During a CNN townhall in Milwaukee, President Joe Biden seemingly defended the genocide of Uighur Muslims in China by stating that “culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow,” so he’s “not going to speak out against” the Chinese Communist Party’s occupation of Hong Kong and Taiwan, or the genocide of the Uighurs.

“The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China. And he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that. I point out to him, no American president can be sustained as a president if he doesn’t reflect the values of the United States,” Biden said. “And so the idea I’m not going to speak out against what he’s doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uighurs in western mountains of China, and Taiwan, trying to end the ‘One China’ policy by making it forceful, I said — by the way, he said he gets it. Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow.”

Former Department of Defense chief of staff Kash Patel responded to Biden’s comments on Sunday, saying that “for the leader of the free world to say genocide is a cultural norm is outrageous.”

“They are in genocide in China against the Uyghurs. That is factually not in dispute. And for the leader of the free world to say genocide is a cultural norm is outrageous,” Patel said. “Could you imagine if President Trump had said publicly that the Uyghur genocide in China, which everyone acknowledges, is a cultural norm? It would have been a global calamity.”

“But because the left-wing media allows the politicization of our national security to continue just because Joe Biden said it, it allows for this outrageous conduct and, more importantly, the death and decimation of a minority population in China, who are encamped in fenced enclosures and cannot leave and are undergoing reeducation therapy,” he said. “This is a serious threat to the world.”