China: Jihadists hijack truck, kill driver, plough truck into crowd on sidewalk, and murder six people at random

But it’s all right — they were responding to decades of oppression, doncha know. “Ten die in Xinjiang knife attack, blast,” by Peter Parks for AFP, July 31:

Ten people were killed in a knife attack and blast in China’s ethnically-tense Xinjiang region at the weekend, state media and authorities said Sunday, in the latest bout of unrest to hit the area.

A knife attack in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar on Saturday saw seven people killed and 28 hurt by two knife-wielding assailants.

One of the attackers was later killed in violence that erupted at a night market, government authorities said.

Hou Hanmin, spokeswoman for the government of the northwestern region, told AFP the attackers were both members of the mainly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, adding the suspect who was still alive had been detained….

An explosion rocked city on Sunday, killing three people, including a police officer, and injuring three others, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Police had already detained two suspects, Xinhua said, although it was not immediately clear what had caused the blasts….

Uh, maybe jihad?

According to tianshannet.com, a website run by the regional government, the suspects in Saturday’s attack hijacked a truck that was waiting at a light at the food market in Kashgar, not far from the border with Kyrgyzstan.

They killed the driver, ploughed the vehicle into passers-by on a nearby pavement, then got out of the truck and stabbed people at random, leaving six bystanders dead before the crowd turned on them and killed one attacker.

An English-language report from Xinhua said two blasts were heard before the incident, saying the first came from a minivan and the other was heard almost simultaneously and originated from the market….

Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress — an exile group — cited local sources as saying the assailants had clashed with members of a civilian force that maintains public security.

“This incident is hard to believe but must be addressed. Beijing should accept the responsibility that repression triggered this incident,” he said.

Of course. It is never the responsibility of the jihadists or their allies. And as always, it is a response to oppression — although ironically, we never seem to see this kind of behavior from the non-Muslims who suffer oppression in Muslim societies such as Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia:

Many Uighurs are unhappy with what they say has been decades of political and religious repression, and the unwanted immigration of China’s dominant Han ethnic group.

While standards of living have improved, Uighurs complain that most of the gains go to the Han.

This tension has triggered sporadic bouts of violence in Xinjiang — a vast, arid but resource-rich region bordering Central Asia, home to more than eight million Turkic-speaking Uighurs.

Earlier this month, more than 20 people were killed in a violent clash with police in the remote city of Hotan.

State media quoted an official in Xinjiang as saying that clash was a “terrorist” attack, adding that four people including a police officer were killed when a crowd set upon a police station.

But Uighur activists called it an outburst of anger by ordinary Uighurs and said security forces beat 14 people to death and shot dead six others during the unrest.

Here is a more realistic account of what happened there.

In the nation’s worst ethnic violence in decades, Uighurs savagely attacked Han Chinese in the regional capital Urumqi in July 2009 — an incident that led to retaliatory attacks by Han on Uighurs several days later.

The government says around 200 people were killed and 1,700 injured in the violence, which shattered the authoritarian Communist Party’s claims of harmony among the country’s dozens of ethnic groups.

China threw a huge security clampdown onto Xinjiang after the violence, and many Uighurs are enraged by the arrests and alleged disappearances of people rounded up across the region in the aftermath….

Ah, even Uighurs play the victimhood game. Has Honest Ibe Hooper flown over to Xinjiang to give them lessons?

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