Sorry for dumpling all this on you this Monday morning:
"In Paris, Chinese tourists encounter robbery, culture clash" by Dan Bilefsky | New York Times September 21, 2014
PARIS — Before arriving in the French capital, Wu Shuyun, a 56-year-old Chinese housewife, imagined Paris to be like a pristine film set for a romantic love story, picturing herself as a glamorous princess surrounded by elegant Parisians, decked out, perhaps, in Chanel.
Instead, Wu, from Kunming in southwest China, said she was shocked by the cigarette butts and dog manure, the rude insouciance of the locals, and the gratuitous public displays of affection.
Though friends had warned her about thieves targeting Chinese people, she said she was nevertheless surprised when a member of her tour group was mugged on a packed Metro car, as other riders watched.
“For the Chinese, France has always been romantic, mysterious, and desirable. We have been told that ‘God lives in France,’ ” she said recently after a two-week tour that included stops at the Eiffel Tower and Galeries Lafayette, an imposing, upscale department store with stained-glass domes where tour buses stop hourly to deposit tourists for marathon shopping sessions.
“Once I realized that the Parisians were indifferent, I made the decision: Try to make the most of this trip, but never come back to Paris again,” Wu said.
A growing number of Chinese tourists in Paris — armed with wads of cash, typically unable to speak French, and still somewhat naïve about the ways of the West after decades of China’s relative isolation — are falling victim to their unrealistic expectations of the city, while also being victimized by brazen thieves who target them because they are Asian, Chinese tourism industry officials here say.
After all the propaganda I've been given all these years about the great West (watch where you step), I get this garbage? I must be having unrealistic expectations of my $ociety.
Alarm that Chinese tourists are at risk from bandits is so acute that the Chinese government recently considered sending police officers to Paris to help protect them. Paris tourism officials said the proposal was shelved amid concerns over how they would operate.
The French capital — celebrated for its beauty, culture, and savoir faire — still retains huge allure, making it the number one destination in Europe for China’s burgeoning middle class and growing legion of millionaires, according to the European Federation of Chinese Tourism.
Not with me, not anymore.
Nearly 1 million Chinese tourists came to Paris last year, according to the Paris Tourism Office, spending more than 1 billion euros on everything from Cartier watches to Michelin-starred restaurants, and outspending Japanese and Americans on shopping.
Now, however, Paris’s glittering image in China is losing its luster amid reports of robberies of Chinese tourists, according to Chinese newspapers and social media.
A group of 75 French luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Hermès, warned last year that high-spending Chinese tourists fearful for their safety could choose to go to Italy or Britain instead. Concerns about the consequences for the country’s vaunted tourism industry have intensified as the French economy has stagnated.
According to the Paris-based European Federation of Chinese Tourism, which represents 30 travel agencies catering to Chinese tourists, the number of group tours coming to the French capital has fallen 20 percent this year compared with 2013. The Paris Tourism Office said that a 21 percent jump in the number of Chinese tourists last year had nearly halved in 2014.
Pierre Shi, secretary general of the European Federation of Chinese Tourism, said Chinese visitors were being preyed upon because they were known to carry large amounts of cash to avoid paying multiple currency exchange fees.
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I'm just not connecting with these articles, sorry. They are not being written for me or you. They are being written of and for a certain $elect group of people in Bo$ton by wannabes.
"BNP Paribas chairman to step down" by David Jolly | New York Times September 28, 2014
PARIS — The chairman of BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, is stepping down as the institution seeks to move beyond the fallout from its guilty plea and nearly $9 billion in fines in the United States for its dealings with blacklisted countries.
The chairman, Baudouin Prot, 63, will leave Dec. 1 after more than 30 years with the bank, the board said late Friday. He will be replaced by Jean Lemierre, a former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Before his elevation to chairman three years ago, Prot served as chief executive from 2003 to 2011. He is credited with helping to guide BNP Paribas through the global financial crisis and into the ranks of the world’s biggest banks.
Prot’s tenure, however, may ultimately be remembered more for the landmark criminal case brought by prosecutors and regulators in Washington and New York after the bank was accused of illegally transferring billions of dollars on behalf of countries, including Sudan and Iran, that were blacklisted by the United States.
While other major banks, including Standard Chartered and HSBC, have been caught up in such affairs, the US authorities were particularly incensed that BNP had ignored warnings and then refused to cooperate with the investigation.
Related: HSBC and Beyond
Also see:
Royal Bank of Scotland chairman to step down
Citizens Bank initial share price is lower than expected
UK regulator fines Barclays record $62 million
All too big to jail.
After months of stormy negotiations, in which the French government lobbied on the bank’s behalf, BNP agreed in June to plead guilty and pay $8.9 billion in fines to settle the case, the largest such judgment ever.
Recent reports that Prot would resign had indicated it was his choice to leave. In its statement, the board lauded his leadership, saying it was “grateful to Baudouin Prot for his total commitment during the financial crisis of 2007-2011 when he faced on a daily basis, with his teams, situations which were unprecedented in the financial sector.”
The statement made no mention of the US investigation.
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Sorry I'm screwing you with this flurry of $hit.
For some reason these briefs are not on the website but did make print:
"A costly strike by Air France pilots appeared ready to continue through the weekend after the French government said that it would not mediate the dispute, which has grounded more than half the airline’s flights for almost two weeks. “We are at an impasse,” Vincent Fournier, a spokesman for the French National Union of Airline Pilots, which represents nearly three-quarters of Air France pilots, said on Saturday. Mr. Fournier said pilots were “stunned” by the government’s refusal to intervene. "
Related: Air France Scales Back Transavia Plan, Giving In to Pilots’ Demands
That's odd because I was led to believe the pilots backed down.
The brief connection that inspired this post:
"A stampede that killed six children and injured 26 at a southern Chinese elementary school was sparked by horseplay that caused panic among dozens of schoolchildren, a state-run newspaper reported Saturday. The Beijing News said several boys were playing in the school in the city of Kunming on Friday when they knocked over several foam rubber sleeping mats. The mats landed on several boys whose screams sent dozens of panicked children down a narrow staircase."
Other Chinese kids sleeping on foam mats:
"Hong Kong activists protest voting reform limits" by Joanna Chiu and Kelvin Chan | Associated Press September 28, 2014
HONG KONG — Hong Kong activists kicked off a long-threatened mass civil disobedience protest early Sunday to challenge Beijing over restrictions on voting reforms, a surprise move that further escalates the battle for democracy in the former British colony after police arrested dozens of student demonstrators.
Organizers of ‘‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace’’ said they were starting their protest by continuing the ‘‘current occupation’’ of the streets outside government headquarters begun earlier by a separate group of student demonstrators that drew tens of thousands of people at its peak about midnight Saturday.
See: Hong Kong Hoax
Agenda-pushing paper approves of this protest, which cast suspicion upon it as controlled opposition.
The Occupy Central movement had originally planned a mass sit-in to paralyze the Asian financial hub’s central business district Wednesday, but organizers moved up the start of their protest and changed the location in an apparent bid to harness momentum from the student rally outside the government complex in the southern Chinese city.
They got diverted and didn't go after the money, huh? $tink!
A massive crowd turned out to support the student protesters who had stormed into a courtyard in the government complex late Friday, scuffling with police officers wielding pepper spray. Police arrested at least 74 people, including some in their teens.
However, momentum seemed to fade after Occupy Central’s announcement, with many young people leaving the scene. Others appeared determined to remain in place until police officers move in to clear them out.
Sound familiar, US kids? From like, three years ago?
More than 1,000 exhausted and weary protesters — most of them students — remained at the scene hours after Occupy Central’s announcement. Many of them slept as hundreds of police officers watched over the scene.
The protesters had arranged metal crowd-control barricades originally brought in by authorities to defend their position, placing them around the protest zone. They donned goggles and plastic wrap to protect against pepper spray.
Good thing AmeriKa doesn't have cops like tha.... oh, right.
Have the Chinese killed anyone yet?
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Hong Kong’s young people have been among the most vocal supporters of full democracy in recent years, fueled by anger about widening inequality.
And here my banker's mouthpiece is praising them!
What an IN$ULT to the good kids of America.
They also fear that Beijing’s tightening grip is eroding the city’s rule of law and guaranteed civil liberties unseen on the mainland such as freedom of speech.
I know how they feel.
Organizers of Occupy Central, a nonviolent protest movement, said in a statement, ‘‘The courage of the students and members of the public in their spontaneous decision to stay has touched many Hong Kong people. Yet, the government has remained unmoved.’’
I love it when a war paper takes the side of nonviolent protest.
The student protest at the government headquarters followed a weeklong strike by thousands of students demanding China’s Communist leaders allow Hong Kong fully democratic elections in 2017. University and college students who had spent the week boycotting classes were joined Friday by a high school students.
$tank.
Organizers estimated that 50,000 people had flooded the streets around the government complex at its peak.
Such good kids, huh?
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Related: Globe Embraces Occupy Wall Street
About three years too late.
"Police use tear gas in Hong Kong political protests" by Alan Wong and Chris Buckley | New York Times September 29, 2014
HONG KONG — Downtown Hong Kong turned into a battlefield of tear gas and seething crowds Sunday after the police moved against a student democracy protest, inciting public fury that brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets of a city long known as a stable financial center.
Look at the New York Times cheering them on!
Hours after the riot police late Sunday sought to break up the protest, large crowds of demonstrators remained nearby, sometimes confronting lines of officers and chanting for them to lay down their truncheons and shields. Some officers were injured.
I feel sorry for the American Occupy kids who had their skulls bashed in and camps ripped down.
The heavy-handed police measures, including the city’s first use of tear gas in years and the presence of officers armed with long-barreled guns, appeared to galvanize the public, drawing more people onto the streets.
Heavy-handed in China, huh, NYT, even though it is first time in years?
On Monday morning, protesters controlled major thoroughfares in at least three different parts of the city. A few unions and the Hong Kong Federation of Students called for strikes, and the federation also urged a boycott of classes.
The confrontation threatened to tarnish Hong Kong’s reputation as a safe enclave for commerce and raised the political cost of Beijing’s unyielding position on electoral change here; footage and photos of unarmed students standing in clouds of tear gas facing off with riot police flashed around the world Sunday.
Oh, $tunk, and why did Ferguson just pop into my mind?
It also set the stage for a prolonged struggle that poses a test for President Xi Jinping of China, who has championed a harsh line against political threats to Communist Party rule.
$tink, $tank, $tunk, I smell the $hit of an
“If this one gets out of control, Xi will also lose face,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a commentator on politics who teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Everyone knows he’s the one running the show.”
Thousands of prodemocracy protesters had been gathering in front of the Hong Kong government headquarters since Friday, despite official warnings to leave. But on Sunday, police moved in, lobbing tear gas canisters into the crowd.
Thousands of people who had been prevented from entering the protest area then spilled onto the nearby streets, and protests and confrontations with the police multiplied across the city. The police repeatedly hurled tear gas at the roaming crowds, further infuriating the protesters.
“We’ve never seen anything like this, never imagined it,” said Kevin Chan, a factory manager who joined thousands of people gathered at night near the government offices. “The government must awaken that this is the Hong Kong people. These are not their enemies, these are the people.”
My government doesn't feel that way, or they work for $omeone el$e.
The protest was started by students demanding electoral changes. Beijing has proposed that the public would be able to vote for the city’s chief executive, beginning in 2017. But a committee dominated by people loyal to the Chinese government would be able to screen out candidates.
With rigged elections votes mean nothing.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE: Hong Kong protesters ignore orders to disperse
Of course, that is the reason the U.S. economy is in the shit house.
It's all China's fault!
Next thing you know they will be blaming China nor nonexistent global warming:
"A rare arctic land sale stirs concerns in Norway" by Andrew Higgins | New York Times September 28, 2014
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — The sale of a majestic waterfront property with easy access to the North Pole across a frigid fjord from Longyearbyen, the capital of Norway’s northernmost territory, has kicked up a noisy storm fed by alarm about the Arctic ambitions of a Chinese real estate tycoon with deep pockets, a yen for ice, and a murky past working for the Chinese Communist Party.
The tycoon, Huang Nubo, was rebuffed last year in an attempt to buy a tract of frozen wilderness in Iceland and has turned his attentions to Norway.
Related: Iceland Gives China the Cold Shoulder
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Huang’s company, Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group, denied reports in the Norwegian media that it wants to buy land here in the high Arctic, and said it is focusing instead on plans for a luxury resort complex in Lyngen, a mountainous area on the Norwegian mainland near Tromso.
That project, though centered on land much farther south than Svalbard, still puts Huang’s company inside the Arctic Circle and has set off a heated debate about his intentions.
“No need to doubt that billionaire Huang Nubo is a straw man for the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s authorities,” warned a commentary in Nordlys, northern Norway’s largest newspaper.
Ola Giaever, the seller of the property near Tromso, said he had “100 percent confidence” that Huang was a straight-up businessman with no hidden agenda. “This is a business deal. Nothing else is going on,” Giaever said in a phone interview.
Such assurances, however, have done little to calm a frenzy of speculation about China seeking a permanent foothold in the Arctic, a region of growing geopolitical and economic significance as global warming opens new and cheaper shipping routes from Asia and also expands the prospects for exploiting the Arctic’s abundant natural resources.
Except the ice has only gotten thicker for the last 16 years.
“For anyone interested in geopolitics, this is the region to follow in years to come,” said Willy Ostreng, president of the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research. Huang, he added, “might be just another smiling businessman” genuinely interested in simply developing tourism, but “we are talking about perceptions here.”
“And the perception is that China wants a foothold in the Arctic.”
Hungry for energy, China has “openly declared its Arctic ambitions,” said Ostreng, noting that Beijing had invested in an icebreaker, the Snow Dragon; sent scientists to Svalbard to join teams of international researchers; and successfully lobbied to become an observer at the Arctic Council, a grouping of nations with Arctic land, including Norway, Russia, and the United States.
It has also tried, so far without success, to get permission to build a large radar antenna on Svalbard.
China has even declared itself a “near Arctic state,” a big stretch as even its northernmost region lies more than 1,000 miles from the Arctic Circle. But, Ostreng said, “When you are a big country, you can claim to be whatever you want, and people believe you.”
Or used to.
Wariness of China’s intentions has been fueled in part by the widespread bewilderment here about China’s relentless efforts to punish Norway over the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to honor Liu Xiaobo, a jailed Chinese dissident, with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
Why bother wasting time being mad about that worthless prize? I mean, Obummer has one!
Furious at the award, China has had a four-year diplomatic tantrum, repeatedly snubbing Norwegian officials, slashing imports of Norwegian salmon, and hectoring Norway for showing insufficient contrition for an award over which the government had no control.
Oh, I see. AmeriKa and its allies sanction: China throws tantrums.
If I didn't know better I would say the Jew York Times is anti-China.
The Arctic region, according to the US Energy Information Administration, holds around 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its natural gas, reserves that have been untouched because of the difficulty and high cost of their development.
Then global warming is actually good, right? Just a "consequence of the way we choose to live."
Can't find it in China or Europe, either.
Russia, which recently announced plans to invest $400 billion on extracting Arctic resources over the next 20 years, believes the region has even more promise, though these plans could be disrupted by Western sanctions imposed over Ukraine.
Why?
Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has said the Arctic holds more than 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves.
Is that why war must be waged against Russia?
He also indicated that Russia, despite its increasingly warm relations with China, was uneasy about Beijing’s push into the Arctic, warning that Russia faced “plenty of competition.’’
Maybe we can get them to go to war over the frozen tundra.
The competition was not only from nations with well-established Arctic claims like Canada, Norway, and the United States, but also “countries which seem to be far from the Arctic,” including China and “even Singapore,” a tropical nation 4,500 miles from the Arctic. “The struggle for resources is getting tougher,” Sechin said.
The land is now up for sale by descendants of a Norwegian shipper who acquired it in 1937.
Nazis didn't take it away from them?
All the rest is owned by the Norwegian state; a Norwegian state coal company, Store Norske; and a Russian state-owned coal company, the Arctic Coal Trust.
But that's okay.
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That cracks me up almost as much as this:
"China's war on terror becomes all-out attack on Islam in Xinjiang" by By Simon Denyer, Washington Post September 19, 2014
Then why am I staring at the CIA's printed article on September 28?
SHACHE COUNTY, China – The month of Ramadan should have been a time of fasting, charity and prayer in China’s Muslim west. But here, in many of the towns and villages of southern Xinjiang, it was a time of fear, repression, and violence.
China’s campaign against separatism and terrorism in its mainly Muslim west has now become an all-out war on conservative Islam, residents here say.
The WaPo went to check on the local CIA-Duh affiliate in China.
Throughout Ramadan, police intensified a campaign of house-to-house searches, looking for books or clothing that betray “conservative” religious belief among the region’s ethnic Uighurs: women wearing veils were widely detained, and many young men arrested on the slightest pretext, residents say. Students and civil servants were forced to eat instead of fasting, and work or attend classes instead of attending Friday prayers.
It's okay when Britain, Australia, France, or AmeriKa do it to protect against phony terror plots so they can convince you to go fight the ISIS they created.
The religious repression has bred resentment, and, at times, deadly protests. Reports have emerged of police firing on angry crowds in recent weeks in the towns of Elishku, and Alaqagha; since then, Chinese authorities have imposed a complete blackout on reporting from both locations, even more intense than that already in place across most of Xinjiang.
Good thing I have a self-censoring media over here.
A Washington Post team was turned away at the one of several checkpoints around Elishku, as army trucks rumbled past, and was subsequently detained for several hours by informers, police and Communist Party officials for reporting from villages in the surrounding district of Shache county; the following day, the team was again detained in Alaqagha in Kuqa county, and ultimately deported from the region from the nearest airport.
Now we know why the WaPo spies are grinding the ax.
Across Shache county, the Internet has been cut, and text messaging services disabled, while foreigners have been barred.
Thank God the U.S. will never be China.
But in snatched conversations, in person and on the telephone, with the few people in the region brave enough to talk, a picture of constant harassment across Xinjiang emerges.
At least AmeriKan citizens self-censor themselves, because no one around here wants to talk about anything significant.
“The police are everywhere,” said one Uighur resident. Another said it was like “living in prison.” Another said his identity card had been checked so many times, “the magnetic strip is not working any more.”
On July 18, hundreds of people gathered outside a government building in the town of Alaqagha, angry about the arrest of two dozen girls and women who had refused to remove their headscarves, according to a report on Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Nice to see the Jewish War Daily picking up the cause of Islam, huh?
Protesters threw stones, bottles and bricks at the building; the police opened fire, killing at least two people, and wounding several more.
Then, on July 28, the last day of Ramadan, a protest in Elishku was met with an even more violent response, RFA reported. Hundreds of Uighurs attacked a police station with knives, axes and sticks; again, the police opened fire, mowing down scores of people.
China's official Xinhua news agency said police killed 59 Uighur “terrorists" in the incident, although other reports suggest the death toll could have been significantly higher.
According to the Chinese government's version, the angry crowd subsequently went on a rampage in nearby towns and villages, killing 37 civilians — mostly ethnic Han Chinese. The region has been in lockdown ever since, with police and SWAT teams arresting more than 200 people and drones scanning for suspects from the air.
Sounds familiar to me.
Xinjiang is a land of deserts, oases and mountains, flanked by the Muslim lands of Central Asia. Its Uighur people are culturally more inclined towards Turkey than the rest of China.
They share a border do they?
China says foreign religious ideas — often propagated over the Internet— have corrupted the people of Xinjiang, promoting fundamentalist Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam and turning some of them towards terrorism in pursuit of separatist goals.
It is what I told you, a CIA program of destabilization. Seen it before.
It also blames a radical Islamist Uighur group — said to be based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas and to have links to al-Qaeda — for a recent upsurge in violence. In March, a gruesome knife attack at a train station in the city of Kunming left 33 people dead, while in May, a bomb attack on a street market in Urumqi killed 43 others.
No doubt in my mind.
In response, President Xi Jinping has vowed to catch the terrorists “with nets spreading from the earth to the sky,” and to chase them “like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them.’ ”
He sounds like Obummer and Biden.
But the nets appear to be also catching many innocent people, residents complain. “You should arrest the bad guys,” said one Uighur professional in Urumqi, “not just anyone who looks suspicious.”
Tell it to the AmeriKan government!
Some 200,000 Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to the countryside, ostensibly to listen to people’s concerns.
It's what the U.S. government and its mouthpiece media call a public relations offensive.
Yet those officials, who often shelter behind compound walls fortified with alarms and barbed wire, appear to be more interested in ever-more intrusive surveillance of Uighur life, locals say.
Well if that ain't the hypocritical WaPo kettle hollering pot!
In Shache, known in Uighur as Yarkand, an official document boasts of spending more than $2 million to establish a network of informers and surveillance cameras.
U.S. has spent billions if not trillions.
House-to-house inspections, it says, will identify separatists, terrorists and religious extremists – including women who cover their faces with veils or burqas, and young men with long beards.
Those only happen in AmeriKa after some agenda-pushing psyop or hoax.
In the city of Kashgar, checkpoints enforce what the authorities call “Project Beauty” — beauty, in this case, being an exposed face. A large billboard close to the main mosque carries pictures of women wearing headscarves that pass muster, and those — covering the face or even just the neck — which are banned.
They have a law against them like France?
By now you must know the source of all trouble in your society is veiled women, not war-mongering leaders or looting banksters.
Anyone caught breaking the rules faces the daunting prospect of “regular and irregular inspections,” “educational lectures” and having party cadres assigned as “buddies” to prevent backsliding, the billboard announced. In the city of Karamay, women wearing veils and men with long beards have been banned from public buses.
That is where the print ended.
Terrorism — in the sense of attacks on civilians — is a new phenomenon in Xinjiang, but the unrest here has a much longer history, with many Uighurs chafing under Chinese repression since the Communist Party takeover of the country in 1949, and resentful of the subsequent flood of immigrants from China’s majority Han community into the region.
The new phenomenon a hallmark of western intelligence services.
What has changed is the growth in conservative Islam, and the increasing desperation of Uighurs determined to resist Chinese rule.
Until a decade or two ago, Xinjiang’s Uighurs wore their religion lightly, known more for their singing, dancing and drinking than their observation of the pieties of their faith.
So WHO GOT TO 'EM!??!
But in the past two decades a stricter form of the religion has slowly gained a foothold, as China opened up to the outside world.
And allowed western penetration!
While worship was allowed at officially sanctioned — and closely supervised — mosques, a network of underground mosques sprang up.
In ATHEIST, COMMUNIST CHINA?!
Village elders returning from the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, brought back more conservative ideas; high levels of unemployment among Uighur youth, and widespread discrimination against them, left many searching for new ideas and new directions in life. The rise of Islam was, in part, a reaction against social inequality and modernity.
Islam's Occupy?
C'mon, readers, this propaganda is awful.
But Joanne Smith Finley of Britain’s Newcastle University, an expert on Uighur identities and Islam, says religion has become a “symbolic form of resistance” to Chinese rule in a region where other resistance is impossible.
When hopes for independence were cruelly dashed by mass executions and arrests in the city of Ghulja — or Yining in Chinese — in 1997, Uighurs had nowhere else to turn, she said.
“People lost faith in the dream of independence,” she said, “and started looking to Islam instead.”
I'm thinking Palestine, I'm thinking Kashmir, I'm thinking Ukraine, I'm thinking Iraq. All lost dreams.
Not every Uighur in Xinjiang is happy with the rising tide of conservatism: one academic lamented the dramatic decline in Uighur establishments serving alcohol in the city of Hotan, while insisting that many young girls wear veils only out of compulsion.
But China’s clumsy attempts to “liberate” Uighurs from the oppression of conservative Islam are only driving more people into the hands of the fundamentalists, experts say.
CIA must be ramping up the campaign as the formal declaration of WWIII approaches.
“If the government continues to exaggerate extremism in this way, and take inappropriate measures to fix it, it will only force people towards extremism” a prominent Uighur scholar, Ilham Tohti, wrote, before being jailed in January on a charge of inciting separatism.
Is the AmeriKan government listening?
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Maybe you are sad about the silli dismissals of the Uigher case?
UPDATE: Recent US military drills focus on possible war with China