The AP reports:
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. . . .
Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.
The one bright spot in this story comes in a quote from a Danish bishop, in a telling exchange with an Egyptian imam:
In Cairo, Bishop Karsten Nissen, of Denmark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, met with Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University, the world's highest Sunni Muslim seat of learning.
Tantawi said the Danish prime minister must apologize for the drawings and further demanded that the world's religious leaders meet to write a law that "condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets." He said the United Nations should impose the law on all countries.
In response, Nissen did not address the issue of a global law but said it was impossible for Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to apologize.
"I have brought to his excellency (Tantawi) the apology of the newspaper, but our prime minister did not draw these cartoons. Our prime minister is not the editor of this newspaper. He cannot apologize for something he did not do," Nissen said....
I'm glad that even against the backdrop of murderous thuggery by Muslim extremists, some people are willing to repeat that, no, free nations and governments are not responsible for what their newspapers publish.
What is the Muslim population of Nigeria?
Muslim idiots are stupider than Western idiots, but there isn't necesarily a greater proportion of them.
There do appear to be a great proportion of extremists, as one would expect from the factors I just cited.
Isn't it obvious that they will never be satisfied with an apology. What they want is to impose their values on us.
However, the most important point of the story is that most of the news articles are being written from a Muslim perspective.
Right. Certainly, no Western religion preaches submission to the will of God.
Oh, Christianity certainly does but we're mostly very bad Christians; I have less faith in the weakness of Muslim belief.
Seriously, how can any religion that has The Truth all scripted out, including its political manifestations, regard freedom except as an occasion of sin?
I'll take the over on that.
I'm slightly less certain following the apology from the paper, but I still suspect that Queen Margrethe would gut the P.M. if he apologized.
Cornellian-
They certainly have nothing to apologize for, and I'm disappointed that they did... But... what they did was an act of courage. It's disgusting that it should be so, but in the wake of Theo Can Gogh, it is so. While it's disappointing that their courage ran out, it's hardly shameful. They were braver than most.
Even with their apology, I expect the editors will be hiring security guards to protect their family for at least the next several years.
I'm not sure this is entirely correct. For example, our justification for invading Afghanistan and ridding it of the Taliban was that they could not disavow the actions of Al Queada (then residing in Afghanistan) simply because they did nothing illegal in Afghanistan.
Now, if a team of hackers in another country was releasing computer viruses that did substantial damage to US systems (e.g. hospital and DoD), we might also hold the government of that country responsible.
Is publishing a computer virus different from publishing a cartoon? Isn't the point of free speech that it should be content neutral?
Finally, the underlying assumption of viral marketing programs is not very different from the assumptions underlying computer viruses. Humans, like computers, have vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause them to redistribute some payload and infect others.
So, if the US is right to object to computer viruses, are Muslim leaders right to object to the spreading of memes that cause their populations to freak out?
Are these questions supposed to make any sense?
Because they don't.
I thought our justification for invading Afghanistan was that Al Queada killed 3,000 Americans and that's where they were.
Just a thought.