How to Guarantee a Muslim Riot

All you have to do is to put out the word that a koran has been desecrated, it would seem, and your local peaceful adherents of a certain religion will be guaranteed to go stark raving mad - or your money back.

Security forces have been called in to tackle riots at a Yemen gas plant where a copy of the Koran is said to have been desecrated, security sources say.

Unrest began after a French engineer at the terminal in the south-eastern port of Belhaf allegedly "defiled" the book.

Hundreds of rioting workers burnt cars and a helicopter at the French-run facility, sources told news agencies.

This latest tale of mayhem sparked over allegations of koranic "desecration" comes on the heels of another story that I couldn't get round to discussing when I had no internet access: in any case, the outline of said story is depressingly familiar.

Secondary school pupils in north-eastern Nigeria have killed a teacher after apparently accusing her of desecrating the Koran, police say.

The teacher, a Christian, was attacked after supervising an exam in Gombe city. It is not clear what she had done to anger the students.

The authorities, concerned that communal unrest could break out, have ordered all the city's schools to shut.

Similar accusations sparked riots in neighbouring Bauchi State last year.

[...]

Nigerian police say students beat the teacher to death outside the school compound after she had been invigilating an exam.

The BBC's despicable Nigeria correspondent, an individual by the name Alex Last, was quick to proffer a load of apologist prattle about how the riots in Nigeria were all about something other than Islam:

Religious differences have long been used to justify all kinds of violence in Nigeria, our reporter says.

In reality it is often fuelled by ethnic or political conflicts and competition for resources, which can be fierce, given that so many people live in poverty, he says.

But if what this idiot says is true, how does one explain the latest riots in Yemen, or the ones which occurred worldwide in 2006 over alleged koranic desecration in Guantanamo? Are we really to believe that all these incidents have nothing at all to do with Islam, but "ethnic or political conflicts and competition for resources"? And why is it that Nigerian Christians of various ethnicities don't tend to seize on offended religious sensibilities as a pretext for killing each other, seeing as they are just as much riven by "ethnic or political conflicts and competition for resources?" There seems to be hardly any calumny western apologists won't seize upon to avoid facing the realities of Islam's violent tendencies, even if it means attributing honor killings and koranic riots to unspecified "ethnic" or "tribal" factors which only ever seem to affect local muslim populations.

Comments

[Ross]

Is there a significant level of ethnically based violence between different non muslim groups within Nigeria?

Whilst I can't claim to be especially well informed about the country, the BBC's repeated insistance that events there have nothing to do with Islam have struck me as being preposterous before now. For example a report about a craze for naming babies 'Osama' after 9/11 in northern Nigeria made the claim that:

" A Nigerian woman has fled home with her new-born baby because her husband decided to name their son Osama Bin Laden..... But the BBC's Sola Odunfa in Lagos says that religion has little to do with this marital discord - it has more to do with Nigerian traditional beliefs in the influence a name has over a person's character. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1741171.stm

[Matt]

I find it funny that the media consistently rejects what Muslims themselves say about their beliefs, and present a version of Islam that is not practiced by Muslims.

[Abiola]

"Is there a significant level of ethnically based violence between different non muslim groups within Nigeria?"

If there is such a thing on a significant scale, it's certainly news to me. The only times I've ever heard of such violence is when it involves muslims and non-muslims ...

"But the BBC's Sola Odunfa in Lagos says that religion has little to do with this marital discord - it has more to do with Nigerian traditional beliefs in the influence a name has over a person's character"

First of all, there's no such thing as a "Nigerian" traditional belief, and second, wouldn't a straightforward interpretation be that the woman doesn't want her child to be used to glorify a religious terrorist? This idea that Nigerian muslims don't keep track of what's going on in the rest of the Islamic world and aren't affected by it is absurd:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1039735.stm
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/012455.php