By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press Writer William Foreman, Associated Press Writer – 57 mins ago (see sig)

URUMQI, China – Police have arrested 1,434 suspects in connection with the worst ethnic violence in decades in China's western Xinjiang region, which killed at least 156 people, state media reported Tuesday.

The arrests come amid a security clampdown on the region, with hundreds of paramilitary police with shields, rifles and clubs taking control of the streets of the capital, Urumqi, where the riots took place on Sunday.

The violence does not bode well for China's efforts to mollify long-simmering ethnic tensions between the minority Uighur people and the ethnic Han Chinese in Xinjiang — a sprawling region three times the size of Texas that shares borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries.

Mobile phone service and the social networking site Twitter have been blocked, and Internet links also were cut or slowed down.

A nonviolent protest by 200 people was broken up in a second city, Kashgar, and the official Xinhua News Agency said police had evidence that demonstrators were trying to organize more unrest in Kashgar, Yili and Aksu.

It said police had raided several groups plotting unrest in Dawan township in Urumqi, as well as at a former race course that is home to a transient population.

[...]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090707/ap_on_re_as/as_china_protest

>>>until you can explain to me how the mass murder and slaughter of nearly 1,400 Gazans by the Israeli military under the ridiculous claim that isolated unguided missiles forced them to do it, is anything other than racist oppression

You can call them "isolated unguided missiles" if that pleases you, but the operative word, I think, is "missiles." I also think that if you send missiles in someone's direction, you sort of forfeit your right to complain if larger, more accurate missiles make the return flight in your direction.

"Spittin' in the wind only comes right back at you" --Lou Reed.

On the other hand, it kind of was racist oppression, because Israel did murder a bunch of people and probably would not have done so with such bloody-minded enthusiasm had the people in question not been of a different race. So there's that, too.

We pour over $3 billion a year into Israel, officially, and who knows how much else in "black" budgets, our charities pour tax-deductible additional millions into settlements and other harmful activities, and we have "nothing to say" about an Israeli attack on Iran that could set back everything the US is attempting to achieve in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Pakistan and the larger Middle East--over a threat our own security services say does not exist? Over a nuclear pilot program that the IAEA has under surveillance, and has repeatedly said has not been diverted or co-opted to military purposes?

Moreover, the huge flow of US weapons into Israel, at taxpayer expense, is conditioned on Israel only using them for 'legitimate self defense"--so we most certainly have a right to determine whether Iran is a legitimate threat to Israel, unless its planning the attack solely with Israeli-made weapons, which would be absolutely impossible. Unfortunately, Biden's stupidity, and ignorance or forgetfulness about the conditions placed on the weapons we taxpayers bestow on Israel under the Arms Export Contol Act, are par for the course in Washington, from "liberal" Nancy Pelosi through the most conservative Southern pol.

You wrote:

“For all the Serious analysis about the War on Terror, so much of it has been driven by nothing more complex or noble than sheer hostility towards Muslims.”

Can we at least try to be logical for just a moment? You used the following combination of words: the War on Terror. You did not write about imaginary War on Terror, did you?

It means that even to you the War on Terror is real.

Don’t you think that if this war is real, then the terror itself should have been real first?

Now, who committed this act of terror on 9/11?

We know that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 were Muslims. We also know that all the people who danced on the streets of the cities in the Middle East celebrating the death of thousands of innocent Americans in that attack were Muslims. These are the facts.

So the cause was an attack on 9/11, and effect was hostility. It is a very unfortunate turn of events, but this is how it happened.

Then you wrote:

“ Rather obviously, the Uighurs were swept into the Enemy category solely by virtue of their status as Muslims.”

I don’t think it is an extremely accurate statement.

Thirteen of them “had, by accident or design, made their way to a run-down hamlet in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains…”

“After the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, they were targeted in a US bombing raid, in which several of their companions died. The survivors made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were welcomed by villagers, who betrayed them soon after, selling them for a bounty to US forces.”

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/10/09/from-guantanamo-to-the-united-states-the-story-of-the-wrongly-imprisoned-uighurs/

Yes, they happened to be the neighbors of Osama bin Laden at the wrong time.

Here is another source:

“The Guantanamo Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and initially labeled “enemy combatants” by the Bush Administration, but were latter downgraded to the more ambiguous, “non-enemy combatant”. By the fall of 2008, all the remaining Uighur detainees were cleared of wrong doing by the U.S. Justice Department, but after nearly seven years, many still remained imprisoned in Guantanamo.

The Justice Department found that these men had no intentions to commit hostile acts against the United States and its allies.”

“Nonetheless, some of the Uighurs were intending to engage in “terrorist” activities, but against the Chinese government, not the United States. While imprisoned some confessed to training at an ETIM (Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement) affiliated group in Tora Bora. The ETIM is regarded by the United States and United Nations as a terrorist organization that seeks to turn the Uighur homeland, Xinjiang Provence (known to Uighurs as East Turkestan) into an Islamic republic.”

http://brooksreview.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/guantanamo-and-the-uighurs-the-story-of-china%E2%80%99s-other-minority-part-i/

So the situation is not as simple as you present it. By the way, your mortal enemy George Bush refused to return these prisoners to China. If he did, instead of sunshine at Guantanamo, they would see the Chinese Gulag, in the best case, or one big grave for all of them, in the worst case.