Beheader briefly attended services at Baptist church in Winnipeg, then moved to Edmonton

Three and half days after he destroyed the life of Tim McLean, here’s the first news article telling us anything about Vince Weiguang Li. It is based on interviews with social acquaintances of his in Winnipeg who describe him as a troubled, lost soul. He and his wife immigrated to Canada four years ago. Then:

Li and his wife Anna found a home near downtown Winnipeg shortly after coming to Canada.

He was hired as a forklift driver, while she began working several waitressing jobs at Chinese food restaurants in the city.

The couple began occasionally attending church services at a Baptist church, which opened the door to other social opportunities.

Li worked at the church and its attached schoolhouse as a night custodian for a time.

After two years, that is, two years ago, Li left his wife in Winnipeg and went to live in Edmonton, Alberta and fell out of touch with his friends in Winnipeg, who had been concerned about him and had tried to support him. The article doesn’t tell us anything about his associations and activities in the two years since then, except that he “found work delivering newspapers and flyers.” It says nothing about his religious background prior to his sporadic attendance at the Baptist church during his two years in Winnipeg. If he went to a Baptist church, even just a few times, he could not have been any kind of devout Muslim. Given his Hui ethnicity, however, as explained at VFR last night, it is highly likely that his background is Muslim. And we also have the report from the Chinese-language World Journal, regrettably lacking any specific or named source, that “Those who know Li Weiquang say that he is a Muslim…” And from past cases what would we expect to happen to an unobservant Muslim, separated from his wife and recent friends and support network, a “lost soul” at sea in a strange, Western society? It is a reasonable guess that in looking for an anchor Li came under the influence of jihadist Islam, as has happened with thousands of other de-racinated, non-devout Muslims living in the West.

And there are plenty of Muslims living in Edmonton. A search for *Edmonton Alberta Muslims” yielded 176,000 results. Here is a page with a list of mosques in that city.

Edmonton, out on the great western plains, is extremely nonwhite. Of a population of 730,000, 165,000 (22 percent) are what the Canadians call visible minorities, including 45,000 Chinese, 38,000 Southeast Asians, and 11,000 Arabs. There are 18,000 Muslims in Edmonton, 2.9 percent of the population. If we assume that most of the Arabs are Muslims, then Li, living in Edmonton over the last two years, would have had ample opportunity to come into contact with types of Muslims he had never known in China. The Chinese-American who wrote to me last night said that Islam as practiced by the Hui people of China is not known to be associated with jihadism. Islam as practiced by Arabs, of course, is.

Since the Canadian police are going to do everything they can to cover up any possible Islamic connection to Li, what is needed is independent journalists investigating his activities and contacts in Edmonton.

- end of initial entry -

Erich writes:

You wrote:

“The Chinese-American who wrote to me last night said that Islam as practiced by the Hui people of China is not known to be associated with jihadism. Islam as practiced by Arabs, of course, is.”

Also Islam as practiced by Filippinos, Thais, black Africans, Turks, Indians (i.e., Pakistanis), and central Asiatics—which brings us to Chinese Muslims:

From a recent Jihad Watch article:

A group calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party released a video threatening the Beijing Olympic Games and claiming responsibility for recent deadly explosions on two Chinese buses, a terrorism monitoring firm said.

Apparently, there was a major jihad by Chinese Muslims in 1930, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the non-Muslim government (on this, Hugh Fitzgerald only says “see Mildred Cable’s book The Gobi Desert”).

Then there’s this article from American Thinker about the 30 million Muslims in China:

For, in truth, the Islamic Jihadists of China’s Xinjiang are linked to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. Their terrorist methods and ideology are of a piece with the larger Islamic Jihadist goal to overthrow existing governments and install a religious theocracy. They, in fact, represent the Chinese battlefront of the worldwide Islamic Jihad.

LA writes (August 4):

I received the previous comment yesterday, August 3, at 3:39 p.m. Eastern time. In an article dated August 4 8:22 p.m. from the BBC, we learn that Chinese Muslim jihadists at 8 a.m. Greenwich time today murdered 16 border policeman in the Muslim region of Xinjiang.

Michael P. writes:

You wrote: “The Chinese-American who wrote to me last night said that Islam as practiced by the Hui people of China is not known to be associated with jihadism. Islam as practiced by Arabs, of course, is.” “

The Hui are Islamic, and are concentrated mostly in the Xinjaing Uyghur Autonomous Region. The largest ethnic group in the region are Uyghurs (Sunni Islamic) which, according to CCTV and Xinhau, are responsible for the recent bomb attack killing at least 16 police.

The earlier blast in Yunnan that totaled a couple of city buses was first hinted to be, perhaps, the work of disgruntled “farmers.” But it is hard to find accurate information, anywhere, Later, an East Turkestan group (Turkestan Islamic Party) claimed responsibility, but little is known about the group, and, in any case, nothing coming out of the PRC is certain. Some of the Chinese blogs are the best source of news aggregation.

Whatever the case, the MO certainly fits the Islam pattern.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2008 02:23 PM | Send