Protesters from the Middle East and a number of other countries are taking their rage out on the anti-Muslim film, “The Innocence Of Muhammad.” A German embassy was broken into by protesters where they took down the German flag and raising an Islamic one in its place. A KFC in Lebanon was set on fire. This is news as the Pope is in Lebanon for a three-day visit. Protesters were shouting, “We don’t want the Pope! No more insults to Islam.” Click below to read more.
Protesters in a number of countries across the Muslim world vented anger against the West on Friday as the controversy over an anti-Islamic film raged, with a KFC restaurant torched in Lebanon, attacks on U.K. and Germany embassies in Sudan, and violent protests in Egypt.
In Egypt on Friday, people hurled stones at police near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. “God is greatest” and “There is no god but God,” one group chanted, as police in riot gear fired tear gas and threw stones back at them in a street leading to the fortified U.S. embassy.
In Sudan, police fired teargas in an attempt to stop about 5,000 demonstrators storming the German and British embassies to protest against the film, a Reuters witness said.
But witnesses told Reuters that protesters got into the German embassy, taking down the Germany flag and raising an Islamic one in its place.
Sudan’s Foreign Ministry has criticized Germany for allowing a protest last month by right-wing activists carrying caricatures of the prophet and for Chancellor Angela Merkel giving an award in 2010 to a Danish cartoonist whose depictions of the prophet in 2005 triggered protests across the Islamic world.
Pope visits Lebanon
In Lebanon, where Pope Benedict arrived Friday for a three-day visit, hundreds of people set alight a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the northern city of Tripoli on Friday, witnesses said.
Locals watching the attack said some people were shouting, “We don’t want the pope” and “No more insults (to Islam).”
At least one person was killed and 25 others were wounded in those protests, Lebanese officials said.
The pope, who was in Beirut, said the Arab Spring movement that saw several Middle Est dictators ousted and elections held –including in Egypt — was a positive “cry for freedom” as long as it included religious tolerance.
But he added that it had to include tolerance for other religions. Asked about Christians’ fears about rising aggression from Islamist radicals, Benedict said: “Fundamentalism is always a falsification of religion.”
Lebanon’s militant Shiite movement Hezbollah hung banners along the airport highway greeting Benedict with a picture of him and texts in Arabic and French saying: “Hezbollah welcomes the pope in the homeland of coexistence.”
But nearby, the movement — which Israel and the United States consider a terrorist group — put up Arabic-only banners for local consumption with a different message: “Welcome to you in the homeland of resistance.”
