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NARRATOR: A dozen members of the Islamic Thinkers Society - young, robed, bearded twenty-something men - stood behind pale blue police barricades outside the Danish embassy yesterday, waving black Islamic flags and placards. The Danish pigs, they said, who published drawings of Mohammed, would suffer the consequences.
ISLAMIC THINKERS: Danish pigs what do you say? The wrath of Allah is on its way. Danish pigs what do you say, defame a prophet and you shall pay.
NARRATOR: Being in the crosshairs of these extremists is serious business. FBI and police officials confirm that they have been shadowing the group for several years - soon after they put up a mock video game on their website in which an airplane was flowing into the Statute of Liberty, breaking her in half. So when one of the group's leaders, who would only give his first name, Ahmed, shouted into the microphone that the group would defend Mohammed's honor with blood, as they did on Wednesday, law enforcement listens.
ISLAMIC THINKER: To hell with your freedom of speech, to hell with your freedom of expression. Indeed, we will defend our prophet's honor with our blood and our lives.
NARRATOR: The Thinkers Society is not just against Denmark and the Mohammed cartoons. They have issues with the West more generally. Their placards say as much. The World is Divided into Two Camps, said one, The Camp of Evil and the Camp of Islam. Another showed the White House, with a black Islamic flag flying above it. Islam will Dominate, it read.
(Bring up protest sound and fade under.)
NARRATOR: There are only a handful of people reading standing on the sidewalk, reading the signs, and watching the protest. They look decidedly unsympathetic. Silvia, a nineteen year old Muslim from Beirut, is among them. These kinds of outbursts, she said, happen in Beirut all the time.
SILVIA: Every day…. Against democracy, against America, you know, the usual. But most of these guys aren't Arab. They are like Asian.
NARRATOR: Moments later the group laid a Danish flag on the wet pavement at their feet. A policeman told me that the Thinkers had wanted to burn the flag, but they weren't given a permit for that. They settled for stomping on the flag instead. They explained that this was meant to be an act of descretion.
ISLAMIC THINKER: We Muslims will desecrate this flag right here, right now, in front of all these people to show you… (FADE)
NARRATOR: Fatima Afshar, who escaped from Iran soon after the fall of the Shah, watched the flag stomping in silences. Lips pursed.
FATIMA: I don't know, I wish they would shut up. I really don't know what they holler about. I don't know. My father said when ever you go, you respect the society, the custom, the religion is a peraon thing. You believe whatever you are going to believe.
JERSEY GUY: What do I really think? I think they are idiots. I think it is insane.
NARRATOR: Non-Muslims, a handful of men in their thirties, sprinkler and irrigation service men from New Jersey, sneered at the protest.
NARRATOR: One man in the group, who would only give his name as Bill, saw the protest as foreboding.
BILL: Islam's wrath is on the way - it's like, HELLO.
OTHER GUY: I can't understand why they would allow something like that in the public streets of America.
BILL: It is because they paid for the permit that they're here. You know what it is? It's the right to freedom to gather and say what you want to say. They don't even understand that that's what this country has done and allows this. They'd get shot over in their world. Come on.
NARRATOR: The Islamic Thinkers' protest ended peacefully. The group carefully stacked their signs and coiled extension cords at 5 p.m. when their permit expired. By then, there was no crowded to disburse. The handful of onlookers had dispersed. Dina Temple-Raston, Columbia Radio News.