Is this worth killing for?
A cartoon of Muhammad does not harm Muhammad. It does not harm Islam. It may even reflect more poorly on the cartoonist than on the object of the cartoon. Yet all too many Muslims around the world continue to fail to grasp this, and to commit cold-blooded murder in their static rage, unaware of or indifferent to the fact that their murderous anger is impotent to eradicate the fact of the cartoon itself, and reflects more poorly on their religion than any cartoon ever could.
“Three killed in riots over Mohammed’s caricature: police,” from AFP (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Three persons including a police officer were killed after Muslim students rioted over a caricature of Prophet Mohammed by their Christian colleagues, police and teachers said Friday.
Students of Government Secondary School Sumaila, some 76 kilometres (47 miles) south of the northern city of Kano, went on the rampage late Thursday, after a Christian student suspended for two weeks returned to the school.
He had been suspended for having drawn a caricature of the Prophet and posted it on a wall inside the school.
“Two people and a police inspector have been killed in the violence while the divisional police station and everything inside including ammunition have been burnt by the rioters”, Kano police chief Aminu Yesufu told reporters outside the burnt police station.
He said about 20 others were badly wounded, including the divisional police officer, who suffered a deep machete cut to the head.
Police had arrested 25 people and opened an investigation, he added.
“The students began chanting Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest) when the Christian student returned and pursued him to lynch him”, Sadiq Haruna, a teacher at the school, told an AFP reporter who visited the town on Friday.
“The Christian escaped in taking refuge in the local police station but hundreds of angry Muslim students attacked and set on fire the premises after the police refused to hand him over,” Haruna said.
The whereabouts of the christian student were still not known.
This is the second time in a week in the mainly Muslim northern Nigeria that an allegation of blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed has sparked violent protests and an attack on the police.