Miami Mayor Francis Suarez appeared to draw a blank when asked on The Hugh Hewitt Show Tuesday about Uyghurs, a persecuted minority group in China.
“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked the conservative host on his radio show when questioned about whether he would talk about Uyghurs in his presidential campaign.
“You’ve got to get smart on that,” Hewitt replied.
Suarez circled back to the topic at the end of the interview.
“You gave me homework, Hugh. I’ll look at what a, what was it, what did you call it, a Weeble?” Suarez asked, laughing.
“The Uyghurs. You really need to know about the Uyghurs, mayor,” Hewitt said. “You’ve got to talk about it every day, okay?”
Suarez responded that he would search and talk about them.
“I’m a good learner. I’m a fast learner,” he said.
After the interview, Suarez said he simply misunderstood Hewitt’s pronunciation of the word.
“Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uyghurs in China,” Suarez said in a statement. “They are being enslaved because of their faith. China has a deplorable record on human rights and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronounciation [sic] my friend Hugh Hewitt used. That’s on me.”
During a foreign policy speech about China in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley responded to the Suarez remarks.
“I mean, genocide — we promised never again to look away from genocide, and it’s happening right now in China,” Haley replied. “And no one is saying anything because they’re too scared of China.”
Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim minority in China’s western region who have faced widespread persecution from the Chinese government in what the U.S. government has designated a genocide.
More than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups have been arbitrarily arrested and detained by the government since 2017, according to the State Department. Beijing has referred to the camps as “vocational education and training centers.”
The interview comes as multiple presidential candidates emphasize tough on China rhetoric as part of their foreign policy perspectives.
President Joe Biden called China’s president Xi Jinping a “dictator” last week, and former president Donald Trump said in a speech that he “stood up to China like no administration has ever done before.”
“Communist China is the greatest threat to American security and prosperity, by far,” candidate Nikki Haley tweeted on Tuesday.
“I think we are in the era of a new Cold War, without any question,” candidate Tim Scott told NBC News in May, when asked whether he sees China as America’s enemy.
Suarez launched a long-shot presidential campaign in a quickly widening GOP field earlier this month. He was first elected mayor of Miami in 2017, then won reelection in 2021.
Jesse Rodriguez, Alec Hernández and Liz Brown-Kaiser contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
