Muslim angerTwenty dead, scores injured, in violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Pakistan

Demonstrations across Pakistan this afternoon (local time) have turned deadly, with reports that eighteen people were killed and seventy-eight injured. Most of the violence occurred during demonstrations in Karachi and Peshawar. Among those killed in Karachi were two police officers. In Peshawar, two police officers were killed.

The protests were sparked by “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crude 14-minute YouTube trailer of a film which mocks Mohammed. Then, on Wednesday, the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons which depicted the prophet in an unflattering light, and which fueled additional anger among Muslims. The cartoons led French officials temporarily to close diplomatic facilities, schools, and cultural centers in twenty Muslim countries.

Police authorities estimated the number of demonstrators to be 15,000 in Karachi and 10,000 in Islamabad.

CNN reports that protesters burned three cinemas and two banks in Karachi. Protesters also burned two cinemas in Peshawar. In Karachi, angry protesters smashed windows, set fire to tires in the streets, and threw rocks at police who tried to keep them from government offices and shops.

Protesters tried to reach the U.S. consulate in Karachi, but police cordoned off the area, and used teargas and firing into the air to turn the demonstrators back.

The government of Pakistan warned Friday of “strict action” in response to the destruction of property. “We have also alerted the army; if things get worse, they will come in,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, told reporters Friday afternoon in Islamabad. “I said it yesterday and I’m saying it again, we mean business,” he said.

It was clear that the Pakistani government meant business. Cellular phone services in fifteen cities were temporarily blocked to prevent militants from using phones to detonate bombs during the protests. In several cities, military helicopters buzzed overhead.

The Pakistani government also declared Friday to be a national holiday — “Love for the Prophet Day” — and encouraged peaceful protests.

The U.S. Embassy in Karachi, in anticipation of Friday’s demonstrations, spent $70,000 for advertisements on Pakistani TV, aired Wednesday and Thursday, which featured segments from President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speeches in the last ten days, in which both denounced the video and talked about U.S. tradition of religious tolerance. The speeches were in English, but there were but subtitled in Urdu running at the bottom of the screen.

The BBC reports that there were other demonstrations in many other countries. Among them:

• A peaceful protest took place outside the U.S. embassy in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur
• Some 3,000 people marched in the southern Iraqi city of Basra
• Thousands burned U.S. and French flags in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka
• Crowds rallied in Baalbek in Lebanon in a protest organized by the Shia militant group, Hezbollah, burning U.S. and Israeli flags
• There were fears of violence in the Libyan city of Benghazi where the U.S. ambassador and three other American officials were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in the city on 11 September

Salman Shaikh, a Muslim and director of the Brookings Doha Center, noted in a CNN commentary that not all of the protests have been violent. Rallies in Lebanon and Malaysia on Friday were relatively peaceful.

“It is no coincidence that the protests first took root in weakened states, such as Egypt, Libya and Tunisian, which are in the early stages of democratic transitions,” Shaikh wrote.

We can now add Pakistan to the list of states led by weak and divided governments, in which the demonstrations turned violent.

USA Today reports that in the ten days of demonstrations across the Muslim world, at least forty-seven people have been killed.