the greycat blog

The very welcome news of Gillian Gibbons’s release has fed the light of tolerance and fair-mindedness that ever burns on BBC News ‘Have Your Say’ pages.

‘She should have served her sentance’ scrawls Mike from Colwyn Bay. ‘If you break the law you should expect to be punished’, he goes on, apparently thinking this both clever and relevant, and ends with a point that obviously weighs very heavily with him (heavier than ‘justice’ or ‘humanity’ for example): ’This must have cost a small fortune. She was only jailed for 15 days - she should have served her time (its not like it was 15 years!!)’.

An idiot from Edgware opines that ‘She deserves two or three lashes - if just for her naivéty’. ‘Common sense has prevailed’ says Chris W, ‘but had it been used in the first place and the teddy bear not been named it would never of happened in the first place.’ Never of happened? By your clueless illiteracy shall the value of your comment be judged, Chris.

Of course, in the end these things are all our fault, as MisterXY of Leeds reminds us: ‘Have you forgotten that we once rulled these countries and sucked out their resources? Or went into countries and bombed them to oblivion?’

Then there is Carla, from Norwich. Words fail one when confronted with the likes of Carla, from Norwich. Carla, from Norwich, is the sort of person who leaves one questioning whether all the effort that went into human evolution was really worth it. Here’s what she says, in full:

I am horrified that Ms. Gibbons has been let off so lightly. Even I, an average white Brit know that it is blasphemy in the eyes of Muslims to name something like a Teddy after their Great Prophet. I would NEVER disrepect another person’s belief’s in this awful way. Surely it is clear that it could be and would be seen as offensive. Ms. Gibbons claims to know about Sudanese culture and to respect it but she has committed an offence in their eyes - one that surely she must have been aware of. I say she should shut up and serve her 15 days then lead a quiet life elsewhere. We need to respect and understand the faiths of others if we want our own to be respected!

Where does one start? It’s very difficult to engage meaningfully with someone who thinks being dragged through the courts for a non-existent crime, threatened with public lashing, deprived of liberty, and having mobs calling for your execution, counts as ‘being let off so lightly’. As for all this respect Carla is so keen on, if respect is to be worth having it has to be earned; simply having it demanded of one is not sufficient. If those Muslims who think Gillian Gibbons’s treatment was justified (and many, many Muslims fervently disagree with them) want respect they have hardly gone the right way about earning it. Fortunately I do not judge Islam by the standards of the bigots of Khartoum, any more than I would wish others to judge Great Britain by the standards of an idiot in Norwich. 

It seems Gillian Gibbons, the Sudan Teddy Bear Teacher, is to be freed. This something about which we should be very glad, but it is not something for which we should be grateful.

Apparently she has been ‘pardoned’ by the Sudanese president. That can hardly be the case; only someone who was guilty would need a pardon.

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.