Nigeria: more religious violence

Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Tue, 02/21/2006 - 23:12

Still hailing the cartoon protests as heroic anti-imperialism? From AP, Feb. 21:

Christian and Muslim mobs rampaged through two Nigerian cities Tuesday, killing at least 24 people in violence that followed deadly protests against caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed during the weekend.

In the mainly Muslim northern city of Bauchi, violent protests by Muslims targeting Christians claimed the lives of 18 people, the Nigerian Red Cross said. In the predominantly southern Christian city of Onitsha, residents and witnesses said at least six Muslims were beaten to death by Christian mobs which also burned two mosques there.

Tuesday's violence brought to 49 the total number of people killed in sectarian violence in Nigeria since Saturday, when protests over controversial cartoons published in Europe of the Prophet Mohammed turned violent in the northern Muslim city of Maiduguri for the first time, killing at least 18 people, police said.

Similar protests broke out in Bauchi city soon afterward, leaving seven dead Monday and another 18 dead Tuesday, Adamu Abubakar, secretary of the Red Cross in Bauchi, said.

Mobs ran through Bauchi's streets wielding machetes and sticks, Abubakar said.

Horror stories follow, if you want to read them...

See our last post on Nigeria, and the cartoon crisis.

Study in leftist myopia

Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Tue, 02/21/2006 - 23:25

Workers World, most atrocious organ of the idiot left, editorialized on the anti-cartoon protests Feb. 16:

The continuing protest over this injustice by Muslim followers and anti-racists is not just a response to the current images—it’s a response to the collusion of imperialist governments with the media, time and time again, in seeking to legitimize oppression over resistance. What’s clear is that more and more of the world isn’t buying it.

Are they going to revise their line? Or is the senseless slaughter of Christian civilians their idea of "anti-racism"? They certainly had no problem with senseless slaughter of Muslim civilians in Bosnia, as we have noted...

In contrast...

Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Tue, 02/21/2006 - 23:31

...legitimate anti-racists are capable of condemning the cartoons without a kneejerk embrace of the backlash against them. From New Kerala, Feb. 9:

"This was a conscious and planned provocation by a right-wing Danish newspaper," said German Gunter Grass, who took the Nobel Prize in 1999.

Grass described the Danish publishers of the caricatures as "xenophobic right-wing radicals" and the subsequent violent Muslim protests as "a fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act."