Christian leader Joseph Hayab told Reuters agency that most of those who died had been Christians.
"They went on the rampage, burning shops and churches of the Christians. The protesters killed the others. Some were even killed in the churches."
Doubtless the Church of England will be apologising shortly for ever converting them in its imperialist former fashion.
The story doesn't make the Ekklesia news page, nor Sinking Anglicans, a site whch claims to "Blog from a liberal Anglican perspective covering news, events and documents that affect church people". Obviously being killed doesn't affect you enough.
Thinking Anglicans has pages of stories about Nigeria - all on the subject of the saintly Archbishop Akinola, who takes his inspiration and authority from Scripture rather than from the Guardian and is therefore a Bad Thing.
Ekklesia likewise has 64 stories on Nigeria, the vast majority being about the hideous persecution (by the Anglican Church) of gay Anglicans, with the rest about Nigeria's debt. I did spot this sombre story though.
"In the worst single incident so far, at least 48 people were murdered, many during an early morning prayer service on February 24.
Armed Muslims invaded the service, ordered the congregation to lie face down and proceeded ‘to machete and axe them to death in their house of worship’ according to the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). The victims included women and children."
The weekend's news was pretty sombre too.
"They think they have won the debate. They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.
The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory.
It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent."
No, it's not a precedent - Northern Ireland was a precedent, the Scarman report on the Brixton riots was a precedent, the response to animal rights terrorists is a precedent. The only organised violence a UK Government will, or can, stand up to is violence by those it can feel good about opposing - which would boil down in practice to the poor old native English.
See the Pub Philosopher for more, to whom I'm also grateful for this picture from the Pakistan cartoon protests. Could be a fake I suppose :
2 comments:
Some German friends of mine visited Syria a few years back. They were told that German tour buses were quite safe, because of what the Nazis had done to the Jews.... So the placard is very plausible.
The photo originally appeared on the website of the German N-TV channel: http://www.n-tv.de/634520.html
The caption translates as: 'What exactly these women want to say with this placard remains unclear'
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