timeimmortal

Last Friday, three people died in Nigeria because of another caricature of Muhammad.

Three persons including a police officer were killed after Muslim students rioted over a caricature of Prophet Mohammed by their Christian colleagues, police and teachers said Friday.

Students of Government Secondary School Sumaila, some 76 kilometres (47 miles) south of the northern city of Kano, went on the rampage late Thursday, after a Christian student suspended for two weeks returned to the school.

He had been suspended for having drawn a caricature of the Prophet and posted it on a wall inside the school.

“Two people and a police inspector have been killed in the violence while the divisional police station and everything inside including ammunition have been burnt by the rioters”, Kano police chief Aminu Yesufu told reporters outside the burnt police station.

He said about 20 others were badly wounded, including the divisional police officer, who suffered a deep machete cut to the head.

Police had arrested 25 people and opened an investigation, he added.

“The students began chanting Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest) when the Christian student returned and pursued him to lynch him”, Sadiq Haruna, a teacher at the school, told an AFP reporter who visited the town on Friday.

“The Christian escaped in taking refuge in the local police station but hundreds of angry Muslim students attacked and set on fire the premises after the police refused to hand him over,” Haruna said.

So much for the law of the land, I guess — these people evidently make up their own laws.

Robert Spencer comments thusly:

A cartoon of Muhammad does not harm Muhammad. It does not harm Islam. It may even reflect more poorly on the cartoonist than on the object of the cartoon. Yet all too many Muslims around the world continue to fail to grasp this, and to commit cold-blooded murder in their static rage, unaware of or indifferent to the fact that their murderous anger is impotent to eradicate the fact of the cartoon itself, and reflects more poorly on their religion than any cartoon ever could.

I don’t honestly know if the rage these cartoons inspires is a genuine religious issue, or whether it has more to do with rampant ignorance and lack of education in the Muslim world (and, more and more, within Muslim communities in Western nations). I do know, however, that whatever the reason, the reason is irrelevant — violence over a cartoonish depiction of a religious figure, even a false prophet, is pointless, absurd, and completely unjustifiable. Christians at the University of Saskatchewan didn’t riot, storm the police station, and murder three people when this cartoon was published:

And Christians at the University of Alberta didn’t riot when this cartoon was published:

Respectfully, I submit that the image of a zoophillic, homosexual Christ performing fellatio on a pig is substantially more offensive than an image of Muhammad with a bomb for a turban. And yet strangely, nobody died over the Christ image. Oh, sure, some people wrote letters of complaint, and some other people boycotted the student paper that ran the cartoon…but that’s just the point. Those are legitimate avenues of protest, and are appropriate forms of protest. Rampaging and killing? Not so much. Not at all, in fact.

I get that some Muslims understand this principle. I really, really do get that. But it seems to be the case, just a little bit more each week, that the majority of Muslims tend toward the opposite view, and see rage and murder as wholly justifiable whenever even the most crudely-drawn depiction of their false prophet is published.

And why? Because images of Muhammad are forbidden out of fear that the Muslim faithful might commit idolatry, giving undue reverence to the image rather than to the person it depicts. Okay, fine…but, as a Catholic, I can do nothing but scoff at that very sentiment. Is their faith so weak, and are they so ignorant, that a poorly-drawn image could distract them from proper reverence for their prophet? Can they even tell the difference between a picture of the prophet and the real deal?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!