Open source text editor poisoned with malware to target Uyghur users Researchers at Canada’s Citizen Lab have spotted a phishing campaign and supply chain attack directed at Uyghur people living outside China, and suggest it’s an example of Beijing’s attempts to target the ethnic minority group. Many Uyghur people, a Muslim ethnic majority, live in China’s Xinjiang province and according to the …
This seems a lot like eugenics to me, using arbitrary reasons to have minorities cleansed out of the population. Alternatively, having a common state enemy helps an authoritarian regime to build unity - just like the Americans say: A president who starts a war will be reelected.
... new wave of unverifiable propaganda ?
What I've read is that some/many Uyghur Islamist extremists are part of the ISIS califate operating in Syria and Iraq. That they have been set-up by the CIA to counter China, the same way as the Taliban were set-up by the CIA to counter Russia in Afghanistan.
"the same way as the Taliban were set-up by the CIA"
That went so well they thought they would do it again? I would be inclined to credit the spook agency with a modicum of intelligence (it's in the name after all) and not fuck up in exactly the same way twice...as that's a job for the electorate.
Despite all the downvotes, there appears to be a grain of truth regarding Uyghurs fighting in the Levant.
According to Wikipedia:
"TIP (ETIM) sent the "Turkistan Brigade" (Arabic: كتيبة تركستاني, Katibat Turkistani) to take part in the Syrian Civil War,[29] most noticeably in the 2015 Jisr al-Shughur offensive"
TIP being one of the Uygur separatist movements.
As for CIA involvement, that's probably just a random conspiracy theory.
Manolo,
There isn't really a grain of truth in it, because it's 99% conspiratorial bollocks.
Sure there are Uyghur islamist terrorists. As there are islamist terrorists from Europe, North Africa, the US, Saudi, wherever. It's a global movement. In the particular case of the Uyghurs, the Chinese government's repression of them as an ethnic / linguistic / cultural group came first though, as it's been going on for decades - along with the Chinese Communist Party repressing various other ethnic / linguistic / cultural groups (not to mention everyone else in China too).
Chinese repression predates the existence of Islamic State, although I don't know the history of Chinese repression, as to whether it also precedes al Qaeda (whose roots go back into the 90s - maybe late 80s). There may be more Uyghur terrorists than other groups, I've seen no data, but also there's been a general rise in the reach of islamist terrorism in Central Asia as a whole. Islamic State seem to have been very effective in the area, in a way that al Qaeda weren't, although they had links to Chechen groups - as well as Afghanistan of course.
Also the CIA didn't create the Taleban. In fact it's almost the opposite. The CIA, and other Western countries, did support the Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet invasion in 1979 - and of course Osama bin Laden was one of those fighters. But the Taleban were formed after the Soviet withdrawal as a reaction against the warlords running the place (sort of) - a lot of whom were also mujahideen (also therefore backed somewhat by the CIA during the war). The Taleban were a reaction to the chaos and misrule of people you might equally claim the "CIA created". They conquered the country in the 90s - but were so repressive that Afghan society then reacted against them, and so they were in the process of losing control of Kabul to the "Northern Alliance" (some of those same "warlords") back in 2001 before bin Laden attacked the World Trade Centre and so the US joined in with a few air-strikes and special forces and the Taleban government collapsed almost immediately.
It's complicated.
From the not very nice translation that Google Translate made of the Uyghur readme/changelog, this editor seems to have a few features that many text editors you could localize either don't have or are specific to Uyghur including:
OCR: I don't have this in my text editors, though you could add it.
Convert between writing systems for Uyghur.
Save to Docx: Most text editors don't bother with this. Localizing LibreOffice and trying to add these features as add-ons would be more work than the average text editor localization.
Features specific to languages that Uyghur users may also know including Kyrgyz.
You probably could bolt these onto another editor, but I'm not sure they're small enough that that's an obviously better option.
