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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States accused China on Friday of putting well more than a million minority Muslims in “concentration camps,” in some of the strongest U.S. condemnation to date of what it calls Beijing’s mass detention of mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups. More at link above..... Is there a down side here?

JINAN, China Cui Haoxin is too young to remember the days of his people's oppression under Mao Zedong. The 39-year-old poet was born after the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Hui — China's second-largest Muslim ethnic group — were among the masses tormented by the Red Guard. In the years since, the Hui (pronounced HWAY) generally have been supportive of the government and mostly spared the kind of persecution endured by China's largest Muslim group, the Uighur. There are signs, though, that that is changing. Cui fears both that history may be repeating itself and for his own safety...

Cui Haoxin is too young to remember the days of his people’s oppression under Mao Zedong. The 39-year-old poet was born after the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Hui — China’s second-largest Muslim ethnic group — were among the masses tormented by the Red Guard. In the years since, the Hui (pronounced HWAY) generally have been supportive of the government and mostly spared the kind of persecution endured by China’s largest Muslim group, the Uighur. There are signs, though, that that is changing. Cui fears both that history may be repeating itself and for his own safety as he...

URUMQI, China—This city on China’s Central Asia frontier may be one of the most closely surveilled places on earth. Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera. China’s efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic...

Iraqis Identify Prisoner as Chinese Islamist Fighter By EDWARD WONG SEPT. 4, 2014 An image taken from YouTube shows what appears to be the first known Chinese jihadist, called Bo Wang, fighting with rebels in Syria. Credit via YouTube BEIJING — The Iraqi Defense Ministry has posted on its Facebook page photographs that it says show a captured Chinese man who was fighting on behalf of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni jihadist group. Iraqi officials have not released further details, but the photographs, if confirmed, would be the first visual evidence of a Chinese citizen fighting...

BEIJING (AP) — Students and civil servants in China's Muslim northwest, where Beijing is enforcing a security crackdown following deadly unrest, have been ordered to avoid taking part in traditional fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

A 68-year-old grandfather who was severely beaten on an East Village street Friday night died from his injuries the following day and police are looking for the suspect. Ruan Wen Hui had just dropped off his granddaughter and was walking on East Sixth Street between avenues C and D when a suspect came up from behind, yelled at him and started attacking, officials said. Surveillance video from the scene shows the suspect tossing the man against a wall, then stomping and punching him. After the attack, the assailant is seen walking away. Hui was taken to Bellevue Hospital in critical...

YINCHUAN, June 23 (Xinhua) -- At a tiny courtyard mosque in China's most populous Muslim region, Jin Meihua leads other women in prayer and chants. Every day, the 44-year-old dons a black robe and violet scarf and preaches to dozens of women at the Little White Mosque in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous region, where most of the country's Islam-faith Hui ethnic minority live. Jin has a routine life. "Except attending funerals, I always stay in the mosque, teaching the female Muslims Islamic scriptures." She is a female imam or "ahong," pronounced ah-hung, from the Persian word "akhund" for "the...

TAKING A POSITION OF ACCOUNTABILITY -- ONE PERSON AT A TIME Mountains are made up of millions and millions of tiny little pebbles, all wedged in together. People who live in a society remind me, in some ways, of those little pebbles on the mountain. We all kind of fit together and form something really big. We reach for the stars above us. We rest on the shoulders of those who have gone before us and blazed trails that give us providence. It's not that I spend my days waxing poetic thoughts, but when I heard that the parents of...

IT'S NOT ILLEGAL TO BE WEIRD By now, the world knows that the killer at Virginia Tech is a guy named Cho Seung-Hui. You won't see him described as an "Asian" anymore. The group that protects the Asians have voiced a protest for fear of casting aspersions on all Asians. I think I've read enough about the massacre to know that Hui was a loner. He talked in monosyllable responses when asked questions. His roommate says he wasn't particularly interactive. He wrote a story for an English assignment that apparently was a bit over the top. So much so that...