NYT report about China detaining 'vast numbers' of Muslims is a lie

Dennis Etler
Fort Russ News
Mon, 10 Sep 2018 07:01 UTC

This article by the NYT's Chris Buckley who after the 6-4 Counter-revolutionary Incident became a rabid China-basher, is full of the same old distorted stories of Uighur "internment camps" that have circulated in the Western media for a few months. I will not respond to those stories as I have done so previously.

Here's the latest rabid China-bashing from the NYT, which continues to invent and distort stories about the Uighurs.

The most telling point made in Buckley's narrative however is the following, "This city of 390,000 (Hetan) underwent a Muslim revival about a decade ago. Most Uighurs have adhered to relatively relaxed forms of Sunni Islam, and a significant number are secular. But budding prosperity and growing interaction with the Middle East fueled interest in stricter Islamic traditions. Men grew long beards, while women wore hijabs that were not a part of traditional Uighur dress."

Buckley writes as if those develops are insignificant, but if truth be told they are an indication of the spread of Salafist (radical jihadist) ideology within segments of the Uighur population. This is part of a push by Uighur separatists, supported and funded by the US Congress, to foment discord in Xinjiang in order to destabilize China to the advantage of US imperialism's goal of fragmenting China and preventing its continued rise.

Comment: And the article itself even points out that the shift in Chinese police only came after actual evidence of radicalism: "The government shifted to harsher policies in 2009 after protests in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, spiraled into rioting and left nearly 200 people dead."

China has seen how the spread of radical religious ideology has led to disastrous consequences in one nation after another throughout the Middle East and in other Muslim majority countries. These movements have been spurred on by the US and used as proxy forces to further US objectives in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. China will not allow Xinjiang to become another Libya or Syria. It will not allow the vast majority of Uighurs and other Chinese people to become the victims of religious radicalism.

Other Muslim countries understand the problem China faces because they face the same problem. They therefore do not criticize China for the actions it has taken to quell separatism and religious radicalism. This of course enrages the US imperialists and their subservient media who want to see China dismembered like the Soviet Union. Hence they spread exaggerated disinformation about the true state of affairs in Xinjiang, making the remedial steps that China is taking look like some form of religious persecution which it is most emphatically not. China will not be dissuaded from protecting its people of all nationalities from the curse of religious fanaticism, separatism and communal violence, no matter what false narratives are spread in the Western media.

To show just how dishonest the NYT actually is the caption to this photo reads, "A sign describes this facility on the edge of Hotan, a city in Xinjiang, as a "concentrated transformation-through-education center."

The Chinese characters however say nothing of the sort. They are from top down:

学双语 which translates as "Study bilingualism"
学法律 which translates as "Study the law"
学技能 which translates as "Study skills"

Is Buckley so ignorant of Chinese that he cannot translate these simple Chinese slogans? Instead he, or the copy editor, make up a quotation out of whole cloth. How, may I ask, can the rest of this article be taken at face value?

Source: Facebook

Comment: Moon of Alabama points out that the reports up "up to a million" Chinese Muslims being 're-educated' comes from 8 vague interviews with locals, as if they would have access to such figures.

The NYT report includes this gem of Orientalism:

One official directive warns people to look for 75 signs of "religious extremism," including behavior that would be considered unremarkable in other countries: growing a beard as a young man, praying in public places outside mosques or even abruptly trying to give up smoking or drinking.

The writers of the New York Times seem to have little knowledge of their own city. In 2007 the New York Police Department published a study on Islamist radicalization that remarked on exactly those points:

As these individuals adopt Salafism, typical signatures include:

• Becoming alienated from one's former life; affiliating with like-minded individuals
• Joining or forming a group of like-minded individuals in a quest to strengthen one's dedication to Salafi Islam
• Giving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes.
• Wearing traditional Islamic clothing, growing a beard
• Becoming involved in social activism and community issues

The Chinese government probably copied its list of signs of religious radicalization from the NYPD and other 'western' sources. A French law prohibits public praying in the street. Other European states enacted laws against the wearing of certain religious attire. The Chinese do not lead in such analysis, they follow 'western' examples.

As for the geopolitical angle:

China is developing new rail and road connection throughout Eurasia as part of its strategic One Belt One Road initiative.

Xinjiang province is larger than Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. It is a mostly uninhabitable landscape of mountainous and desert terrain with a tiny population of some 24 million of which only 45% are Muslim Uyghurs of Turkic ethnicity. It would be rather unimportant outer province for China were it not at the core of the new Silk road connections.

It is a vulnerable point. An established insurgency in the area could seriously interrupt the new strategic communication lines.

Chinese strategists believe that the U.S., with the help of its Turkish, Saudi and Pakistani friends, was and is behind the Islamic and ethnic radicalization of the Turkic population in the province. It is not by chance that Turkey transferred Uyghur Jihadis from Xinjiang via Thailand to Syria to hone their fighting abilities. That the New York Times publishes about the Xinjiang re-education project, and also offers the report in Mandarin, will only confirm that suspicion. China is determined to end such interference.