Who Would Have Thought?

As part of the whole process of studying abroad, we had many informational meetings at school last semester. The biggest one, which everyone studying abroad attended, touched on many topics. One of them was remaining safe while abroad. Part of that talk was warning us not to get close to riots or political confrontations. I laughed at these warnings because how many riots was I going to run into in Denmark, a small Scandinavian country that isn't exactly a major player in world politics and doesn't have much to riot about.

I guess one of the ways you get people to riot is to print a cartoon that may offend (from numbers I found on the internet) over 1.6 billion people, the world Muslim population. Who knows exactly how many Muslims there are, but everyone knows it's a whole lot. So as you've most likely figured, I was wrong about the whole riot/political confrontation thing.

Fires are the main weapon of choice in Arhus. Today, someone burned down a daycare. Countless cars, bus stops and buildings have all been burned, in addition to the stoning of public buses. Certain bus routes have been temporarily shut down for fear of violence. Most of the action is taking place in West Arhus, which is about 15 minutes from where I live. It seems the police are having little effect in keeping things under control. The situation is dominating the local news. Last Tuesday, many Danish and European newspapers reprinted the Mohammed cartoon. Realizing the enormity of the situation I saved a newspaper, which should be another interesting thing to look back on 10 years from now and say I was there. I'm pretty used to seeing pictures of American activists and foreign enemies burning American flags, but it's absolutely crazy to look in the paper and see pictures of Muslims burning the Danish flag. This is certainly not the situation I envisioned when I sat in the auditorium last November and listened to the safety speech.

The original comic was published back in 2005 and to be honest I didn't remember that it originated in Denmark. Although this is a story that is very hard for someone like me to cover for school, it's so fascinating to be in this situation. The only thing I can hope is that people aren't killed. It's terrible that people are losing property to these fires, but when lives start to be lost then it completely changes the situation. That's what makes the alleged murder attempt on the cartoonist such a big story.

I know this post wasn't more about the Floorball game, but I really wanted to talk about this so I'll share more interesting Floorball stories soon. Hej hej.

To get some Muslim perspective check out this article: http://www.cphpost.dk/get/105731.html