A Reminder of Muslim Rampages Past

Given the current uproar by Muslims worldwide over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, it seem a good time remind Westerners that this is hardly the first time Muslim rage has been ignited by something trivial. There was for example the carnage that followed an off hand reference to the Prophet Mohammed in a Nigerian newspaper reporting on the 2002 Miss World contest.

MUSLIMS in Nigeria were yesterday urged to execute a fashion journalist whose article about the Miss World beauty contest sparked last week’s riots, resulting in more than 200 people losing their lives.
The deputy governor of a state in northern Nigeria said Islamic law required the death of the journalist, Isioma Daniel, because she was guilty of blasphemy.

"Just like the blasphemous Indian writer Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed," Mahamoud Shinkafi told a gathering of Muslim groups. Rushdie was forced into hiding after Iran’s former leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, ordering his death in 1989 for allegedly insulting Islam in his bestselling novel The Satanic Verses.

Although Shinkafi does not have the religious authority to issue a fatwa, his spokesman said the death sentence was "a reality based on the teachings of the Koran".

Ms Daniel has resigned from her job and is also believed to have gone into hiding since writing in defence of the Miss World contest in the Lagos-based newspaper ThisDay.

The article suggested religious objections to the beauty contest were misplaced because Islam’s founding prophet Mohammed would have approved of the pageant and might even have chosen one of the contestants as a wife.

Within hours of the article being published, rioting erupted in the northern city of Kaduna where Muslim youths burned down the district office of ThisDay. More than 200 people were killed in the city and rioting also briefly spread to the capital, Abuja.

The Miss World pageant, due to be held in Lagos, was cancelled and all 80 contestants flown to London after the unrest.

Pointing out that Muslim media regularly depict non-Muslims in far more abusive terms and that the Muslim outcry over the cartoons is thus utterly hypocritical, is rather like throwing snowballs at an alpine avalanche. Better for Western nations to understand that such bizarre and violent over-reactions are typical of Muslim behavior worldwide. One may then draw the appropriate conclusions regarding the average level of intellectual and moral development inspired by Islam. The most obvious conclusion being that Muslim immigration to Western nations is uniformly bad for the West, and needs to be stopped at once.