Explosives in a Koran, bombings near a mosque — why, sometimes it’s almost enough for someone to think that maybe, just maybe, Islam really isn’t a Religion of Peace.
But anyway, while there would be international riots if non-Muslims had hid explosives in a Koran — remember, it’s a hate crime to put a slice of bacon into a Koran — this Koran was wired by Muslims, and that makes it all right.
Sunni/Shi’ite Jihad Update: “Deadly Blasts Rock Shiite Mosque in Baghdad,” by Steven Lee Myers for the New York Times, September 12 (thanks to Bill):
BAGHDAD — Two bombs exploded near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad on Saturday, while the government said that the police found and defused another explosive hidden inside a Koran at one of the holiest Shiite shrines in the city.
Baghdad was hit by several bombs on Saturday. Thick smoke rose over the city after a car bomb detonated near a mosque not far from the Tigris River.
Saturday’s bombings, like many recently, appeared intended to kill Shiite civilians and inflame sectarian tensions that continue to simmer despite a general reduction in violence in recent years.
Iraq’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that a man left the Koran containing a pound of explosives outside the shrine of Musa al-Khadim and his grandson, 2 of the 12 imams of Shiite Islam, in an attempt to reignite the carnage that engulfed Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
“This terrorist is trying to start a sectarian war,” the statement, read on state television, said. The man who left the bomb slipped away.
The two bombs that did explode killed at least three people and wounded more than a dozen others at another holy Shiite site not far away on the opposite side of the Tigris. The first detonated near the mosque, which includes the tomb of a revered ninth-century sheik, Mohammed bin Othman al-Omari, and was followed moments later by an explosion of a car bomb in a nearby parking lot….