Syrian Riots
The excellent travel-blog Coming Anarchy comments on the burning of the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus:
The embassy district was a few minutes walk from our language school and one could navigate that entire area in a few minutes as it wasn’t very big. Yet, every street had at least one embassy on it, most of them multiple ones, all with at least two or three guards lounging outside with AK-47s. The point of the story is that I find it HIGHLY suspect that the Norwegian and Danish embassies were successfully burned. As my personal experience illustrates, in a police state like Syria, not to mention the most heavily guarded area of Damascus, the government was almost definitely involved in the incidents. Considering the mobs moved on to the American embassy and were fought off by police, I’d bet the farm that these riots were intentionally allowed to get out of control, but not enough to threaten the United States which is the last thing Syria needs now. Denmark and Norway don’t have any real international muscle to worry about. Read the whole article
In the comments section there are links to translations of Arab bloggers on the cartoon row, Slate translated excerpts of Arab editorials from February 3, before the embassy burnings.
A piece in The Times by a British magazine (Punch) editor (Alan Coren) talking about choosing controversial cartoons in the 70s and 80s.
February 8th, 2006 at 11:26 pm
Many thanks for the praise and the link. Tak!