China cracks down on jihad in Muslim Western China

Closing Islamic schools and conducting house-to-house searches. The ChiComs, of course, are ruthless against dissent. Their regime is abhorrent in it authoritarianism and brutality, and certainly Western governments should not imitate it in that. At the same time, China is not hamstrung by politically correct niceties preventing it from even recognizing that Islam has a political character -- and one that threatens Chinese government and society. If the West could even go so far as to recognize that political Islam does indeed constitute a societal threat, a threat to Western free societies, a great deal would have been accomplished.

BEIJING (AP) — An overseas rights activist said Monday that authorities in China's predominantly Muslim far west are closing unregistered Islamic schools and conducting house-to-house searches in a new security crackdown in the restive region.

The campaign under way for five weeks in the city of Hotan underscores Beijing's persisting concerns about separatist movements in its Central Asian border province of Xinjiang.

While anti-government protests and a security clampdown in Tibetan areas have grabbed attention over the past year, China has also been battling unrest in Xinjiang, with a flare-up in violence last year that killed 33 people. Like the Tibetans, many of Xinjiang's ethnic minority Uighurs have chafed under Beijing's rule and restrictions on the practice of religion....

A congress spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, said in an e-mail that armed police were making nighttime raids from house to house. At least seven religious schools have been shut and 39 people arrested so far, Raxit said.

The official Xinhua News Agency earlier this month reported that Hotan authorities had launched a campaign against "illegal religious activity" at the end of February and "had already achieved some initial success."

"Officials uncovered some illegal religious activities, seized a large number of illegal books, handwritten materials, computer discs, audio tapes and other propaganda materials as well as bullets, fuses, explosive and flammable materials, and other weaponry," it said.

A secretary with Hotan's Communist Party Propaganda Department on Monday denied that any religious schools were closed, people arrested or bullets, explosives and other materials seized. But he confirmed that some illegal religious activity has been halted and illegal books, writings, computer discs and audio tapes had been confiscated....

It is about time that a Country took a stand against the global jihad. The West needs to take lessons. The so called religion of Old Mo needs to be outlawed and destroyed. It is the most dangerous thing in the world right now. I still find it hard to believe that we have to worry about a religious war in the twenty first century. Time for the Crusaders to be let loose.