Demonstrations reflect anger over anti-Islam film

KANO, Nigeria: A wave of protests against a anti-Islam film made in US continued yesterday in some Muslim countries.
Tens of thousands of people protested on the streets of Nigeria’s second city of Kano.
An AFP reporter said the crowd of demonstrators stretched several km through the city, the largest in Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north, with protesters shouting “death to America, death to Israel and death to the enemies of Islam.”
The rally was organized by the Islamic Movement of Nigeria — a Shia group operating in Africa’s most populous country since the late 1970s.
“We are out today to express our rage and disapproval over this blasphemous film,” said Muhammed Turi, a protest leader said.
“This protest is also aimed at calling on the US government to put a halt to further blasphemy against Islam,” he added.
Demonstrators carried pictures of US President Barack Obama, as well as American and Israeli flags as they marched toward a palace owned by the Emir of Kano, the top religious figure in the city of roughly 4.5 million people.
“The prophet means everything to us. He means more than our lives... Any blasphemy against him is like an invitation to war,” said protester Husseini Ibrahim.
Turi also urged Nigeria’s government to publicly denounce the film and said all ties with Israel should be severed.
Thousands of people in Pakistan staged new demonstrations yesterday against the film, as the death toll from the previous day’s violent protests rose to 21.
More than 5,000 protesters marched toward Parliament in Islamabad, including hundreds of women, chanting “We love our Holy Prophet” and “Punishment for those who humiliated our Prophet.”
Some 500 people from the hard-line Jamaat-ud-Dawa staged a protest in front of the US Consulate in the eastern city of Lahore, chanting “The US deserves only one remedy — jihad, jihad.”
The protests were peaceful, in contrast to the previous day’s demonstrations. Religious groups said they were also planning demonstrations in Karachi, the scene of the worst violence on Friday, after the funerals of some of those killed during the protests.
Officials and witnesses say scores of people have been injured in a clash in Bangladesh’s capital between police and hundreds of Muslim protesters.
Police say they fired tear gas and used batons to disperse the stone-throwing protesters, who were from about a dozen Islamic groups. Witnesses say the protesters burned several vehicles. Dozens of protesters were arrested.
The clash erupted when police attempted to block the demonstration. All protests near the city’s main Baitul Mokarram mosque have been banned since late Friday to avoid unrest.
The protesters announced a nationwide general strike tomorrow to protest the police action.
Meanwhile, starting today, ads describing Muslim militants as “savages” will appear in New York’s subway system, courtesy of a right-wing US anti-Islamic group.
“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad,” read the ads that the American Freedom Defense Initiative paid to be shown in the sprawling subway. AFDI chief Pamela Geller told CNN: “I’m running them because I can.” The activist, who runs the Atlas Shrugs blog and heads a hate group called Stop Islamization of America, defended her use of the word “savage,” claiming that jihad, in the sense of holy war, targets innocent people. “I think any war against innocent civilians is savagery,” she said. Geller insisted that the ads were not antireligious because neither the words Islam nor Muslim appear in the ad.
French police yesterday arrested a man for apparently calling on a jihadi website for the decapitation of the editor of a magazine that published blasphemous cartoons, a judicial source said.
The man was detained in the western city of La Rochelle for calling on the radical website for the head of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. “The essential thing is not to let him live in peace,” the man allegedly wrote.
Police have opened a preliminary probe on charges of incitement to commit murder, the source said.