Oh, for pete’s sake:

Hundreds of protesters set alight a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Friday, witnesses said, chanting against the pope’s visit to Lebanon and shouting anti-American slogans. Locals watching the attack said some people were shouting, “We don’t want the pope” and “No more insults (to Islam.)” The incident came as Pope Benedict began a three-day visit to Lebanon and as anger over a film which Muslims have said is blasphemous to Islam spread across the region.

So, they’d rather have Chick-fil-A?

I didn’t know Pope Benedict was headed to Lebanon. God protect him! What is it about the Islamic religion that brings crowds of idiots out to attack embassies and fried chicken joints because a movie has offended them? You can talk all you want about American imperialism, and Israel yadda yadda yadda, and this and that and the other thing, but at the end of the day, you have a mob of barbarians burning down property and even killing people because some nobody somewhere in the West hurt their religious feelings.

Look, I know that not all Muslims are like this, and not even most Muslim are like this (and by the way, thank you Libyan Muslims for protesting against the murder of Amb. Stevens). Still, this keeps happening with Muslims abroad. Why? It goes back to Samuel Huntington’s point about “Islam’s bloody borders.” As Huntington wrote:

“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

I hate the way many of us in the West — I’m thinking about the media now — react to these kinds of outrages by being more afraid that we might make a bigoted judgment against Muslims, instead of asking questions about why Islam — in particular, Middle Eastern Islam — has so much success whipping crowds of the faithful up into this kind of frenzy. After all, this whole thing started when an Egyptian Salafist known for his inciteful broadcasts highlighted the offensive anti-Muhammad video on his Cairo-based TV show.

Why would anyone want to live like such fanatics, or among them? Why do Europeans allow Muslims who believe so fanatically emigrate to their countries? This is not going to end well for us.

Burning down a Kentucky Fried Chicken. You just shake your head.