Posted on 05/11/2005 8:40:07 AM PDT by ppaul
Kabul: Three people were killed and at least 60 injured when police clashed with more than 5000 Afghans infuriated by reports that US soldiers had desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay prison camp."We have two dead in our hospital and 47 wounded. Three of the people injured are in a serious condition," said Mohammed Ayob, deputy director of the public health hospital in the eastern city of Jalalabad.
"The medical university hospital, the second hospital of the city, has registered one dead and 12 wounded are in hospital. Some other people with light injuries were cared for and have been discharged."
Witnesses said police opened fire as the crowd rampaged through the city yesterday.
Jalalabad police chief Abdul Rehman said: "Initially the demonstrators were peaceful but then a group joined them and the mob turned violent."
Western security sources said the governor's office and those of several aid agencies including UNICEF, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, were set on fire.
The US State Department said on Tuesday that the Pentagon was looking into a report in Newsweek magazine that interrogators at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, kept copies of the Koran in toilets to annoy prisoners.
The protesters, which one police source in Jalalabad said numbered "maybe 10,000", also denounced US-backed President Hamid Karzai, shouting: "Death to America's allies" and "Death to Karzai" as well as "Death to Bush". US troops stationed in the city stayed in their base, witnesses said.
The reports have also infuriated close US ally Pakistan.
The mostly Muslim country's foreign ministry demanded an explanation while parliament and cricket hero-turned politician Imran Khan urged Washington to apologise.
Mr Karzai is due to visit the US this month where he said he will seek special long-term ties with Washington.
¡ The US and other countries have secretly sent scores of Islamist prisoners to Egypt since the mid-1990s, where they have likely been tortured, a human rights group said on Tuesday.
Human Rights Watch issued a 53-page report criticising Egypt as the world's main recipient of prisoners, including suspected Islamist militants believed to offer useful intelligence for the US war on terrorism.
The report, titled Black Hole: The Fate of Islamists Rendered to Egypt, identifies 61 people who have been transferred into Egyptian custody since 1994.
Seriously, though, I'm sick and tired of hearing about these freaks going nuts and trying to kill non-Muslims every time they think they've been offended. They need smack down time EVERY time they do this just to let them know we find it uncivilized and unacceptable.
These riots just lead to further death, destruction, and simmering rage. Might as well give them something to really be mad about--until all the quick to anger and violent ones are dead.
Then I'm all for peaceful co-existence.
The Afghani soldiers, police and citizens not participating in the protest in the streets and shops were all non-Muslim?
All the police and soldiers and all the people in their homes and stores and streets in the path of the protest were non-Muslim?
" So you think that is alright?"
Yes, it's paper. Faith is in the heart, and the bible/koran is an aid for the mind. People shouldn't hurt others because of a book.
Holtz
JeffersonRepublic.com
"Please don't squeeze the Charmin!"
I'm sooo delighted that our efforts in converting Afghanistan into a budding democracy have been so successful [/sarcasm]
Once again, we hitched our cart to the wrong horse and would have done considerably better had we backed the Russians in their attempt to rid the world of these ungreatful Muslim miscreants.
In any case, I'm not only refering to these riots in Kabul, but in every city/town Muslims have a riot in because someone said a non-Muslim insulted the Prophet or the Koran or Islam. Many thousands of innocents have died in recent years in vast regions of the world. To name a few: Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Sudan, Palestine, Iran, Maylasia, etc, etc. All Muslim countries. Almost all of the conflicts raging in the world are between Muslims on the one hand and any other religion on the other. That speaks loudly to me. Islamic people, not all, but enough to cause serious problems, cannot get along with non-Muslims.
Perhaps they would like us to put the Taliban back into power?
Geesh
Did they want The Reader's Digest in the latrines...?
Right, I can just see the deadly riots in Atlanta, Chicago, LA where people would be killed over that issue. Right?
Can you imagine all this brou-ha-ha if during WWII it was discovered that U.S. GI's were keeping copies of Mein Kampf in latrines? Horrors!
If true, it still wasn't a terribly bright thing to do. Maybe I just vastly underestimated the imagination of the interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.
It's not a matter of the prisoner. It's a matter of ticking off a billion people for no good reason. There are other options. I would hope that even if this results in only one more borderline jihadist getting the motivation to strap a bomb on and blow a few people up, you would not still say it was worth it, but somehow I doubt it.
Why? You planning on going over there and getting some bibles?
Muslims show no respect for the shrines and scriptures of others, what goes around comes around.
Another poster replied:
Mein Kampf was as much a "religious text" to the Nazi lunatic as the Koran is to the Islamist lunatic...
Isn't it nuts how folks will proclaim, "Well that is a religious book, but this book is a political book!?
"Religion," politics, philosophy - they can all be distilled down to a basic word: opinion. It is just someone's opinion about how the world or the universe works, their "worldview" if you will.
Thomas Jefferson, and our other founding fathers, realized this. One of Jefferson's most famous quotes, against forcing people to pay taxes to fund government schools: "It is both a tyranny and sin to compel a man to furnish contributions for the propogation of opinions with which he disagrees."
When you hear the Left clamoring for "separation of church and state," what they really mean is that they want opinions that they don't agree with to be banned from the public square. And the best way to ban those opinions is to refer to them as "religion." Let's not get sucked into that rhetoric.
Just so you don't feel isolated by the more 'extreme' elements that have popped up on this thread, I agree.
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