Posted on 10/08/2001 5:02:51 PM PDT by Merovingian
Hollywood ignites the flames of hate
By Tim Butcher in Quetta, Pakistan
(Filed: 09/10/2001)
ALL it took was a film poster. Such is the hatred of America now felt by a violent Muslim minority in Pakistan that a Hollywood advert became the catalyst yesterday for the country's worst violence since the September 11 attacks.
The mob stormed the Imdad cinema in Quetta simply because it was showing the film Desperado. The protesters smashed glass doors and windows and burned what they could not rip apart with their bare hands.
"Death to America, death to America," they shouted as the terrified cinema staff fled. One man was shot dead later as the violence spread and intensified.
At first, demonstrators attacked council vans, traffic police shelters and anything they believed was linked to the government of President Pervaiz Musharraf whom they accuse of treachery for siding with Washington. The police simply melted away, watching in amazement as the mob lit fires and ransacked buildings.
The country's second largest military garrison is in Quetta but no one was prepared for this and troops were in their barracks, with only a few police out on the streets wielding nothing more than rattan canes.
As the tide of hate grew, nothing was spared. A building used by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, was judged to be in some way linked to America so it was set on fire and ransacked.
For 30 minutes three staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, dedicated to humanitarian aid, cowered inside their compound fearing for their lives as rocks clattered against walls and smashed windows. But the compound walls were high enough to keep the crowd at bay.
The mob moved around the corner to the Unicef building where a security guard was unable to keep them at bay. Five new vehicles parked in the compound were ablaze within a few minutes.
Three motorcycles joined the pyre and then the crowd smashed their way inside the building and wrecked computers, furniture and even potted plants. The crowd was not interested in stealing. All they wanted was destruction and that is exactly what they achieved at the Unicef office.
"They did not steal a thing, they just burnt everything," Abdul Ahad Khan, head of the Unicef team in Quetta, said later. In these sensitive times, a mob that was loudly supportive of the Taliban regime might have taken offence at the "Increasing Primary School Participation For Girls" motif painted on one of the vehicles destroyed.
For three weeks Muslim militants in Pakistan had been threatening violence and jihad against America if it attacked Afghanistan. Many in Pakistan doubted that they meant business but yesterday changed all that.
Student supporters of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Pakistan's most powerful militant Muslim party, which has close links to the Taliban, were on the streets early yesterday in the capital city of the frontier province of Baluchistan.
There were probably no more than 5,000 of them but as they approached the city's main hotel, where scores of representatives of the international media are based, the police over-reacted. A pot-pourri of tear gas shells, some made in Britain, some in China and others in America, were fired.
Within minutes the hotel precincts were smothered in clouds of breath-shortening, nostril-burning vapour. If the police had hoped this would calm things down, they could not have been more wrong.
As ranks of police surrounded the hotel, barricading the journalists inside, the mob fragmented into roving gangs who toured the city attacking a wide variety of sites.
As one plume of smoke rose into the cloudless sky from a burning bank it was soon joined by another from a burning market, another from a cinema.
Within a short while smoke was visible all around the city. It was then that the authorities decided that they meant business and sent in the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force with good equipment and robust attitudes to law and order.
The crackle of gunfire could be heard coming from the direction of the main Kandahari bazaar in town, soon followed by the more repetitive rattle of automatic gunfire. Eye witnesses said the demonstrators were armed with nothing more than stones but Ali Mohammed, 25, paid the ultimate price, apparently hit by several police rounds.
His body was taken to the mortuary at the Civic Hospital where seven other gunshot wounds were being treated. By twilight, order had returned to Quetta although the streets where the demonstrators had been were still strewn with rubble and fragments of kerbstones.
Smudges of black on the tarmac showed where tyres had been set alight and in the city centre scores of armed police stood around looking at the wreckage of the National Bank of Pakistan and various other burnt out buildings.
Perhaps the most audacious attack came on the main police station in the town centre, which was badly damaged by fire. An attack on the main police station by a mob suggested a sense of determination among the demonstrators that will not easily disperse. Night fell in Quetta with few people thinking the city had seen the last of the violence.
big house, no furniture..
Now it will be killer penguins from antarctica running amok.
I guess the guns came out later.
Hollywood offends many of us, but we know where the lies are and where the truth is in movies about this country. Foreigners are not that lucky. Maybe it's time for Hollywood to clean up it's act. Hollywood presents us as filth.
Neither can the Wall Street Journal.
In a word: YES
Islam seems to have that effect on primitive mental defectives.
Sheesh that's just what we need: crazed islamofascists high on 40oz malt liquor!
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