Observations

Muslims are busy rioting and demonstrating around the world over the blasphemous images first produced by a Danish newspaper. Actually Muslim extremists think that any image of Mohammed violates Islamic law and tradition.

So, what's next? Hacking apart the edifice of the Supreme Court building?

The death toll continues to rise as rioters tried to overrun a peacekeeping outpost in Afghanistan that houses Norwegian troops. One Afghan was killed in that episode. In total, at least six people have been killed since the Islamists took offense at the Danish cartoons first published in September 2005.

Meanwhile, a few folks are wondering where the Buddhist firebombers were when their precious, famous, and incomparable Bamayan Buddha statues were destroyed by the Taliban despite the protestations of nearly the entire world community (except for much of the Muslim world). Those statues were over 2,000 years old and were a cultural and religious treasure. The Taliban blew up the statues because the statues were deemed offensive to the Taliban.

A growing number of American newspapers are coming around to publish the original Danish cartoons. This is a good thing. We should see exactly what the fuss is about. Yet no major American paper has seen fit to publish all 12 cartoons (or any number of the bogus cartoons that the Islamists inserted into the mix to further inflame the Muslim sensitivites).

Over in Lebanon, they're pissed at the Syrians. The ruling coalition, which has no love of the Syrian regime in Damascus, basically blamed the embassy torchings on Syrians.

Lebanon's dominant coalition accused Syria yesterday of deliberately fomenting violent protests over cartoons about the Islamic prophet Muhammad, while the United States urged its Arab allies to help quell the spreading anger.
Syrian leaders held meetings, meanwhile, with Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Iraqi cleric who has been organizing protests over the drawings in his country...

In Beirut, the anti-Syrian coalition that dominates the Lebanese government apologized to Denmark for the burning of its consulate on Sunday, while charging that Syrian intelligence agents had sparked the trouble to destabilize their country. "The acts of sabotage that happened in [Sunday's] protest are the start of a coup d'etat by the Syrian regime that aims to transform Lebanon into another Iraq," said the coalition. It specifically blamed Syrian officers led by military intelligence chief Asef Shawkat, brother-in-law of President Bashar Assad.

Yet another act of war perpetrated by Syria that cannot go unanswered. Syria must be held accountable, though I doubt that the UN will ever take the steps necessary.

Also, the attacks against the Danes wasn't simply a spontaneous reaction to the cartoons, but rather a coordinated and purposeful attempt to threaten the Danes into inaction over Iran's nuclear program. Denmark is going to be assuming the role of chairman of the UN Security Council. Coincidence? I think not.

UPDATE:
The New York Times lacks a spine to publish the cartoons alongside its articles and the editors are clearly cowed by the situation. They're sitting on the facts, which should give every reader pause as to what else the paper is withholding on other major stories.

UPDATE:
The Boston Globe should be able to discern the difference between protestors and rioters. Protestors simply do not begin firebombing embassies. Rioters do. Call 'em like they are, not as you wish they were. Rioters may be acting for or against something, but they're not simply protestors. They are violating the law - and are inciting, condoning, or even engaging in violence themselves. And throw in the fact that they're actually committing acts of war - and the Iranian government is wholly complicit in this - by not protecting the sovereign property of the state of Norway.

And one gets the sense that the Islamists could care less whether they're confusing the Danes with the Norwegians or the Swedes. In fact, they are interchangeably burning flags from any number of European nations including Switzerland, Norway, Austria, along with the usual assortment of US and Israeli flags.

This isn't about the cartoons. It's about asserting dominion over other viewpoints.

UPDATE:
The European Union appears to be growing a spine - stating that an Iranian boycott is a boycott against the EU. Let's see just how far the Europeans are willing to take this. What actions would the EU contemplate to protect one of their own. Are they willing to give up the Iranian oil over this? They're in a far more precarious position re: oil than the US, and a shock in oil prices in Europe will hurt their economy far more than here in the US.

UPDATE:
Omar at Iraq the Model chimes in and notes the following:

I give up! I have to comment on the general situation…
I swear that 90%+ of the protestors in Muslim countries have not seen the cartoons and do not know the name of the paper and when I say that I'm sure of it because I have access to the web 24/7 and I spent a really long time searching for the cartoons and couldn’t find them until a friend emailed me a link and.

You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction.
And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes.

However, I cannot claim that Muslim community is innocent for there have been outrageous reactions outside the range of Syria's or Iran's influence but again, these protests and threats are more political than religious in nature.

He goes on to say that even if the EU apologized tomorrow, the fanatics would continue with their ways - and Iran and Syria would continue to instigate

Healing Iraq is similarly outraged over the violence spurred by these cartoons.

This is yet another example of Islamists and totalitarian states doing their darnest to try and undermine Western democracy.

Technorati: Buy Danish "jyllands-posten mohammed" "muhammad cartoon" embassy torchings "muhammad image archive"