From AP, :
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) -- A car packed with explosives went off as a bus carried Chinese engineers to a port project in remote southwestern Pakistan on Monday, killing three of them and injuring eleven other people, police and hospital officials said.The attack occurred just after 9 a.m. local time while the bus took at least 12 Chinese to the Gawadar port, about 300 miles west of Karachi, near the border with Iran, said Sattar Lasi, the chief of police in Gawadar.
"A car was parked near the port and it exploded as the bus reached the port," Lasi told The Associated Press.
The motive for the attack was not yet known, said Shoaib Suddle, the police chief in Baluchishtan province, where Gawadar is located. ...
The motive for the attack was not immediately clear. Islamic militant groups have targeted foreigners in the past, but never in such a remote part of the country.
Several nationalist groups have also expressed opposition to the project at Gawadar, which aims to develop a deep sea port that will ultimately provide a second option to the heavily trafficked Karachi port terminal.
China is Pakistan's most important ally and one of its chief trading partners.
The Chinese Embassy was closed Monday, a holiday in Pakistan marking the birth of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, but a duty officer who identified himself as Cai, said the embassy was monitoring the situation closely. He had no additional information.
Dear Reza and Summer Breeze~ Do you really think it is in the best interests of your friends in Al-Quaida (or any other Jihad group) to get China upset with the muslim world? I suspect they would not have the kind of Restraint the US practices. In fact, I wouldn't be sure if they had the kind of restraint Saddam's kids practiced in the Olympic torture rooms.
Of course since that is Their culture, I suppose I should respect it and let the Chinese do what they can for your friends. Right?
Overseas Chinese have long been the victims of Muslim persecution. 600,000 ethnic Chinese -- many Christian, others Confucian -- were killed in a sustained campaign, in Indonesia, described to the outside world as a necessary attack on "Communists." Few paid attention; it seemed plausible -- Chinese, owing their allegiance to Communist China, and so on -- but in fact, the attacks were motivated almost entirely by a hatred that, whatever the jealousy over Chinese economic successs (though almost all killed were poor peasants), had at its base -- as Chinese survivors noted -- a large element of religious fanaticism.
Cries of Jihad, as the Englishwoman and missionary Mildred Cable dryly noted in her wonderful "The Gobi," could be heard once every 30 years or so. The last major Muslim Jihad in that region was in 1930; it was bloodily suppressed. Foreign visitors to XInjiand are always impressed by the superior hygiene of the Uighurs; they pay less attention to the unrest that Islamic tenets prompt. They sometimes extend to Muslims the same sympathy that they feel for the Tibetans. But the Tibetans make no claim to anyplace but Tibet, and the destructionof the lamaseries, and of much of Tibetan culture, unique in the world, should have a claim that Muslims, intent not on preserving various unique local cultures, but on extending Islam which, wherever it has gone, has actually worked to destroy the artifacts, and the historic memory, of everything non-Islamic, do not possess.
One hopes that the Chinese, whatever their realpolitik calculations, will realize that aiding Pakistan is, in effect, aiding the world of Islam, a world which may seem only to have America, Israel, and a few other places in its sites, but in end, it has all of Asia as well.
And as the tide of Communism recedes, one hopes that fervent Christians, rather than the bearers of da'wa, will flood China with their message.
It is of note that in France and Italy, the communities most hostile to the Muslim immmigrants are those of the Asian immigrants. They are at least as conscious of their own histories as are Muslims; unlike Muslims, they do not view their neighbors with hostility or hatred; they cause no trouble to anyone; they exhibit no signs of wanting to be other than productive and loyal members of the countries to which they have come. The constrast is stark, and is beginning to be noticed, at least in the Corriere della Sera and Le Figaro (the latter has become the most sensible French newspaper, even at times publishing the truth about Islam, and about Iraq as well).
Waiting for the pro-Muslim whackjobs in the LLL media to blame the US/ Israel. Oh wait, I haven't checked BBC/ CNN yet.
They bombed some french engineers a few years ago in the same way.
What were these Islamists thinking--blowing up Chinese citizens? Don't they know that the Chinese are not the Spanish or the French?
But then, the do seem to want a war with all the non-Muslim world. I say that the lineup for WWIII is starting to look pretty good: House of Islam on one side; USA, Russia, China, and India on the other.
And perhaps Europe - if they see that we are winning.
jay
Hugh:
On the macro level, the Chinese and some other East Asian immigrants may indeed be the most hostile to Islam, as you say.
On the micro level, the NSW Police report that the Lebanese crime-gangs (which have been running rampant here since the cops were transformed from law-enforcers into social-workers by a "wringing-wet" Police Commissioner - now retired and a consultant on security for the Athens Olympics), having disposed of numerous other ethnically-based gangs and taken over their territories and capers, are terrified of the Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese gangs in town!