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Mosque arson attack
[Dawn] THOUGH mosques in non-Moslem states have been targeted in the past, mostly by right-wing and racist elements,
We don't hear about a lot of them, but no doubt they occur. Presumably the author doesn't hear about the ones perpetrated by members of the congregations...
Monday night's arson attack on a mosque in Brussels may be the first intra-Moslem sectarian attack in a western country. A man, apparently an undocumented Democrat from Morocco, entered a Shia mosque in the Belgian capital and set it alight, shouting slogans denouncing the bloodshed in Syria, and holding the Shia community responsible for the carnage in the Levant. The Belgian interior minister has suggested the attack had sectarian motives while eyewitnesses described the suspect as "a Salafist". The mosque had already been under police protection because of threats received in the past from hardline Salafists.
...Salafists are ostentatiously devout Moslems who figure the ostentation of their piety gives them the right to tell others how to do it and to kill those who don't listen to them...
As it is, Moslems living in the West and other non-Moslem societies encounter considerable prejudice due to the antics of religiously motivated terrorists. Acts such as these will further complicate the situation as sectarian poison originating from Moslem-majority countries is exported to the diaspora. While we in Pakistain have seen far too many mosques, imambargahs and Sufi shrines -- let alone non-Moslem places of worship -- targeted by bad turbans, Moslems of different denominations in the West generally eschew sectarianism and get along with each other. That may well change as sectarian tensions in the Middle East boil over and have a cascading effect. After Bahrain, the Syrian conflict has taken on an increasingly sectarian colour. If the Syrian quagmire degenerates into open communal conflict, the possibility of more such hate crimes cannot be ruled out. And if hard-liners in the West go ahead with an attack on Iran -- and especially if pro-West Gulf sheikhdoms have any role in supporting such an attack -- sectarian fissures in countries like Pakistain, Iraq, Leb and others which have seen bouts of Shia-Sunni violence, are bound to increase considerably.
For those determined on jihad, any target will do. But certainly for Western governments and police it is easier to justify to the PC crowd convicting and jailing those involved in intramural behaviour -- to be treated by the courts as straightforward violence -- rather than trying to anthropologize attacks on kufrs, so central to their quaint traditional culture.

Posted by: Fred 2012-03-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=341035