http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9420582/its-all-kicking-off-in-the-islamic-world-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-islam-of-course/

Everywhere you look there is outrage and fury and screaming and violence

1,116 Comments Rod Liddle 24 January 2015

Iranians take part in a protest outside the French Embassy in Tehran Photo: Getty

They have been burning churches and murdering Christians again in Niger. You’d think that they’d have more immediately pressing concerns than worrying about a cartoon, Niger regularly winning the award for being the worst country anywhere on God’s earth, and the poorest. But nope, it’s kill-a-kuffar time once more. Some 45 churches set alight and at least five people killed and 50 injured. Adherents of the Religion of Peace (© all UK politicians) included in their pyromania a Christian orphanage, which was thoughtful of them. There have also been massed rallies and protests and the usual effigy-burning business in the vast and dusty Islamic desert rat-holes next door, Mali and Algeria. Not to mention Senegal, and the fragrant delight which is Sudan, plus Niger’s red-hot rival for the worst-country-on-earth award, Mauritania.

Death to France! Death to infidels! Death to Christians! And that’s just Africa. There was more effigy and flag-burning plus the requisite homicidal screeching in good old Pakistan, and next door in Afghanistan, and of course in Iran. Even the Chechens got in on the act — a massed rally in the central square of Grozny with an estimated 800,000 people howling their loathing of France and cartoonists and the West in general, protests which spread over the border into another backwards enclave which the Soviet Union, to its immense credit, succeeded in briefly civilising, Ingushetia. Oh, and there was still more fury in the Philippines, the usual howling at the moon from the country’s Islamic minority whose political wing, the MNLF, was habituated to kidnapping and murder in the Sulu peninsula and Mindanao.

NIGER-FRANCE-ATTACKS-CHARLIE-HEBDO-DEMO — Smoke billows in a street as people demonstrate near the grand mosque in Niamey, Niger Photo: Getty

Everywhere you look in the Islamic world there is outrage and fury and screaming and violence. An anger not occasioned by the vicious executions of 11 people in Paris, but in response to the ‘Je suis Charlie’ stuff, and the magazine’s post-murder edition featuring Mohammed on its front page. The murders did not bother them at all and a substantial majority, by the look of things, will have wholly approved of them. It’s the cartoons which made them go on the rampage, killing people of a different faith.

So next time some jackass of a politician tells you that the Charlie Hebdo attacks were ‘nothing to do with Islam’, or some hand-wringing, PC, public-school broadcaster on the BBC puts it all down to ‘extremists’ — point them in the direction of the millions of people in the Islamic world who rather fervently disagree with that flip and patently delusional diagnosis. If all those people are ‘extremists’, then we need to redefine the word ‘extreme’ so it means something closer to, say, ‘mainstream’ or ‘moderate, consensual centre’. In this, our own vile and incendiary Islamic preachers, such as Anjem Choudary, are much closer to the truth than are our politicians: this is not ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It is all about Islam.