By Peter Burrows 10/2/20 - elburropete@gmail.com - silvercityburro.com

The Grant County Beat has recently run a number of articles, "Education About China," that have focused on China's persecution of its Muslim minorities. Unsurprisingly, the Muslims are portrayed as victims while the Chinese government is accused of implementing "a system that allows evil to thrive and harm the Chinese people."

The irony is that Islam is at least as evil as Communism, although communism has less than 200 years of proof vs over1,400 for Islam. If forced to choose between the two, I think I'd take communism. You can reason with communists, but not with people who think they are obeying God.

I was surprised to learn there were any Muslims at all in China, but there are some 25 million, about half of whom are Uighur Muslims, pronounced 'wee grr,' who until recently were the majority in the province of Xinjiang. Xinjiang, about three times the size of France, is on the far northwest border of China. and has been governed by China only since 1949.

For hundreds of years it has been the land of the Uighurs, who are Muslims with roots in Turkey, and are of both a different race and culture than the rest of China. In recent years the Chinese have been resettling large numbers of Han Chinese into the province, and today they outnumber the 12 million Uighurs. The Han Chinese constitute the great bulk of China's population, and at 1.4 billion people are the largest ethnic group in the world. They are who we think of when we think of "the Chinese."

I don't know when this resettlement of Han Chinese began, but it is an important part of Beijing's plan to dilute the influence of Islam in Xinjiang. If you have to ask why they would want to do that, you have not been paying attention. All around the world, Islamic terrorists are killing people in the cause of Islam, especially in non-Muslim ruled nations.

Xinjiang is no exception. Starting with a Muslim population of way over 50 percent, ruled by far-off pagans, acts of terrorism should come as no surprise. You Tube has lots of boo-hoo documentaries bemoaning the fate of today's Uighurs, but here's the one that you should watch first. Its title is "Fighting Terrorism in Xinjiang." It's 50 minutes long and has lots of nasty stuff. Before you criticize China's treatment of the Uighurs, you MUST watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4cYE6E27_g&t=55s "Between 1990 and 2016, thousands of terrorist attacks shook the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers."

The question then becomes: How would YOU combat the terrorism? Would you recommend that China simply abandon the region to the Muslims? This would consign the Uighurs to centuries more of poverty and Islamic oppression. It would also create a very hostile nation on China's northern border. If that's your recommendation, China is not going to accept it.

China has instead taken a number of actions designed to eliminate the threat of Islam in Xinjiang. Given China's history of forced assimilation and indoctrination, e.g., The Cultural Revolution, The Grear Leap Forward, and Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, to name a few events from Mao's reign, China's handling of Muslims today is surprisingly humane.

No one doubts that President Xi Jinping has the power to order the deaths of millions of Muslims, or any other group he deems a threat to China. Seen in that context, China's response to acts of Muslim terrorism should earn Xi commendations, but, of course, in today's politically correct world of Islamic apologists, Xi is demonized.

In spite of daily acts of terror around the world committed by terrorists screaming, "Allahu akbar," apparently not enough people have been killed by Muslims to drive home a lesson that should have been learned centuries ago: Islam and its adherents cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of humanity. Their religion commands them to wage war until the world is ruled by Islam.

In the short-term, China is doing what any government should do: flood the terror-afflicted region with law and order. The next most visible response has been to demolish the mosques used by Uighur terrorists. The mosques are the loci of terrorism. They are where the terrorists receive inspiration and funding.

Also, in 2014, China began to build a vast system of concentration camps that have been the subject of intense international criticism. Thanks to satellite imaging, it appears that China has about 400 of these camps. Estimates are that they house about a million Uighurs. These have been built in the wake of the terror attacks committed by Xinjiang's Muslims, and one has to wonder if Mao would have been so "gentle." By all accounts, these are NOT death camps.

China claims these are "reeducation" camps, and there may be some truth to that. The typical Uighur does not speak Mandarin, the official language of China, and is an unskilled farmer-herder. Critics have said that most in the camps are only guilty of practicing Islam, which indicates to me that the Chinese have got it figured out.

Uighurs are not the only Muslims in China. About half of China's 25 million Muslims are ethnic Chinese, called Hui Muslims, pronounced 'whay,' spread throughout China where they have lived for centuries, the descendants of Chinese converted by Muslim traders over a thousand years ago. Up until recently, the Hui enjoyed a surprising amount of religious freedom, attending mosques, observing Ramadan, and some even undertaking the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

This began to unravel in the wake of terrorist attacks such as the one that killed five in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2013, and one in the southern city of Kunming in 2014 that killed 31. Uighurs took credit for both, bringing terrorism to the homes of the Han Chinese and sparking an anti-Islamic backlash throughout China.

Critics say the Chinese government is encouraging this anti-Islamic trend, which is probably true. The pragmatic Chinese have noted that if the terrorists are Muslims, maybe it has something to do with their religion. Gee, you think?

There is simply no gentle way to deal with Islamic terrorism, and as much as China's treatment of the Uighurs may offend some people, there have been no acts of terror in Xinjiang since 2016. To see how that compares with the rest of the world, go to thereligionofpeace.com and look at what the jihadists have been doing lately. I warn you: it ain't pretty.