Civil War in Iraq

Iraqi insurgents posing as police planted a bomb inside and mosque and detonated it.

Not just any mosque, the Askariya shrine.

It contains the remains of two of Shia Islam's most revered imams. To Shias the world over this is a holy place of pilgramage, whose golden dome sets it apart as an outstanding feature.

However, as Iraq now slides toward civil war, where is the protest?

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets the world over to protest at a series of twelve cartoons in a danish paper. Cartoons advertised by militant imams to stop them being overlooked as they would otherwise have been. Cartoons that were added to (the prophet Mohammed depicted as a pig which was never part of the original series) by the imams themselves.

Yet now, in the most sickening act of cultural terrorism seen this century, iraqis - muslims - choose to blow up a place of worship and no protest is heard except on the troubled streets of Iraq where furious Shias are venting their anger on their Sunni neighbours (50 bullet riddled bodies were found this morning and many sunni mosques were attacked.)

Not quite true.

On Thursday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the United States and Israel for the destruction of a Shiite shrine's golden dome in Iraq, saying it was the work of "defeated Zionists and occupiers."

The blatant hypocrisy of the cartoon protesters reveals the fatal flaw in the ideology of militant islamists. The people they whip up into a frenzy over various anti-western causes do not share their hatred of the west. Rather, in the emotionally stunted regimes they live in, protest against the West is the only form of protest, offering a chance to vent their frustrations with the otherwise suffocating regimes unlikely to step in.

A sad day for Iraq, a telling silence from the militants.