Riots Continue for Eighth Night in Denmark

The riots in Denmark continue for an eighth straight night.

A total of 20 towns were hit by fires on Sunday night, with around 29 people arrested - most of them for arson or attempted arson.

In two cases the fires were so strong that blocks of flats had to be evacuated.

Bands of young people have vandalised or set fire to hundreds of cars and a number of schools in the past week, however the situation was said to have been improving over the weekend.

Police said they could give no reason for the behaviour, but said unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.

Social workers believe an alleged plot to kill a Danish cartoonist for his drawing two years ago of the Prophet Mohammad may have fuelled the riots. Fifteen Danish newspapers reprinted his drawing on Wednesday in protest against the alleged murder plot.

It's almost become a truism about these riots that they're due to winter break combined with unusually warm weather.

Social workers are on the right track, at least in part. The rioting began before the republication of the Mohammad cartoons following the revelation and disruption of an assassination plot against one of the cartoonists. However, things progressively became worse after the republication. Muslim groups denounced the republication, but have been strangely silent over the assassination plot against the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, who was expressing his free speech rights to criticize others. It's truly a sad commentary when the cartoons spur the very violence that the cartoons depict.

About 90 fires were reported last night. The Danish Prime Minister puts the onus on those responsible for the violence:

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Sunday said the rioting youths and their parents bore the responsibility for the unrest, and said they should expect no sympathy from society.

He noted that Denmark's freedom of speech includes cartoonists, and that anger over a drawing did not give anyone "the right to burn others' cars or to burn down schools or institutions."

On Saturday, Danish lawmakers canceled a planned trip to Iran after the Foreign Policy Committee received a letter from Iran demanding that lawmakers condemned the cartoon reprints.

The all-party committee said in a statement that the trip was called off because its members "can't or will not apologize for the drawings."

The violence may lessen now that the Danish schools are back in session.

Still, there are those who think that the riots are self-inflicted by the newspapers that republished the articles. Jakob Illeborg, a writer at the Guardian, thinks that the Danish papers acted hastily and that the reaction was predictable in the anti-Danish sentiment that swept through the Muslim world. Really? Your right to speak your mind is based on the ability to say things that might be uncomfortable or put the beliefs of others in a bad light. You may be satirized, criticized, and lambasted for what you say and what you believe.

The cartoon jihad shows that there are groups, specifically Muslim and Islamist groups, that refuse to accept criticism, satire, or any kind of objection to their views and that their first response is not to speak back, but to whine, seethe, and riot. There is absolutely no reason why people have to watch what they say, print, or draw because it may be offensive to some other group. That's the beauty of free speech. You fight speech with speech. The moment you set a group aside that is exempt from criticism, they are given a position of power over other groups that is neither afforded to them under the law of the state, nor should be granted to them as a practical matter.

He writes:

"But it is the Muslims' fault", a few angry Cif commenters reminded me. That may be, but I think we ought to ask ourselves whether it is worth picking these fights. Of course we must protect our writers and cartoonists from deranged fundamentalists, but we are not faultless ourselves. There were hidden political and religious agendas in the original printing of the cartoons, just as is there are this time around. The latest street riots in Denmark tell their own story of the serious problems with disintegrated migrants that we have at the moment, but they also speak loudly about Danish society's inability to cope with foreign cultures and religions - it is no coincidence that such riots take place in capitals such as Copenhagen and Paris and not in London.

London may not have had riots, but they surely had suicide bombers who attacked the London Underground, and they had the gas-car bomb plot that saw a number of Muslim doctors plot and attempt to carry out mass-casualty attacks across the UK.

The problem isn't so much that the Danes or the French refuse to cope with foreign cultures as much as it is a refusal of Muslim groups to assimilate into the Danish or French cultures. I know and understand that there is resistance in France to accept non-French as Frenchmen, but there is a certain amount of reciprocity involved, and when Muslim groups first impulse is to riot and torch hundreds of cars and businesses and schools, you're not going to get a whole lot of sympathy from this quarter.

There were hidden agendas involved in the publication of the cartoons. It took two months from the time the cartoons were originally published to initiate the riots, and that was after additional cartoons were invented by Islamist groups to further fan the flames of vitriol in Muslim communities around the world. The cartoon riots did not happen spontaneously, but were stage managed by Islamist leaders.

The political statement made by the original publication was, and remains, the ability of people to speak freely and criticize others, and specifically criticize the violent and misogynistic nature of the Islamists.

UPDATE:
Gateway Pundit has more. Astute Northern Seer has a contrary view, with reliapundit questioning that take in the comments.

UPDATE:
In a related note, Wikipedia has been deluged with emails demanding the service take down copies of the Mohammad cartoons. Thus far, Wikipedia refuses to do so. Good for them. (HT: DanThePainter at LGF)