This is reminiscent of Muhammad’s notorious jihad attack on the Jews at the Khaybar oasis in Arabia. As I explain in my book The Truth About Muhammad, when Muhammad raided Khaybar, the Jews were going out to tend their farms. One of the Muslims later remembered: “When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him. We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, ‘Muhammad with his force,’ and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, ‘Allah Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people’s square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned..'”
“6 Farmers Killed in Attack in Xinjiang,” by Andrew Jacobs, New York Times, July 14, 2014:
In the latest outbreak of violence in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, assailants have stabbed to death six ethnic Han farmers in a late-night spate of home invasions that appear to be part of a slow-burn effort to sow terror among migrants to the region, Radio Free Asia reported on Monday.
Like most recent incidents of ethnic bloodletting, news of the attack was quickly removed from the Internet in China. But Radio Free Asia, quoting local police officials, said that seven men were involved in the killings, which took place on Wednesday in Uchturpan, known in Chinese as Wushi, a rural county in Aksu Prefecture that has been the scene of deadly clashes between the police and ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who are predominantly Muslim.
In the latest attack, the police shot and killed one suspected attacker and captured three other suspects, Radio Free Asia reported. A warrant that circulated on the Internet suggested that three others were still at large. The report said one of the stabbing victims, a woman, had survived.
The attack comes amid a year-long “strike hard” campaign that Beijing is waging against what it calls Islamic-inspired terrorism in Xinjiang, and it follows a series of brutal, high-profile attacks across the country that have taken aim at ordinary Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, unnerving government leaders.
The final straw appears to have been a bombing in May at an outdoor produce market in Urumqi, the regional capital, that left 43 dead, including four attackers, and injured more than 90 others. In the days that followed, security officials promised to pacify the region through an iron-fisted campaign that President Xi Jinping vowed would involve “walls made of copper and steel” and “nets spread from the earth to the sky” to capture those involved in the violence, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
Since the crackdown started, state news media have reported the arrests of more than 400 people in Xinjiang, many of whom have already been sentenced. Last month, 13 people in three cities were executed after local courts convicted them of organizing and leading terrorist groups, according to Xinhua. On Friday, 32 others were handed lengthy prison sentences, three of them life terms, for having downloaded and circulated what the state media described as religious extremist video and audio files. Like most legal proceedings in China, the trials were closed to foreign journalists.
Exile groups and local residents say the continuing crackdown has heightened the fear and resentment that have been steadily poisoning ethnic relations in Xinjiang since rioting in 2009 claimed nearly 200 lives, most of them Han who were hacked to death by young Uighur men in the streets of Urumqi.
In recent months, there have been almost weekly reports of small-scale attacks across the region. Last week, investigators arrested four Uighur men who they say ambushed Kashgar’s antiterrorism commander in a rural area and stabbed him nearly 40 times before dumping his body into a reservoir. In late June, five Uighurs, two of them police officers, were fatally shot during a raid on a farmhouse in Kashgar Prefecture. In late April, three Han officials on a fishing trip in the same area were also murdered.
Experts say that disenchantment among Uighurs has grown alongside mounting economic disparity between Han and Uighur, and that the discontent is fueled by government restrictions on religious practices, including what news reports describe as aggressive efforts to dissuade students and government workers from fasting during the holy month of Ramadan….
The New York Times ought to be ashamed itself for continuing to push the oft-discredited claim that poverty causes terrorism. But the New York Times has no shame.