Front Page Magazine reports:

Uighur Islamic separatists killed eight people during a rash of suicide bombings on August 9, in the latest in a series of brazen terrorist attacks inside the communist police state. Terrorists targeted a dozen government offices with home-made explosives, just one day after the Turkistan Islamic Party released a video threatening to attack public transportation during the Games.

Earlier in the week, two Muslims drove a truck into a group of paramilitary police in Xinjiang province, then attacked the officers with knives, throwing explosives into their barracks. Sixteen officers died in the brazen attack. A local Communist Party official reported the two attackers had prepared written statements that declared, “they had to wage ‘holy war.’”

To most Western observers, the very existence of Chinese Muslims comes as a surprise. However,as previously reported in FrontPage, followers of Islam (mostly Sunnis) make up an estimated 1%-2% of China’s population – approximately 30 million people.

The Hui people, numbering around 20 million, practice Islamic dietary laws and other customs, but very rarely engage in jihadist violence. However, the nation’s 8.5 million Uighurs present a challenge to Chinese authorities. Located near the Pakistan and Afghanistan borders, the north-west province of Xinjiang is home to these Turkic Muslims, whose language is closer to Turkish than Chinese, and whose women often wear buhrkas. Many of the area’s tens of thousands of mosques have been financed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Uighurs have never accepted Communist rule. The cycle of sporadic unrest and subsequent crackdowns by Chinese authorities has persisted for decades … 

For the most part, Western media – using the struggles of Tibet as their touchstone – frame the attacks during the Beijing Olympics as part of “a local ethnic conflict” between the Uighurs and China’s culturally and ethnically distinct Han majority.

However, Dr Walid Phares, the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, charges both parties with denial: “As under the Russians in Chechnya it looks like the Communists in China are battling another form of totalitarianism to come: Jihadism.”

One of those conflicts – like the Iran-Iraq war or the Soviet-Afghan war – which has no side worth cheering for.