It seems that a lot of people in the Middle East need to grow up.
In Beirut, a day after violent protests in neighboring Syria, the thousands-strong crowd broke through a cordon of troops and police that had encircled the embassy. Security forces fired tear gas and loosed their weapons into the air to stop the onslaught.
The protesters, armed with stones and sticks, seized fire engines, overturned police vehicles and garbage containers for use as barricades, damaged cars and threw stones at a Maronite Catholic church in the wealthy Ashrafieh area—a Christian neighborhood where the Danish Embassy is located.
Flames and smoke billowed from the 10-story building, which also houses the Austrian Embassy and the residence of Slovakia’s consul.
Protesters waved green and black Islamic flags from the broken windows of the building and tossed papers and filing cabinets outside.
Witnesses said one protester, apparently overcome by smoke, jumped from a window of the embassy and was rushed unconscious to hospital. Security officials said he died.
If you haven’t been paying attention, these rampaging protests are over a series of offensive cartoons in a Danish newspaper. Most of them are just confusing to me, but I can see how some of them would be offensive. Actually, I’m more than willing to take Muslim protesters’ word for it that the cartoons are offensive. I think, however, that if you believe you must respond violently to offensive cartoons, there’s something wrong with you. You’re acting like a child.
In contrast, consider the ruckus raise in the United States by the release of The Last Temptation of Christ. Many Christians in the United States were upset by that movie and by what they saw as a perversion of Christian doctrine. They wrote letters, complained to the media, and held protests outside of theaters showing the movie. Defenders of the movie, or of the right to show it, wrote letters, complained, and staged counter-protests against those protesting the movie. The police, in keeping with the tradition of separation of church and state, didn’t take sides, and acted to protect the safety of protesters on both sides. There was a lot of argument, and a lot of noise, but not a lot of violence.
It wasn’t always that way, of course. Christianity has a long history of violence against other religions and against schisms within Christianity itself. But Christians learned lessons from the violence and terror, and the violent and tyrannical elements of Christianity have been reigned in.
Islam seems to be going through similar changes. There are 6 million Muslims in the United States, and they behave—at least as much as any other American—like civilized people. So do millions of other Muslims around the world.
That’s because they understand the rules of religious tolerance in a liberal civilization: Everybody has the freedom to follow the religion of their choice, to encourage others to do so, to express their objections to other people’s religions, and to object to the objections of others. Nobody has the authority to force anybody else to obey the rules of any religion.
It’s not always that way, but that’s how it should be. Everywhere.
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