Cartoon Pogrom
Up till now, rioters have been killed by security police. Now, rioters have killed innocents
Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people in the deadliest confrontation yet in the whirlwind of Muslim anger over the drawings. It was the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa's most populous nation. An Associated Press reporter saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.
It does seem like it took a little longer for the anger to spread to sub-Saharan Africa, which is presumably less connected to global media. There have now been riots from Indonesia to Nigeria, which pretty much covers the entire swath of Muslim-majority settlement in the world.
Update: The Danish editor who published the cartoons, Flemming Rose, makes a persuasive case for why it was appropriate to do so.
As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.
Is Islam totalitarian? Not in the centralized form of the Soviet Union, but I believe it is accurate to describe Islam, and the tradition I was raised in--Orthodox Judaism--as totalistic systems which require constant obedience. Like Judaism, Islam does not have a single centralized authority to define what most be obeyed, but the traditions are quite specific and worked out. Neither tradition is philosophically accepting of freedom. For Orthodox Jews, the word for those Jews are are not religious is "frei" meaning "free" i.e.
free from submission to God's will. Islam, which was derived from Judaism, seems to have a similar outlook.
Posted by Rick Heller at February 18, 2006 09:36 PM
I think this is a new tactic by Al-qaeda and its allies. It's already been discussed that the Beirut and Syrian riots were staged. If you start the riots rolling in countries like Syria then let them “spread” and escalate to U.S. Allies, you have a good chance of tying up resources, suppressing economic activity and a moderate chance of destabilizing a friendly regime. And don't forget the French riots (and that weird “we are going to nuke you” speech by Chirac a little while later.) . Nothing happens in a vacuum! A riot gives you good cover to burn things down and kill people.
All the polls show that most Americans think we are wining the WOT. I think that's a little naive. No enemy is going to tell you his next move till its to late. The beauty of a riot is that the west dismisses it and say “Oh those barbaric Muslims”.
The Nigeria attacks remind me of the rioting that broke out over a Miss World pagent in 2002. The northern Christians that were attacked had nothing to do with the pagent, or the tacky newspaper comments about Muhammad wanting to marry one of the lovelies were he around today.
Instead, the Miss World outrage was used as an excuse to kick non-Muslim butt. The Danish cartoons are serving roughly the same purpose.
Agreed. The cartoons are just a lightning rod, a convenient lens being used to focus muslim discontent.
I think that most faiths that manifest as totalitarian ultimately do so as a function of what a faith's most powerful leaders stress. In the case of islam, notice that many of its least tolerant policies manifest in sh'aria law, which is not in fact any doctrine which comes from the mouth of Mohammed.
I'm not willing to let any religious leaders or followers off the hook for whatever horrible things they do in the name of faith. It's not Jesus, Mohammed, Yahweh, the Buddha or anyone else that's fomenting violence. It's living human beings.
I don't remember where I saw the story, but in the last coupla days a Russian or Eastern Europe paper had a cartoon censored out. It showed Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and God looking down sadly at the riots, and saying "We didn't approve this. Who said we approved this?"
Hatred doesn't need facts, just excuses. Like an alcoholic, it's any bottle of port in a storm....
