WhatFinger


Islam, Teddy Bears, Christmas

The teddy teacher: why the surprise?



The BBC is reporting today that Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, will pardon 54-year-old British teacher, Gillian Gibbons. As everyone now knows by now, Gibbons was teaching in Sudan when she brought a teddy bear to class and allowed one of her 7-year-old students to name the bear.

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The enterprising young man named the bear after himself – Muhammed. Gibbons was later charged with blasphemy and insulting the Prophet by allowing the bear to be named Muhammed. Although she was facing 40 lashes and six months in jail, she was sentenced to 15 days in jail and ordered deported (deportation, for those in the West that may be unfamiliar with the term, is when the government actually removes a non citizen from the country). As some media reports have stated, the world was “outraged” at what the government of Sudan was doing to this well meaning teacher who chose to give up her cushy teaching job in the U.K. to teach in Khartoum. There’s a moral to Ms. Gibbons plight – you goes to a Muslim country, you takes your chances. What is really surprising about the incident is the fact that so many people around the world were outraged or surprised that such a thing could happen, at least to a white woman from the West. The only real shocker in the whole affair was that she was only sentenced to 15 days in jail. Even the original sentence that Gibbons faced; 40 lashes and six months in jail appeared relatively low for insulting Muhammed (the Prophet, not the teddy bear). Usually the penalty for blasphemy in countries that are governed under Sharia law is death. And although we won’t know this for certain until Ms. Gibbons leaves Sudan, she has apparently been well treated by her jailers. If any humor can be found in this situation it is from other people’s reaction to the teacher’s fate. Those who propound the theory of moral relativism; that every country and every culture is equal, appear to be shocked, not that Muslims suffer extreme consequences for exercising freedoms that those of us in the West take for granted, but because Sudan dared to uphold Sharia law against a white non-Muslim woman from a civilized country if Britain can still be called one. Some people thought that the sanctions taken against Gillian Gibbons were outrageous because she obviously didn’t intend to insult either Islam or the Prophet. Here again, many in the West couldn’t understand how Gibbons could be punished at all for something that she did but did not intend to do. These critics were blindly attributing Western values to a backward society where the notion that serious criminal acts must have a mental component before punishment can be meted out should be present. Many, including the editorial board of the National Post, compared Gillian Gibbons to the 19-year-old Saudi woman who received 200 lashes for being the victim of a gang rape. Certainly that teenager did not have the intention to be raped; in fact it’s impossible to have the intention to be raped; rape by definition implies the lack of intent to participate in the physical act. Yet there seemed to be surprise at the notion that Gillian Gibbons could have been punished for an act that even the government of Sudan didn’t think that she intended. Gibbons’s sentence of 15 days imprisonment was the equivalent of getting 30 days of house arrest for blowing away a couple of people in a Western country. Certainly some Sudanese citizens were bound to be outraged, just as many Westerners are upset with lenient sentences. While those in the West express their outrage by calling talk radio shows or writing their elected representatives, in Muslim countries the solution is to run through the streets screaming and armed with swords in order to smite the necks of the infidels. Since the publication of the Danish cartoons, no one should be surprised by the reaction of some of the practitioners of the Religion of Peace. The political correct masses refuse to accept the notion there is a clash of civilizations and that not all cultures are equal. And then they profess shock and outrage in a situation that really calls for praise for the government of Sudan for handling the matter in the way in which they did. And as far as the greedy West is concerned, Gillian Gibbons has given birth to a new industry; the manufacture and sale of Muhammed Bears. And just in time for the Christmas season.


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Arthur Weinreb -- Bio and Archives

Arthur Weinreb is an author, columnist and Associate Editor of Canada Free Press. Arthur’s latest book, Ford Nation: Why hundreds of thousands of Torontonians supported their conservative crack-smoking mayor is available at Amazon. Racism and the Death of Trayvon Martin is also available at Smashwords. His work has appeared on Newsmax.com,  Drudge Report, Foxnews.com.

Older articles (2007) by Arthur Weinreb


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