You both posted to the effect that bias against Muslims is racism.

I was not aware that there was a Muslim "race", or that there only a single Muslim "race" or whatever you intended by this, but it seems odd.

There's people of many races who are Muslims.

I completely grok that a (e.g. religious) bigot may be very likely to be a racist too, but this characterisation of yours just looks lazy.

Moving back to the topoc: the last time Christianity became the officially sanctioned religion of Empire it didn't work out very well.

I guess this time it's different, huh?

is justified under cover of sympathy for other ethnic groups in China. Using your logic Americans would find sympathy with you if Whites rioted and killed Blacks because they don't like the policies of the "Black" Obama administration and perhaps the disproportionate crime in urban areas committed by Blacks?

Ya know, we might feel something more about the Han Chinese who were hurt or killed in Urumqi, but the Han Chinese government in Beijing won't let our reporters in there to interview any of them, and they won't let anyone from Urumqi post pictures of what happened on the internet.

And there is that little matter of the Han Chinese treatment of the Uighurs, dating back a few years, no?

-- ondelette

Given that this has been the US position for the past three decades--and given that it would be the Pavlovian response of nearly every Democrat asked any question about anything Israel might consider doing anywhere, I don't see it as anymore than the reiteration of the US bi-partisan paradigm on Israel.

Your point about the U.S. supporting the Islamists against the Communists when the Communists were the enemy and supporting the Communists against the Islamists now that Islam is the enemy, overlooks the very large numbers of Islamic groups we do support.

Note, the U.S. supports Islamic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afgahnistan, not to mention Kuait, Dubai, Egypt, and the Non Hamas branch of the Palestinian Government.

In fact what you see mostly with regard to U.S. policy isn't an opposition to Islam, but an opposition to those who upset the applecart. Those without a global view of the powers that be, and the necessity of dealing with agents like the Sudi's and the Chinese to further peace and prosperity such as it is across the globe.

Resorting to the us vs them racism analysis is just lazy. Even the Nazi's were more motivated by money, trade and power than they were their tired eugenic philosophies.

To see the world in terms of base racism is to overlook the cause of racism, and the true motivations of those in power. There are those who for various ends have likely fostered islamophobic ideas for their own political agenda. Those ends however do not extend to our foreign policy where such grade school games interfer with the larger context of our mechenations.

We aren't at war with Islam, because there are many Muslims who happily and readily do business with the U.S. We are at war with those whose own agendas require opposition to the U.S. and it's policies regardless of what their motivating philosophy is. There are a number of opponents who are also muslims, but we likewise still have issues with secular insurgents in south america as you may have recently noticed.

Interesting point about the Honduran insurgency by the way, we largely agree with policies of the new regime, but oppose their seizing of power so as not to cause more upsetting of applecarts that might be less beneficial to the U.S. as a whole.

Order and the flow of trade is our motivation in our choosing of allies and enemies, and if you see it terms of race, religion or some other blanket idea, you will be wrong.

This photograph of Uighur terrorists is pretty darn terrifying.

http://nytimes.com/2009/07/07/world/asia/07china.html

Go back and read what I wrote again. I said that violent regime change by revolution in China took possibly centuries to complete.

The one thing I'm not seeing discussed is the accuracy of the numbers coming out of China. From the NYT article:

"The casualty numbers in Urumqi appeared to be murky and shifting on Monday. Xinhua, the state news agency, said the toll so far was 140 dead and 828 wounded, citing regional police officials. It was not possible to independently verify the government’s counts."

Xinhua is run by the government, and has been inaccurate in the past, tweaking numbers for political ends. They probably downplayed the number of Tibetans killed last year and inflated the number of dead Han. It's a bit premature to begin making assumptions about how this incident is being handled by anyone: left, right, bloggers, MSM, ot the government. The facts are not out yet, and in this case wisdom is on the side of patience.

The protesters being Christian wouldn't matter unless there was a strategic benefit for the establishment. The US isn't going to seriously fuck with a country that can defend itself, i.e. China, by economic means more likely than military. Muslims protesters are being supported in Iran right now, and Christian protesters are not being supported in Honduras. (Those aren't religious conflicts, of course.)

But let's say the small Christian population in Israel started acting like Christians and organized protests against Israel's war crimes. The US government would obviously allow Israel to crush them however necessary, and the major "Christian" organizations in the US wouldn't align themselves with the actual Christians either.

So you're in favor of letting Western journalists in and web pages to go up, so we can see what's happening in Urumqi?

You have a point. Westerners are way too critical of the Chinese exploitation of oil in Darfur. They charged the Sudanese head of state with crimes against humanity but didn't say squat about the reserves allocated to the Chinese for exploitation. Are the Han as nice to ethnic minorities in Sudan as they are in China?