Posted on 05/27/2005 3:19:10 PM PDT by Blackirish
Islamabad - Thousands of Islamic hardliners launched fresh protests across Pakistan on Friday after the United States admitted some guards at Guantanamo Bay had mishandled the Qu'ran, witnesses and party officials said.
Armed and mounted police as well as anti-terrorist commandos watched over several thousand people, including a number of women, who gathered outside the parliament building in Islamabad in response to a call by Islamic parties.
Demonstrators waving anti-US placards and banners also vented their anger in southern Karachi and eastern Lahore, Pakistan's two largest cities, and many other towns around the Islamic republic of 150 million people.
The demonstrations came a day after visiting US assistant secretary of state Christina Rocca assured Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf the US would take action if anyone was found guilty of abusing the holy book.
"The US is indulging in desecration of the Koran as part of its anti-Islam policy," Qazi Hussain Ahmed, chief of main Islamic fundamentalist party Jamaat-i-Islami and a senior member of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance of religious parties, told the rally in the capital.
Ahmed said an earlier bomb blast at a Muslim shrine near Islamabad earlier on Friday which left at least 19 people dead was "exploded to divert attention from the protest against the United States and to trigger Sunni-Shiite violence."
Liaquat Baloch, deputy chief of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, said the alliance had also contacted Muslim organisations in 34 countries.
In neighbouring Indian-administered Kashmir, shops, schools and banks shut in a one-day strike called by Islamic parties, while several hundred Muslims protested outside the US embassy in Malaysia at the alleged abuse.
Shouted abuse
Back in Pakistan, about 2 000 protesters chanted anti-US slogans in Lahore while a crowd of 800 gathered in the southwestern city of Quetta where protesters trampled on a US flag, witnesses said.
Hundreds of Shiite Muslims gathered in politically volatile Karachi, shouting vitriolic abuse aimed at the US and Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf, who is a key ally in the what Washington calls its war on terror.
About 100 women clad in Muslim veils and waving placards took to the streets in Peshawar, the main town in deeply conservative North West Frontier Province. Pakistani opposition leader and Islamic radical Fazlur Rehman later addressed a large rally held in the city.
Similar demonstrations were held in the central Pakistani cities of Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan, an where angry mob burnt American flags and effigies of President George W Bush.
Protests erupted across Muslim world after a report in Newsweek magazine early this month that interrogators at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, threw a Koran in a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.
That's one heck of a good point.
The Koran is abusive.
But not a word against those that fellow muslim blow up, burn up or otherwise damage when they bom a mosque. No double standard there.....
Just another excuse to have an anti-American rally. Big deal. They'd rally against "Tuesday" if they ran out of stuff.
When I read the title "Mass protest. . ." I assumed Massachusetts.
I was somewhat surprised to see this happened in the Middle East.
If these morons want to continue to kill each other over stories that have been proven to be unfounded, all the more power to them. Social Darwinism in action.
1. Each of them was organized by the most extreme Islamist organizations in each country, who rallied all their followers to attend
2. The protests were after Friday prayers, during which thousands of people are already assembled anyway
these protests were not that impressive and were mostly small gatherings of the usual fringe group suspects.
From the AP story:
"The defilement of our holy book is outrageous because we consider it to be the word of God," said Asiya Andrabi, head of the Daughters of the Community and one of about 50 women clad in black Islamic veils who marched through Srinagar, India.
A demonstration in downtown Cairo drew about 1,000 people, mostly lawyers, who were surrounded by twice as many riot police.
In the Lebanese capital, Beirut, about 1,000 demonstrators burned American and Israel flags and held black banners with the inscription, "No God But God, Muhammad is God's Messenger."
In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, a small crowd of protesters in the capital of Jakarta pelted a portrait of Bush with tomatoes. The 50 demonstrators were outnumbered 4-1 by police.
Hundreds of people in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, shouted, "Go to hell, America!" and burned U.S. and Israeli flags outside the U.S. Embassy.
In these very populous Muslim countries, on the day of Friday prayers when thousands assemble, on an issue the media tells us outrages all Muslims... most protests attracted crowds only in the hundreds with a few protests attracting several thousand. Any fringe moonbat protest in the U.S. gets 10 times that.
MUHAMMAD JIHAD! MUHAMMAD JIHAD!
I've got to get a copy of the Koran to place next to "My Lies "for the bathroom to wipe my a$$ with it .Then i can flush it for real . BTW is it Septic safe ???
I've been reading some of this stuff pretty carefully and it looks like the worst thing a *guard* did was lay the Koran on top of a TV.
The inmates themselves did all the "mishandling" and flushing.
...And we are supposed to care because?
flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush flush
More and more I see the word "savages" used in the same sentence as "Muslims"
Yep. They should be removed immediately to prevent future rumors.
Better you should use it as 'tear-off' napkins for your Fourth of July rib BBQ.
Flush some more - it is a POS anyway...maybe these primitive Aholes will keep killing each other until they are gone...who cares what these ignorant barbarians do to each other. Quite frankly, I'm tired hearing about their precious Koran - where is the outrage over the Christian churches burned, American flags desecrated, bibles destroyed, not to mention the murder of what, 500,000 christians in the Sudan by these pajama clad idiots living in the 7th century..I'm still for turning Mecca into a frigging parking lot, and then having a hog sale on their hallowed ground!
How can anyone doubt we are in a religious war.
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