Hundreds of protesters set alight a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Friday, witnesses said, chanting against the pope’s visit to Lebanon and shouting anti-American slogans.
Locals watching the attack said some people were shouting, “We don’t want the pope” and “No more insults (to Islam.)”
The incident came as Pope Benedict began a three-day visit to Lebanon and as anger over a film which Muslims have said is blasphemous to Islam spread across the region.
So, they’d rather have Chick-fil-A?
I didn’t know Pope Benedict was headed to Lebanon. God protect him! What is it about the Islamic religion that brings crowds of idiots out to attack embassies and fried chicken joints because a movie has offended them? You can talk all you want about American imperialism, and Israel yadda yadda yadda, and this and that and the other thing, but at the end of the day, you have a mob of barbarians burning down property and even killing people because some nobody somewhere in the West hurt their religious feelings.
Look, I know that not all Muslims are like this, and not even most Muslim are like this (and by the way, thank you Libyan Muslims for protesting against the murder of Amb. Stevens). Still, this keeps happening with Muslims abroad. Why? It goes back to Samuel Huntington’s point about “Islam’s bloody borders.” As Huntington wrote:
“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”
I hate the way many of us in the West — I’m thinking about the media now — react to these kinds of outrages by being more afraid that we might make a bigoted judgment against Muslims, instead of asking questions about why Islam — in particular, Middle Eastern Islam — has so much success whipping crowds of the faithful up into this kind of frenzy. After all, this whole thing started when an Egyptian Salafist known for his inciteful broadcasts highlighted the offensive anti-Muhammad video on his Cairo-based TV show.
Why would anyone want to live like such fanatics, or among them? Why do Europeans allow Muslims who believe so fanatically emigrate to their countries? This is not going to end well for us.
Burning down a Kentucky Fried Chicken. You just shake your head.
Hector_St_Clare 
Andrew 
David J. White 
JonF 
Dave 
M_Young 
Franklin Evans 
Ukrainian 
Re: Then there’s the distressing possibility that we in the west are less violent not because we are Christian so much as we are modern. In his (deeply) flawed but fascinating book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Steven Pinker documents hair-raising levels of violence, cruelty, and just plain barbarianism perpetrated by our Christian ancestors in early modern Europe. They
This is, really, pretty remarkably ignorant.
You’re aware, aren’t you, that for the first three centuries of its existence Christians were generally strict pacifists, took a maximalist intrepretation of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and countenenanced neither war nor the death penalty. It wasnt till the fourth century that the first person was executed for heresy, it wasn’t till much later that executions for heresy were commonplace, and it wasn’t until the middle ages that people started writing theological justifications for it. Executions for heresy were a medieval innovation (and one should add that at its worst, the medieval inquisitions were less brutal than, say, the way that some twentieth century Latin American regimes treated Communists, or the way that some of the Eastern Bloc regimes treated right-wingers).