Two people, including an eight-year-old boy, have died during a second day of violent protests across Pakistan over depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in European newspapers.
Dozens of demonstrators were injured in clashes with police in Peshawar, the restive capital of North West Frontier Province near the border with Afghanistan, when a crowd of 70,000 marauded through the streets, burning three cinemas, scores of cars and a KFC outlet.
This is real news. Ignorant people are easy to manipulate. Rioting over cartoons sounds idiotic because it is, but real people still have their lives cut short for no good reason.
What questions should we be asking here? The first one I would ask is who benefits from this violence? Hmm…. Next I would wonder what the overall objective of the violence is? Hmm….
People who are worried about losing power are fomenting trouble in Muslim nations because they are afraid that something new might actually take root. That something is the power of free will. Freedom of choice is what created the world’s only 21st century superpower. What would happen if the same 70,000 Pakistanis who rioted against those offensive cartoons were suddenly transported into middle American lifestyles. If they woke up tomorrow with big screen TVs and sport utility vehicles parked in their driveways would they be as likely to burn and loot? Their children might have a chance to find out if they aren’t killed in a riot.
I wonder what sort of inventors and entrepeneurs the Middle East will produce once people can choose their own paths in life, instead of being forcibly herded into counter-productive memes that all too often lead to rage, riots and destructive bursts of immature anger that scare the rest of us and cause negative stereotyping and violent backlashes. In the short-term, things look bad in the Middle East. In the long-term, I prefer to remain an optimist. I think the taste of freedom is pretty darn compelling.