This story is a few weeks old, but I’m just now getting around to it.

A leading Al-Qaeda militant on Wednesday called on Muslims worldwide to defend Uighurs in China’s restive northwestern region of Xinjiang. He told Uighurs to prepare for a holy war or Jihad and urged a “vast media campaign” to raise awareness of their fate at the hands of “oppressive” China.

In the video posted to jihadist websites, Abu Yahya al-Libi appeared to launch a frontal assault against China.

The coming war between China and Islam has been boiling under the surface for some time now.  China, having the benefit of a closed media and an existing international reputation as bad guys, will react to this war in a much different way than the west.

They will react in ways that countries like the US or Great Britain, or even Russia cannot.

He [ed. the Al-Qaeda militant] also accused China of using “satanic ways” to oppress Muslims in the province and replace them with other ethnicities while “looting their wealth and undermining their culture and religion.”

“Tens of thousand of people have been silently killed to prevent a revolt. The communist Chinese government has tried to eliminate all links between eastern Turkestan and the Islamic nation by sending colonisers to constantly reduce the number of Muslims,” he stated.

Another tactic China is using to exterminate Muslims is calling the province Xinjiang instead of eastern Turkestan, just as Palestine’s name as been changed to Israel, al-Libi argued.

He described China’s presence in Xinjiang as an “occupation” and claimed the colonisation of the province has made the Muslim population a minority.

“The Chinese have closed all the Islamic schools, forbidding the study of the Muslim religion. They have arrested and killed all the Muslim leaders,” he said.

Xinjiang is also the province where China is carrying out the largest number of nuclear experiments, al-Libi alleged.

“Thousands of people have died from the radiation emitted by the many nuclear missiles that have been launched and the experiments carried out in the area,” al-Libi concluded.

Uighurs make up 8 million people out of Xinjiang’s population of 20 million. It covers one-sixth of the country and is relatively sparsely populated.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 8 million Uighurs just ended up disappearing one day.  It’s surely not beyond the ability of the Chinese to execute.

China has been mostly silent as the rest of the international community deals with the threat of Islam.  (See, for instance, Iran.)

It will be interesting to see how they react when the threat is in their own back yard.