the greycat blog

The interactivity of the web is all very well, but having comments facilities on news reports is a very dubious notion: just look at what happens over at CBS News. The BBC, so committed to fawning over user-generated content that one wonders why they need all those very expensive newsrooms and journalists at all, is, of course, in love with the idea. Those bulging ‘Have Your Say’ pages hang like monstrously distended parasitic growths from many BBC news stories, and the fact that the comments are moderated only makes the prevalent ignorance, offensiveness, smug stupidity (and illiteracy) of the contents all the more disturbing.

The Have Your Sayers have been Having Their Say about Gillian Gibbons and the Khartoum teddy bear crisis (see my earlier post), and the results are truly revolting. For the full grisly picture see ‘The self-loathing Brits who think teddy bear teacher deserves her fate’ at The Monkey Tennis Centre, but make sure you take a sick-bag.

(Some choice comments have been added since the Monkey Tennis Centre’s post. Steve from Derry declares that ‘She went to another country, broke the law, and insulted an entire religion’, that ‘calls for her to be executed are welcomed’ and he hopes that ‘even if she just gets the poor sentence of 15 days, there will be a strong revolt outside the prison upon her release’. What a nice chap. ‘I think we should take a step back and be thankfull that we are all luncky enough to live in a multi cultural society that welcomes any person of any race or religion’, says optimistic James Taggart of London. Glad you feel luncky, James. From sunny Southend, Ken reminds us all (twice, in identical posts - what’s that moderator doing?) that ‘You can’t look at this with western values, this is a different culture and it has to be respected’. Personally I find it hard to respect that kind of respect.)

Today hundreds of demonstrators have flooded Khartoum’s streets protesting about the leniency of Mrs Gibbons’s sentence and demanding that she go before a firing squad.

Above: Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916), victor of Omdurman. He’d know what to do.

The quotation in the title of this post, ‘Astonishing backwardness, oh people!’, is from a posting, in Arabic, at The Sudanese Thinker, as quoted by the BBC in their review of blog responses to the Teddy Bear Crisis.

Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher working in Sudan who called a teddy bear Muhammad after the name was chosen by her pupils, has been jailed for fifteen days for ‘insulting Islam’.

Rats in this affair include the Sudanese government, judiciary and religious authorities, and Sarah Khawad, secretary at the school where Gillian Gibbons taught, who made the original complaint. But also Robert Boulos, head of the school, who reacted to the verdict by saying ‘It’s a very fair verdict, she could have had six months and lashes and a fine, and she only got 15 days and deportation’.

Among the weasels, Catherine Wolthuizen of Fair Trials Abroad, who blames the victim: ‘I think she is not someone who has sought to cause offence, she’s not someone who’s acted foolishly, but she perhaps hasn’t necessarily understood the extent to which some of the parents might have been sensitive to the use of this name’; the Right Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, who cringes and simpers like a true multiculturalist: ‘deep disappointment because this was clearly a mistake and I know that the Muslim community here in Liverpool will be as disappointed as anybody. I think, too, a real anxiety that something like this so badly handled in this way won’t do anything to build up good relations between the faith communities’; and the UK Foreign Office who have responded by quavering: ‘We are extremely disappointed with the sentence and Foreign Secretary David Miliband has summoned the Sudanese ambassador to explain what has happened’. Miliband himself has been mainly concerned to stress British respect for Islam, much good has it done him (or Gillian Gibbons).

Praise where due, however: both the Muslim Council of Britain and the American Islamic Congress have condemned Sudan in forthright terms.

The strange fixation of our age with saying sorry all the time is brilliantly anatomized by Gorman Beauchamp in the current American Scholar:

History, that is, offers so much to apologize for that the question is not where to start but where to stop. We could save time, energy, and the risk of invidious specificity by just apologizing for history itself … its annals are overrife with horrors, crimes, and cruelty. Except for reasons of political expediency and publicity, how would we cherry-pick from this long and dismal record which enormities merit apology?

A round-up of the leading current apology stories:

• Rudd will apologize to Aborigines - ‘Newly elected Australian leader Kevin Rudd renewed a commitment Monday to apologize to indigenous Aborigines for past indignities.’
• Christian leaders ask for Muslim forgiveness - ‘we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the “war on terror”) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbours.’
• Queen should apologise for slave trade - ‘The Queen of Britain should apologise for the evils the British inflicted on Ugandans during the colonial era, the chairman of Africa Leadership Institute, a think tank in Kampala, has said … “If she does not apologise to the Africans then she would suffer severe punishment from the creator”.’
• Bishop offers apology over Church’s role in bloody civil war - ‘On many occasions we have reasons to thank God for what was done and for the people who acted, [but] probably in other moments … we should ask for forgiveness and change direction.’

The above cases, wretched as they may be, are pretty tame stuff, really; it isn’t that long ago that a Danish government minister was apologizing for the behaviour of the Vikings.

The UK National Defence Association is officially launched today (more detail here). The UKNDA is a non-political group established ‘to campaign for sufficient, appropriate and fully funded Armed Forces that the United Kingdom needs to defend effectively this Country, its people, their vital interests and security at home and throughout the world.’ There is certainly a need for such a campaign; historically, British governments never bother about defence until it is almost too late, and the current administration is firmly in that unhappy tradition. Labour’s record since 1997 is one of underfunding, overstretch, ill-advised privatizations and lack of commitment to military personnel, and the preceding Tory governments were no better (although at least no Conservative defence minister ever quit his post to go car-racing*).

The UKNDA has great potential and I wish them well. They need to pay more attention to presentation, however. The Association’s emblem, as well as being ugly and unmemorable, misleadingly implies by its use of the official Service flags that the UKNDA is an official organization with formal links to the military establishment. Their website, too, is pretty useless. It has a pointless animated intro sequence, is overly cluttered with text, the contents are utterly disorganized with no clear hierarchy or structure, and - a particular pet-hate of mine - it springs PDF files on you without warning. Whoever entered the text is overly fond of bold face and CAPITALS (sometimes using BOTH TOGETHER for no good reason) and isn’t much use at proof-reading. The thing has been designed by an outfit called Web-Feet, who claim that they have designed 700 sites in 7 years; looking at their general standard, this statistic is hardly surprising. More fool the UKNDA for trusting their site to people who don’t know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’.

* The minister concerned is Lord Drayson, and the manner of his resignation is distinctly odd, but he was in many ways a capable minister who achieved a great deal under very difficult circumstances and, uniquely for the current MoD ministerial team, was well-regarded by defence insiders.

Here’s a superb article from The Times: Sarah Baxter, ‘Where do you stand in the new culture wars?’ I particularly like this bit:

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

There’s also a quiz to help you find if you are a true progressive or a phoney liberal. It can be found here (warning: it’s a PDF. Unlike the people at The Times, I think you should know that in advance).

[Found via Tim Blair, to whom acknowledgements and thanks.]