Canadian Press

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - The deputy governor of a largely Islamic state in northern Nigeria has called on Muslims to kill the Nigerian woman who wrote a newspaper article about the Miss World beauty pageant that sparked deadly religious riots.

"Just like the blasphemous Indian writer Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed," Zamfara deputy governor Mahamoud Shinkafi told a gathering of Muslim groups in the state capital, Gusau, on Monday.

Rushdie, an Indian-born Briton, went into hiding after Iran's late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a 1989 fatwa - or religious edict - against him for allegedly insulting Islam in his best-selling novel, The Satanic Verses.

In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support the fatwa, but said it could not rescind the edict since, under Islamic law, that could be done only by the person who issued it. Khomeini died in 1989.

While state officials in Nigeria cannot issue fatwas, the deputy governor, "like all Muslims," considers the death sentence against Daniel as "a reality based on the teachings of the Qur'an," Zamfara state' information commissioner, Tukur Umar Dangaladima, said Tuesday.

Islam's holy book "states that whoever accuses or insults any prophet of Allah . . . should be killed," Dangaladima told The Associated Press. "If she (Daniel) is Muslim, she has no option except to die. But if she is a non-Muslim, the only way out for her is to convert to Islam."

Daniel, a Lagos-based fashion writer with ThisDay, reportedly went into hiding after being interrogated by police last week in connection with the article, which suggested Islam's founding prophet Muhammed would have approved of Miss World and might have wanted to marry one of the contestants. Her religion is unknown.

The newspaper has issued repeated apologies for the article, saying the offending portions were published by mistake after earlier being deleted by a supervising editor.

ThisDay officials were not immediately available for comment Tuesday. But one of the paper's columnists, Amanze Obi, suggested Daniel "may have been a victim of excitement."

"I imagine that she may have written that line without knowing it," Obi wrote in Tuesday's edition. "The line was innocuous."

Dangaladima said other ThisDay employees have been spared from the death threat, which "applies only to the offending pen."

Zamfara was the first of 12 states to adopt Islamic law, or Shariah, after Nigerian military rule gave way to elected government in 1999. Religious clashes since then have killed thousands across the country.

The latest rioting began last Wednesday when Muslims burned down a ThisDay office in the northern city of Kaduna. More than 200 people were killed in the city and rioting also briefly spread to the capital, Abuja.

The violence caused Miss World organizers to abandon plans to hold the pageant in Nigeria and evacuate more than 80 participants to London, where the show will go ahead Dec. 7.

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2002

Answers

Understand Nigeria and you understand the Islamic threat

http://www.jewishworldreview.com

This past week, Muslims in Nigeria rioted. The reason for the beatings, and killings of Christians and the torching of Christian churches; the West's reporting of these riots; and the official Muslim reactions to the riots explain almost everything you need to know about the threat non-Muslim civilization faces at this time.

To understand the threat the non-Muslim world faces, you need to understand the reason for the Muslim riot.

Muslims in Nigeria, a country that is about half Muslim, opposed the presence of the Miss World pageant in their country. They condemned the pageant's "nudity" and its "encouraging of promiscuity."

In an article on the Muslim opposition, on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2002, the popular Nigerian newspaper ThisDay (almost half of whose staff is Muslim), published a piece by one of its reporters, journalist Isioma Daniel. In the piece she wrote, "The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity. What would Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them. The irony is that Algeria, an Islamic country, is one of the countries participating in the contest."

To most of us, this paragraph is utterly innocuous, insulting of no one and no faith. To many Muslims, however, it was more than insulting. It was blasphemy.

Though the management and editor of ThisDay immediately and profusely apologized in print day after day, "Islamic fundamentalists gathered after prayers outside the national mosque in Abuja, then marched through the city chanting 'G-d is Great' and burning cars, churches and houses. They also burned down the offices of ThisDay, despite a groveling apology from the paper" (The Sunday Herald, Scotland). As reported in the Nigerian press (The Vanguard, Lagos) "Muslim youths chanting 'Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar' G-d is great, G-d is great, brandishing swords, cutlasses, knives, cudgels and other dangerous implements faced some churches, hotel (sic) and other known Christian places of businesses which they razed."

Christians counterattacked, and as of this writing, over 200 Nigerians are dead, some burned alive in gasoline-soaked tires.

To understand the threat the non-Muslim world faces, you need to understand the way in which Western news agencies report Islamic violence.

Blame is almost never placed on the Muslim rioters. Rather, the passive voice, "violence broke out," is regularly used, and Muslims and Christians are simply reported to be killing each other in "sectarian violence." The Voice of America news report actually identified with the Muslim rioters: "The riots were sparked after a newspaper published an article mocking the Islamic leaders' protest."

It is crucial to identify this each-side-is-at-fault reporting. It characterizes world news organizations' descriptions of Arab-Israeli violence as well. Just as in Nigeria, where the press blames "sectarian violence" rather than Muslim rioters, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the press blames a "cycle of violence" rather than Muslim terrorists.

To understand the threat to the non-Muslim world, you must understand the official Muslim reaction to the Muslim rioters in Nigeria.

One would think that leaders of any great religion would condemn members of their faith who murdered innocent people, destroyed others' houses of worship and homes, and burned down a newspaper's offices.

Yet in all the statements made by Nigeria's leading Muslim officials in the Nigerian press, I could not find a word of condemnation of the Muslim murderers. The Muslim leaders called for calm after accepting the newspaper's abject apologies. But the leaders made it clear that they, not only the Muslim rioters, consider the original article a grave insult to Islam. In fact, they compared the woman who wrote it to Salman Rushdie, whose death sentence they reaffirmed.

So here's where we stand:

Nigerian Muslim rioters murder innocent Nigerians and burn down over 20 churches because of an innocuous sentence in a Nigerian newspaper.

The West and its press choose to regard the Nigerian violence as merely "sectarian violence," and hold Nigerian Christians equally culpable.

Muslims kill non-Muslims and the victims (i.e., the editors of the newspaper whose offices were razed) are told to apologize -- just as after 9-11, America has been repeatedly told to apologize to the Muslim world, and just as Israel, while enduring massacre after massacre at the hands of Muslim terrorists, is told to apologize for defending itself.

Nigerian Muslim leaders do not say a word against their murderous co-religionists but they do declare one innocuous sentence by a young woman writer to be an "abomination."

The woman who wrote the sentence has been fired.

The editor of ThisDay has been arrested and not been heard from since. One fears for his life. And ours.

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2002

sounds like a good bomb testing site, doesn't it? No sentient life forms in the way and all that...

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2002

Did the male muslims ever notice that it was a lower lifeform - a woman - who drove them to such frenzy last week?

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2002

I want to know what set them off in all the other riots they've had in the past.

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2002

Tell me again how Islam is a religion of peace . . .

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2002

"Well, you see, there was this mountain..."

-- Anonymous, November 27, 2002