The news brings word of more depressing incidents of Muslim hatred and viciousness, this time in Nigeria. Don't these disciples of the religion of peace know how to express indignation and anger without killing people? Are their religion and culture so reflexively violent that any insult is considered a justification for cruelty and brutality?
There are places in the United States, to be sure, where you can get killed for being from a different neighborhood, or for being a different race, or for just making eye contact with someone, but we tend to think of the wanton killers in these cases as marginally human savages. How can we think any more of people who kill over a vaguely insulting cartoon appearing in a newspaper thousands of miles away?
Here are the headlines:
Nigeria confirms that 35 persons were killed, 30 churches and five hotels were also burnt in violence the past three days.
For the third day in a row, Nigerian Muslims rampaged through the streets leaving 13 dead on Monday in Bauchi after at least 25 reported deaths in two previous days of violence.
The Red Cross put the death toll in Maiduguri and Katsina at 28, but the Christian Association of Nigeria said it had counted at least 50 dead bodies in Maiduguri alone.
There are gruesome reports of Christians being burned to death in their churches over the weekend.
And there's this:
One group threw a tire around one man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.
A Catholic Priest and 3 children are among the dead.
Also you might check out the protest posters here and here to get a sense of what at least some Muslims in New York are thinking about your future.
The irony, lost I'm sure on the protestors, is that these messages are sponsored by an organization called the Islamic Thinkers Society. It's hard to believe that anyone who was really thinking would conclude that the murder of innocent priests and children in Nigeria is an appropriate response to the provocation of cartoonists in Denmark, but there you have it.
