George Bush -- and many, many other people -- have described Christianity as faith of peace as well. True as far as it goes, of course, but it's a shame so few of practitioners -- especially loudly-professed practitioners in positions of power -- give that more than lip service.

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Except that the Uighurs themselves don't view it as a religious issue

They view it as cultural and linguistic suppression much the way the Tibetans do. That the Uighurs are in fact Islamic is somewhat besides the point.

I think the point was that the US was able to keep them locked up for so long because they are Muslim. This has nothing directly to do with their view of their suppression by the Chinese government.

Every single Chinese Catholic and Tibetan Buddhist captured in Afghanistan who had trained with the Taliban were sent to gitmo.

If you know of any Chinese Catholics or Tibetan Buddhists who were captured in Afghanistan and trained with the Taliban who weren't sent to gitmo, I would be happy to receive information on this inequality.

I need to point out one exception, Glenn, and that is the Palestinians, a sizable number of whom are Christian.

The mainstream media has glibly painted all Palestinians as Arab and Muslim which is untrue but worked well to villify and obscure the truth from the so-called evangelic Christians here in the US who would vote unanimously to cleanse them from their beloved holy Lands.

Since when was the 1989 protest in Tiananmen an insurgency? There have been insurgencies in China, there was a huge one during the Cultural Revolution. Millions of people died. Tiananmen was a protest.

They view it as cultural and linguistic suppression much the way the Tibetans do. That the Uighurs are in fact Islamic is somewhat besides the point. My recommendation would be to dial back on the paid pro Islamo-extremist rhetoric and try to at least frame some of these arguments in the same context that the people involved with them do.

The fact that you provide zero evidence for your assertion is bad enough, but it simply flies in the face of what most people know about human nature. In any group defined by religion and culture, some people will undertake their resistance activities motivated to protect cultural aspects, others have a religious impulse. To say that religion plays absolutely no role in the resistance is to advertise that you are an intellectually lazy two-dimensional thinker without a good point to make.

humans fought each other over access to water and pastureland as they did during the Neolithic Age. I like to get as much factual information as I can before accepting facile explanations and it is a fact that China is composed of 56 ethnic groups, of which the Han are predominant. It seems that the Han believe in several gods and in ancestor worship, which must make their beliefs similar to Japanese Shintoism. Some Uighur men were seeking work in a part of China outside their own region and were attacked as "outsiders". The Han have also been throwing their weight around in the north-west where the Uighurs believe they have prior rights. This is an ethnic conflict in a vast country of billions of people and in an area that is thousands of miles from any sea.

Ancestor-worship, ethnic tensions....not exactly unknown outside of China. It's not a black-and-white world.

Based on what, precisely? In other words, arresting black people in black neighborhoods for crimes perpetrated against other black people is 'proof' of our 'war on black people' because.....no white people were around to arrest?

Hmmmm sounds fishy. But if it works for you, ok then.

I guess we'll have to wait for all the blond haired blue eyed Lutherans who were rounded up in Afghanistan and sent to Camp Gitmo to get a read on whether they were treated better or worse based on their affinity to residents of Lake Wobegone.

Every day the US rounds up and at least makes an attempt to arrest, detain or deport scores of Mexicans, their coyote smugglers and drug cartel members on or near the border with the US. But apparently to the Liberal intelligentsia this is also 'proof' of our 'war on Hispanics'.

And just to make clear the point, the U.S. did far less to support the Tiananmen Square protestors than they did a few years earlier in support of Islamic freedom fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan.

We armed Muslim militias (such as Osama's) to kill Communists when Communists were the Enemy. But now Muslims are the Enemy and we let the Communists oppress the Muslims. Our former (and now forgotten) support for Islamic militias fighting the Soviet Union only emphasizes that American sympathies rapidly shift against our newly designated Enemy.

Tienamen wasn't an insurgency, just a protest, much like the protests of the Uighurs, and the protests of the Iranian democracy activists. It is the hope of American's however that such protests properly fostered will become an insurgency to effect regime change (peacefully or otherwise) in these totalitarian countries.

In all cases however, the support of the U.S. for the protesters goes little beyond kind words and hope, as the real world political necessities of the situation often make anything more counter productive.

I don’t think it alters your argument one iota, Glenn, but we should concede that the Uighurs in Guantánamo as far as I remember were picked up in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. There their intent was to be trained for armed resistance against the Chinese. Thus, in a way allied to the Taliban, the American forces might be excused for detaining them in the first place. However, it was evident in quite a short time that they had no ill will toward the U.S.

They were picked up crossing the Pakistan border. Their refugee camp was in the White Mountains, and while not actually near the fighting in Tora Bora, was close enough that they got scared and left. They had no intent to be trained for armed resistance, that's a crock. The Pakistanis were picking up everyone who was not Afghan, and giving them to the Americans. At the time of arrest, the Americans didn't really care what their role was, they were taking as many people as they could to interrogate them. The enemy combatant/terrorist stuff came later when they needed a reason to be holding them.

They were tolerated by the Taliban, that's not the same as being allied with them. They lived in a camp, that's not the same as training for armed resistance.