The largest protests yet over the Danish cartoon of Mohammed have taken place in Pakistan:
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) – Gunfire and rioting erupted Wednesday as more than 70,000 people joined Pakistan’s biggest protest yet against Prophet Muhammad cartoons, burning movie theaters, a KFC restaurant and a South Korean-run bus station. Three people died and dozens were injured in two cities, police and witnesses said.
The massive crowd went on a rampage in the northwestern city of Peshawar, torching businesses and fighting police, who struck back with tear gas and batons. It was the third straight day of violent demonstrations in the Islamic nation.
The rioters ransacked the offices of the Norwegian mobile phone company Telenor, three cinemas and offices of Mobilink – the main mobile phone operator in the country, witnesses said. They also burned a bus terminal operated by South Korea’s Sammi Corp. Flames were shooting out of some of the buses, private TV station Geo reported.
“The European newspapers have abused our religion,” said Shaukat Khan, 22 and jobless, his eyes streaming from police tear gas near the burning bus stand. “We are expressing our anger. Usually protesters are peaceful but some miscreants do bad things and other people join them.”
Muslims have a right to be upset about images that violate their religious sensibilities but the extent of their response should be letters to the editor. The larger and more violent such protests become the more difficult it will be to claim that only a small number of Muslims are violent Islamists.
I sincerely wish that more of my countrymen were thinking strategically about this matter. That thought has been echoed in the Saudi press:
In the weeks since the crisis broke, America has tried to reduce this to an issue of press freedom. Any civilized nation that has expressed anger over these cartoons was labeled extremist and Islamist. However, as matters have progressed, America and the West are now aware that the “carpet” they have laid down under the feet of themselves and those in the third world after 9/11 is being pulled out from under them … and very quickly indeed.
All of this is due to the pictures printed in a Danish newspaper and the spreading of them by other European newspapers.
These acts have effectively nullified all military action taken by American and international forces sent to Iraq and Afghanistan up to now. They have nullified all previous propaganda measures, such as the creation of radio and television stations and attempts to buy consciences.
[…]
They have laid waste to all the best laid plans of U.S. intelligence to cut al-Qaeda off from the masses and terminate its influence on Islamic public opinion, and have deterred attempts to shut the terror group off alone in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Therefore, these disrespectful pictures of our noble Prophet have inflicted strategic losses upon America. These losses are due to the radicalization of the Islamic Street, which is now all in one trench under the banner: “Whoever disrespects our Prophet Muhammad May Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him – then he is our greatest enemy.”
This is the very thought that America has tried to remove for the past five years. It has tried to keep Western governments away from a confrontation with the Islamic street, because their plan was only to confront terrorist organizations.
It can be seen then that America’s involvement in the issue of the Danish pictures has widened the scope of the confrontation. It is also clear that at this stage, a simple apology will not suffice.
As long as there are no concrete measures taken to bring an end to Muslim humiliation and the taking advantage of their present vulnerability, the crisis on the Arab Street will continue to build.
I do disagree with several aspects of what the Saudi columnist above has written: either the rioting and violence are expressions of Muslim public opinion or they aren’t. To the extent that they are it is indeed clear that the affair of the Danish cartoons (and their continued re-publication) has been a strategic defeat for the United States in our attempts to exploit soft power in prosecuting the War on Terror. But, equally to that extent, the claims of those who believe that Islam itself is the enemy become more plausible.
What does the writer above mean by “concrete measures� Presumably, something along the lines of those suggested by the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca:
Speaking to hundreds of faithful at his Friday sermon, Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, called on the international community to enact laws that condemn insults against the prophet and holy sites.
In my view that’s an extremely unfortunate development. It merely sets Muslims up for another disappointment: there is no likelihood whatever that the U. S. Senate would ratify such a law and even calling for such a law highlights the enormous gulf separating the Western and Islamic traditions. As Noah Millman noted:
“Blasphemy” is not a synonym for “offense.” Blasphemy is a deliberate insult to the sacred, violating the third commandment, spuriously claiming powers or attributes properly reserved for the divinity, etc. To define blasphemy, you need to define the sacred, and the divine, and the attributes thereof. And religions do not agree about these definitions. Indeed, religions can conflict radically on these central points. For this reason, an egalitarian anti-blasphemy law cannot be conceived.
And, of course, in countries in which the overwhelming majority of the population are adherents of a single religion and, in particular, in those in which other religions are suppressed the very notion of religious egalitarianism is a meaningless noise.
The only practical way to insulate Muslims against images which might be offensive to them is to expel them from the West (for their own good, of course), seclude them in Islamic reservations, and sever the connections of those reservations from the rest of the world. This may, indeed, be what Islamists want but the overwhelming losers in such a proposition would be Muslims themselves who would be condemned to lives of isolation, ignorance, poverty, disease, and oppression.
The Paki protests are about Paki domestic politics: test of strength between the Islamist parties and the Moucharraf government. Pakistan probably has one of the severest problems of run-amock Islamist parties pimping their bloody lies to the masses.
I remain of the position that concluding anything about “Muslims” in gneral based off of specific sub-sets of Muslims is illogical and walking down the road to bigotry (that is not an accusation towards you, an observation with respect to the problem of drawing these conclusions).
It’s correct to be alarmed about Pakistan, but the entire Muslim world… no.
If Pakistanis don’t like the way Islam is portrayed in the west, then they would be better served by weeding out and prosecuting terrorists in their midst rather than protesting Dutch cartoons. Until they and other Muslims do this, they will be viewed as tolerating Islamic terrorism, and Islam will be judged accordingly. If they really want to change Islam’s image, they need to publically and privately preach that Islamic terrorists are evil and that they will burn in Hell.
Perhaps realizing that attempting to impose restrictions on more powerful countries JUST DOESN’T WORK will help them see the light.
Unfortunately, the fact that Islam’s initial expansion was in large part due to the weakness of surrounding nations–which is not true today–seems to be lost on many of their imams. The potentially dangerous results of this self-deception can be seen in the example of 9/11, when Islamicists thought they could “strike a blow” for Islam by murdering non-Muslims without serious repercussion, but in reality brought about the fall of a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Afghanistan and the deaths of tens of thousands of their compatriots.
For their sake, let’s hope they see the light soon.