CHINA BEGINS CRACKDOWN ON JIHADISTS

These guys, when they're not pouring pee pee in your Coke, go about their business in a whole different way.

Chinese police killed five Muslims in its far northwest who were planning to wage a "holy war" against the nation's majority Han population, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

The five were killed on Tuesday when police raided their hide-out in Urumqi, the capital of the Muslim-populated Xinjiang region, Xinhua reported, citing local authorities.

Fifteen people, all Muslim Uighurs, were at the apartment and all had been wielding knives when police conducted the raid, the report said, without mentioning any heavier weapons such as guns.

China has repeatedly warned of a terrorist threat from Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan and central Asia, with police alleging earlier this year they had smashed a group that was planning to attack the Beijing Olympics.

However human rights groups and other critics allege the government has fabricated or exaggerated the terrorist threat as an excuse to crush all forms of dissent there.

Many among the region's Muslim Turkic-speaking Uighur majority say they have been subjected to 60 years of repressive communist Chinese rule, and have complained of an increased security crackdown ahead of next month's Games.

Monday at the The Big Feed we reported:

In a backstreet of the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, the Chinese government has been spray-painting signs on dusty mud brick walls to warn against what it says is a new enemy -- the Islamic Liberation Party.

Better known as Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group says its goal is to establish a pan-national Muslim state, or Caliphate.

China says Hizb ut-Tahrir are terrorists, and claim they operate in the far western region of Xinjiang, home to some 8 million Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs, many of whom chafe under Chinese rule.

"Strike hard against the Islamic Liberation Party" and "The Islamic Liberation Party is a violent terrorist organization" read the signs in Kashgar, written in red in both Chinese and Uighur's Arabic-based script.

As in another strife-hit Chinese region, Tibet, many Uighurs resent the growing economic and cultural impact of Han Chinese who have in some cases been encouraged by the government to move to far-flung and under populated parts of the country.

Beijing accuses militant Uighurs of working with al Qaeda to use terror to bring about an independent state called East Turkestan. It claims to have foiled at least two Xinjiang-based plots this year to launch attacks during the Beijing Games.

Convenient patsy? Or are the jihadists really up to something?