Sudan: let the innocent teacher go
The Sudanese court had one way to proceed: let Gillian Gibbons go free, but then deport her. The deportation could have quelled extremist demands that the teacher be executed for agreeing to let her students pick a name.
Now they’ve got a far more serious problem to handle. Thousands of armed protestors could put Gibbon’s life in danger. If she’s hurt, it will cause further religious animosity all over the world.
In fact, it was several extremist clerics that incited the mob actions that are occurring. That’s the real threat to their national security, not a misnamed teddy bear.
But the Sudanese government seems to relish the role of promoting extremism and violence towards anyone who’s a symbol of the West. One only needs to consider the Darfur genocide to see how corrupt and violent the Sudanese government really is.
With a median age of a very young 18.9 years, an average life expectancy of 49.11 years, a literacy rate of 61.1%, and 40% of the country living in poverty, it’s a population easily manipulated by ideologues. But singling out an innocent teacher like this invites hostile actions from civilized nations all over the globe.
If they’re halfway smart, they’ll get Miss Gibbons home safely within the next 24 hours. There are governments that deserve to be overthrown because of their ongoing atrocities. Sudan has been among the top 2 or 3 deserving of that for several years.
I think the president, Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir should get a delivery of a boatload of teddy bears, each one named Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Rectum in his honor.
I’m sorry if this runs counter to my preference for non-war solutions, but this is simply the latest outrage from a government that long ago failed to block a genocide. In all of Africa, it’s the only government that deserves outright ouster for the war criminals it contains.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:26 am
[…] This school teacher’s crime? Naming a teddy bear after the Prophet Mohammed. “Kill her, kill her by firing squad” they chanted, while young men marched with machetes and other barbaric utensils. Now, I know all of the appropriately PC things to say here are that these protestors–a mere drop in the bucket of the Islamic world–don’t reflect Islam’s mostly silent majority, and that such backward outrage is really the result of poverty and limited education (as Kevin Hayden points out on his blog). […]