Thank you for sharing this link. Along with the recent statement by Pakistan's prime minister, this certainly seems to create a portrait of a bunch of irrational lunatics.
However, these absurd statements are taking place within a complex context. Over in another thread, I wrote a bit about the context of "Muslim outrage" that was are witnessing.
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/forums/index.php/topic,23854.msg532391.html#msg532391
I think it is impossible to underestimate the role that the Palestinian situation plays on the international stage. For Muslims around the world, including the non-Arab Muslim majority, the Palestinian situation is a rallying point.
When Muslims get mad about pictures of Mohammad or youtube videos, please understand that they are really already mad about the dehumanization of Palestinians.[1] They see these symbolic attacks on their beliefs and practices as a reminder of their vulnerability, and they live with the ever-present fear that their lives could be transformed into the lives that the Palestinians have been forced to endure now for generations, in which their land is not theirs, their national resources are not theirs, and their right to self-determination is stripped away.
And it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. We watch the protests against these cartoons and whatnot from the safety of our comfortable homes, and we shake our heads at how irrational they are, and we forget the greater context. Just as most Americans look at the 9/11 attacks with outrage, and just as most Americans can identify with the victims, most Muslims look at the Palestinian situation with outrage and identify with the victims.
But when we fail to recognize the context in which the outrage is taking place, it is indeed easy to dismiss these angry people as savages.
In the context of Pakistan, the situation is even more complex. Pakistan is a pretty nasty place, and Peshawar is probably among the most horrible places on planet earth. Geographically and ethnically, it is closer to (Pashtune) Afghanistan than Pakistan. And for more than a generation, it has been the dumping ground for the cold war refugees escaping the violence of the US/Soviet war that was taking place on their land. Then it became the dumping ground for those escaping the Taliban. And then, as the Taliban were pushed from power in Afghanistan, it became a refuge for them.
So refugees keep flooding in from wars that no one even understands, but which the Western world is blamed for. As as the residents of Peshawar look at the US troops wandering through the squalor that most of them live in, they, perhaps justifiably, feel as if they are under attack.
So some petty politician, (who somehow has managed to acquire wealth in a place where poverty is the norm), has found a rallying point from which to make a name for himself and gain popular support from the disenfranchised, mostly illiterate masses, on whom is political future depends.
