Did anyone in the camp opposing the stone throwers have a "Thank You For Proving Our Point" sign? "Islamists, liberals face off outside Tunisian assembly," by Cecile Feuillatre for Agence France-Presse, December 3:
Police fired tear gas as thousands of Islamist supporters swooped on central Tunis Saturday to confront liberal demonstrators rallying against extremism as lawmakers draft a new constitution for Tunisia.
"The Islamists attacked us and threw stones, the police fired tear gas," Ines Ben Othman, a representative of the liberal demonstrators told AFP.
"The sit-in continues, we will remain. But the aggressors are provoking us and are waiting on all street corners," she added.
Interior ministry spokesman Hichem Meddeb confirmed that Islamists had "thrown stones and the police dispersed them. Calm has returned."
Separated by barriers and police, the two sides shouted insults at each other outside the Bardo Palace where the constitution is being drawn up after a vote that saw the moderate Islamist Ennahda party win most seats on the drafting body.
The Islamists waved Ennahda flags but also the black banners of the hardline Salafist Hizb Tahrir, which has not been legalised in the north African country.
Ennahda spokesman Noureddine Bhiri, whose party denied being behind the Islamist rally, went to try to calm the situation as police reinforcements and armoured vehicles were brought in to block the entrance to the palace.
The constituent assembly also issued a statement appealing for calm and support as it charts the country's future and sets the pace for the Arab Spring, a year after the birth of the revolution that brought about regime change.
"Tunisia is going through a very sensitive phase where the priority is the establishment of a democratic regime and of a fair economic system. And this requires us to refrain from anything that could stir tensions and instability," the statement said.
Hundreds of students, teachers, unemployed miners and other protesters began gathering Wednesday at the Bardo Palace with various demands.
The protest was partly a response to ongoing demonstrations at a university outside the capital, where Islamists disrupted courses demanding a stop to mixed-sex classes and for female students to wear the full-face veil, or niqab.
Ennahda dominates the 217-member assembly elected in the country's first democratic polls on October 23.
Long-time Tunisian leader Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and his staunchly secular regime were ousted in a popular uprising in January and the country has no government yet, while the economic situation is worsening.
Central bank governor Mustapha Kamel Nabli was quoted by the TAP news agency Saturday as saying that growth this year will be zero while unemployment will be up to 18 percent.
The vital tourist sector has been hard hit by the revolution, with foreign visitors preferring to go elsewhere, while the phosphate industry has seen production plummet because of a series of strikes.
In addition some 100,000 Tunisians working in neighbouring Libya fled back home during the upheaval that overthrew Moamer Kadhafi's regime and are left without jobs.
The central bank Friday demanded that its independence be guaranteed in the new onstitution, as a draft law threatened to place it under government control.
Ennahda, with 89 seats in the constituent assembly, is accused by some, including prospective coalition partners, of seeking to concentrate all powers in the hands of the new prime minister, the party's number two Hamadi Jebali.
And Jebali wants to be caliph. Everything's coming up roses!
Let Jebali be the next Kalifah--followed in quickest succession by the next, and the next, and the next--and at the end of the day, True Believers still will have failed to set up their World Caliphate; they all chase after a miraj.
Tunisia: "Islamists" throw stones at demonstrators "rallying against extremism"
Did anyone in the camp opposing the stone throwers have a "Thank You For Proving Our Point" sign?
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Jihadists have no sense of irony—nor do they care that this sort of behavior does indeed prove the demonstrators' point.
All these "Islamists" care about is imposing their will—on Infidels, on "apostates", or, as here, on those they consider "insufficiently Islamic".
Always with the stones. Everywhere you go, in Israel, North Africa, and beyond, Muslim mobs are throwing stones (and sometimes in order to be able to throw stones, they have to bring them and store them ready). Bat Yeor in one of her articles recalled how her elderly Jewish relatives, when visiting family graves at a cemetery in Egypt, would have rocks flung at them by Muslim boys. In the UK there are ancient, historic churches whose beautiful stained-glass windows have been smashed by Muslim boys throwing stones.
What is it with the stones?
I suspect it isn't just about grabbing anything handy to throw at someone or soemthing you don't like, like non-Muslim rioters throwing bricks and bottles at police, or like non-Muslim hooligans tossing rocks off a freeway overpass.
In the case of Muslims, I suspect the obsession with **stone** throwing has something to do with the 'stoning of satan' thing at the Hajj.
**Throwing rocks** has formal *ritual* as well as, shall we say, practical meaning, for Muslim mobsters.
Here's part of French philosopher Robert Redeker's essay on Islam, that got him death threats and forced him into hiding, after he published it in Le Figaro in April 2007.
"The stoning of Satan, each year in Mecca, is not only an obsolete superstition.
" It not only sets the stage for a hysterical crowd flirting with barbarity. Its meaning is anthropological.
" Here is a rite, which each Muslim is invited to submit to, that emphasizes violence as a sacred duty in the very heart of the believer.
"This stoning, accompanied each year by the accidental trampling to death of some of the believers, sometimes up to several hundreds, is a rite that feeds archaic violence.
"Instead of getting rid of this archaic violence, and thus imitating Judaism and Christianity (Judaism starts when it abandons human sacrifice, and enters civilization; Christianity transforms [or, I would say, subverts - dda] sacrifice through the Eucharist), Islam builds a nest for this violence, where it will incubate.
"Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites spurn violence, by delegitimizing it, Islam is a religion that exalts violence and hatred in its everyday rites and sacred book." END QUOTE
When Muslims throw stones at Jews in Israel, or at deemed-unislamic Muslims in, say, Tunisia, or when a howling male Mohammedan mob throws rocks at a helpless woman who is half-buried in the ground, trussed like a chicken and unable to flee, they are "stoning Satan" just like at the hajj. They are reenacting that hajj ritual.