a few other countries in speaking up, calling it abhorrent and the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic minority since the 1940s. But it has yet to take any action to let China know it is serious about emptying the camps.
There has been no targeted sanctioning of the perpetrators even though it is U.S. law to sanction gross human rights violators under the Global Magnitsky Act. There has been no international inspection of the concentration camps. No closing of a Chinese consulate until China would close the concentration camps and stop using western technology for mass surveillance. Not even any separation of the West from providing the technology China uses to oppress. Nothing.
There has even been no action taken in response to the specific targeting of American citizens inside the United States. China brazenly thinks that it can keep the world silent through fear or the hope of monetary gain. And it works. It works against people and governments. It is working right now to keep the U.S. inactive with just the hope of monetary gain out of a trade deal. It works against individual Uyghur Americans whose family members are put in the concentration camps to silence the Americans from speaking up inside the U.S. No one appears strong enough to stand up to China.
Help me strengthen America to act decisively.
I am an American Uyghur. My 68-year-old father, a well-known Uyghur intellectual and journalist, is one of the detainees in the Nazi-style concentration camps in Xinjiang.
China is erasing Uyghur identity since 2017. They completely banned Islam and the Uyghur language. Xinjiang has become the first mass surveillance police state unlike anywhere else in the world. The entire region is an open air jail with big data-driven predictive policing invasively monitoring every individual. And while the West is not separating itself from the perpetrators and enablers, its companies, researchers, and even CA and NY teachers are finding out they are directly supplying the technologies used to deprive Uyghurs of human rights.
I was 11 when I became your lifetime fan after watching Terminator 2 in 1994. Since then I started to lift and later became a bodybuilding coach.
In 2015, I started my own company UyghurMuscle, where I turned my bodybuilding hobby into a dream job in the U.S. My company quickly became a leading brand in the Uyghur fitness industry and I had a very good market in Xinjiang. UyghurMuscle’s mission was to strengthen Uyghurs.
Last year, China banned my brand and closed my office and warehouse in Urumqi, Xinjiang, because I am an American Uyghur. This was consistent with China’s separating Uyghurs from communicating with Americans and its policy of throwing Uyghurs into concentration camps for having connections to people overseas.
I attend the Arnold Classic in Ohio every year as a visitor and I feel sad for my champion athlete, Zunun Muhammad, every time I see other Chinese athletes competing in the amateur bodybuilding show. Zunun is a young bodybuilder with a bright future in bodybuilding and he won many medals in China’s national bodybuilding contests, but only because he is an Uyghur, he can’t attend competitions overseas as Uyghurs are not allowed to have passports. His ultimate dream was competing and winning at the Arnold Classic, but now he cannot go anywhere, even from his city to any other city, without police permission though his only “crime” is being Uyghur. He is still training hard at the gym under the regime, because he is the type of bodybuilder who has the vision and mindset like you.
Uyghurs are in deep pain and suffering and this is the darkest time that we are living in. If the world does not stand up for Uyghurs, China will completely erase my nation. This could end up with the genocide of millions of lives including my father’s, my other family members and my athletes in Xinjiang.
Please Arnold, speak out for Uyghurs. Move Secretary Mnuchin to sanction the individual perpetrators by applying existing U.S. law finally to China. We can terminate this evil of concentration camps in Xinjiang. Your actions could bring more attention to Uyghurs’ pleas to Congress and bring awareness of Uyghurs within American society and around the world. You can instill hope for Uyghurs even by simply telling them #BeStrongUyghur . That is the hashtag I have been using to bring hope to my people. I took pictures of pro athletes and stars holding a #BeStrongUyghur sign at the Arnold Classic last year. Even small actions like pictures can bring hope to Uyghurs around the world.
There are many actions you could take to help me strengthen Uyghurs in their darkest hour. I look forward to hearing what you would want to do.
Here are some possible ideas:
• Meet with me in person to discuss and take a picture with my sign of hope.
• Speak out for Uyghurs on your social media accounts, echoing U.S. officials’ words to a much broader audience worldwide.
• Attend future events for the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act (House Resolution H.R. 649 and Senate Resolution S. 178.) at the Capitol.
• Push the White House and President Donald Trump to act, starting with imposing Global Magnitsky Human Rights Sanctions on the Xinjiang communist party secretary Chen Quanguo and other officials responsible for the crimes against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Thank you for being an inspiring legend!
Sincerely,
Bahram K Sintash
April 12th 2019