It's the fault of the pagans, witches and abortionists! Brown people are rioting because Jerry Falwell made some comments about Muhammed that weren't very nice [1]. This is the reason that my family left these sort of countries and came to the sedate north-people don't riot at the drop of a hat (when I was three or four, I was vaguely conscious of the concept of political killings since my family would talk about it sometimes). We Americans are civilized-we riot when our sports teams win! [1] I happened to be visiting Bangladesh in 1989 when the Salman Rushdie affair was a big deal. We were in my mother's ancestral village when some fundamentalist preacher came up to my brother and I (he was 7, I was 11) with some photocopies. He wanted us to translate the pamphlets/broadsheets. Basically it was talking about how the The Satanic Verses declared that Muhammed's wives were whores. Needless to say, I didn't exactly know what I was going to tell this guy, so I pretended that I had an upset stomach and had to leave (highly plausible in the hyper-pathogenic environment). Update: "ks" on the message board has a link to this article that gives more information on the craziness going on in India. It seems clear that one of the problems was that the Muslim community-or a faction of it-was trying to impose their outrage on the society as a whole by trying to close down Hindu businesses to protest the remarks by Falwell. Now, I have to ask this-because I've seen this sort of thing before, can you think of any other community that forms 12% of a country's population that is so brazen about trying to impose its norms on the society around it?. India's political leaders always have to sensitive to Muslim feelings-from banning The Satanic Verses to mouthing a negative attitude toward Israel (though this is changing under the BJP). Can you imagine what would happen if Hindus were 12% of a country's population? Oh, wait, there is an example, Bangladesh! I doubt Khaleda Zia (the Prime Ministeress) is always solicitous of the Hindu community lest they explode in violence and outrage. To be fair, there is a reason I think that India's Muslim community is so arrogant, Muslims ruled India for 1,000 years. Update #2: Falwell apologizes. Interesting. Now, Muslim fundamentalists that criticize Western women as whores and Christianity as a debased infidel religion probably aren't going to apologize anytime soon. Of course, Christians wouldn't demand one.