Islamic mobs attacked the U.S. embassy in Jakarta today, continuing a worldwide wave of violent demonstrations.
Hundreds of Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad tried to storm the U.S. Embassy on Sunday, smashing the windows of a guard post but failing to push through the gates. Several people were injured.Pakistani security forces, meanwhile, sealed off the capital of Islamabad to block a planned mass demonstration and fired tear gas and gunshots to chase off protesters. In Turkey, tens of thousands gathered in Istanbul chanting slogans against Denmark, Israel and the United States.
Protests over the cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and have been republished in other European publications and elsewhere, have swept across the Muslim world, growing into mass outlets for rage against the West in general, and Israel and the United States in particular.
Christians also have become targets. Pakistani Muslims protesting in the southern city of Sukkur ransacked and burned a church Sunday after hearing accusations that a Christian man had burned pages of the Quran, Islam's holy book.
That incident came a day after Muslims protesting in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri attacked Christians and burned 15 churches in a three-hour rampage that killed at least 15 people. Some 30 other people have died during protests over the cartoons that erupted about three weeks ago.
The AP correspondent quoted above is still peddling the notion of Muslim "rage," but the pattern of the last few weeks is now clear: an intentionally instigated global intifada.
Masquerading as a spontaneous eruption of religious/cultural anger and based on the success of the bitter Palestinian campaign against Israel (now culminated in the election of Hamas), this would appear to be a pre-meditated, perhaps long-planned step by Islamists towards a worldwide confrontation. This time the Danish cartoons serve the same false purpose as Ariel Sharon's Sept. 2000 visit to the Temple Mount: a pretext for deadly conflict.
Prediction: this will get worse, not better, as time goes on.
Related:
• Counterterrorism Blog - Danish cartoons: new political tool
• Michelle Malkin - World on Fire: Islamists Gone Wild