Necktie Party
The AP reports that mobs are roaming the streets in the Sudan looking to lynch the British "teddy bear" teacher:
Khartoum, Sudan (AP) - Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of a British teacher Friday and demanded her execution for insulting Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Sudan's Islamic government, which has long whipped up anti-Western, Muslim hard-line sentiment at home, was balancing between fueling outrage over the case of Gillian Gibbons and containing it.
The government does not want to seriously damage ties with Britain, but the show of anger underlines its stance that Sudanese oppose Western interference, lawyers and political foes said. The uproar comes as the U.N. is accusing Sudan of dragging its feet on the deployment of peacekeepers in the war-torn Darfur region.
Many in the protesting crowd shouted "Kill her! Kill her by firing squad!"
In response to the rally in central Khartoum, Gibbons was moved from the women's prison across the Nile in Oumdurman to a secret location, her chief lawyer Kamal al-Gizouli told the Associated Press. He said he visited her there to discuss her conviction Thursday on charges of insulting Islam.
The 54-year-old Gibbons, who was sentenced to 15 days in jail, spoke Friday with her son John and daughter Jessica in Britain by telephone.
"One of the things my mum said today was that I don't want any resentment towards Muslims," the son told AP. "She's holding up quite well."
The Times Online reports that Lord Ahmed has been sent to pour oil on troubled waters:
Lord Ahmed, Britain’s first Muslim peer, is due to meet President Bashir of Sudan today in an effort to secure the release of a primary school teacher jailed for blasphemy.
A source close to the Sudanese Government said that it would consider offering Gillian Gibbons a pardon so she could fly home within days.
Ms Gibbons was being held at a secret location last night after hundreds of protesters, some of them wielding knives and ceremonial swords, called for her execution.
I think the incitement here is not entirely on the Sudanese side. The supine behavior of the West, abject surrender to every demand, it's willingness to shame and degrade itself without limit, is in large part responsible for the provocations now directed toward it. Some people are already ready to admit it's Gillian Gibbons's fault. Newsbusters.org reports this talk-show exchange on "The View":
SHERRI SHEPHERD: I think it’s like it’s sacrilegious to name a stuffed toy Muhammad. But you know, you would think that with her being in Sudan, she would know the rules and customs. Because I know I performed stand up in Turkey, and they gave me a big thick packet on the customs, and what you could and could not do, and how you would offend people. So I’m surprised that she didn’t know it might be offensive.
WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Yeah, because you’d think if you’re going overseas, I mean, we had this discussion yesterday about people coming to America and learning the customs and knowing what is cool, and what isn’t cool. But I find that maybe we are not- and I say we just as European and American, we’re not as anxious to learn the customs before we go places. It’s just one of the reasons we’re called the ugly Americans.
But you have to know something to call people "ignorant". As information from Astrolabe, an Australian Muslim site shows, age-old Muslim "holy customs" are sometimes made up on the spur of the moment to suit political requirements. There is apparently no prohibition against naming teddy bears for Muslim prophets. However this is unlikely to dissuade those who want the West to apologize on every occasion, out of general principles. The cries "cut off the blasphemer's head!, cut off the blasphemer's head!" are likely to be echoed by its Western equivalent: "we're still guilty! we're still guilty!"
What is clear, however, is that much of the discussion around it being completely and utterly forbidden for teddy bears to be given the same name as Prophets is somewhat misinformed. There is a reason, for example, why we haven’t seen the hordes calling for the people selling Adam the Muslim Prayer Bear or Adam’s World to be decapitated.
A picture of the "Adam the Muslim Prayer Bear" as sold on SimplyIslam.com is shown below.
posted by wretchardthecat at 11/30/2007 04:01:00 PM
42 Comments:
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!"
Winston Churchill
"The River War"
And yet, maybe not as dreadful as the curses which political correctness lays over the guilt-stricken, carbon-minimized, terrified votary of political correctness. If I had to choose between being a Jihadi and a political correctoid, for survival's sake I would be a Jihadi.
Most people, not being the international nobility such as Shepperd or Goldberg (neither of whom is certain that the world is round btw on the View) ...
Conclude that the Sudanese wanting to kill a teacher for allowing her class to name a teddy bear "Mohammed" ...
Is the true disgusting face of Islam. And for that matter, Muslims.
I wonder how much money Britain would have to lay out to the various mucketymucks in Sudan to assuage their hurted little feelings and intense humiliation.
A new form of money-making is born which combines the old custom of blood money and equally old mores of kidnapping into a tidy little package of claimed heresy and breaking of unwritten laws.
Can anyone point to a passage in the Koran or an actual law that's written down on paper in Sudan that's been broken by this teddy bear named Mohammad?
I don't suppose it makes a whole lot of difference one way or the other that teddy bears were initially named after American President Teddy Roosevelt. Could America claim our own hurted feelings and humiliation for Muslims abusing our famed President and war hero, and just nuke them in retaliation ... unless Sudan promises to pay American blood money in recompense.
There must be more to this than meets the eye, e.g. the rioters were deceived in some way. I find it hard to believe that people could be this stupid.
plant - you done forgot that Muslims *died* in their riots over some cartoons? At that point, the Muslims governments figured out that riots where Muslims are killing each other were not upsetting to the West, and to the contrary we were getting a kick out of watching them.
This time around, they're back to demanding the blood of an infidel, and - even better - an infidel of the female persuasion. Be great for the government of Sudan if they could trace her lineage back and find a Jewish ancestor some plce along the way.
All they are doing is making it more and more obvious, to more and more Westerners, that we're going to have to kill a whole lot of them before this is over.
I don't often agree with Whoopi Goldberg, but this time I sort of do. Which doesn't let political correctness off the hook by any stretch of the imagination.
I can just imagine the thought processes going on in Gillian Gibbons's head before she decided to venture forth:
"There's strife in the world, between wonderful people who could easily live together in harmony and peace because that's what all of us desire. After all, there's no such thing as an enemy, only a friend who doesn't understand. So I'll go to Sudan and show them through my example the wonderfulness of the multicultural west, so that they can come to love us for the tolerant, unthreatening people we are. It's only a small step towards the end of hate and beginning of world peace, but it is a step."
Color me cynical . . . but I'm unwilling to let Gibbons off the hook. I think she gulped the PC line hook, line and sinker.
Incidents like this are why God made long-range helicopters.
Strictly for transport of course.
If parts of the Muslim world choose to be this didactic, so be it.
At least the MSM should admit that some of these guys do hate us. For reasons we can't change.
By Sudanese logic, Is it not then sacrilegious to name you Islamic male off spring Mohammad? If they insist on killing this lady, I suggest that any good Muslim must Kill the father of every boy carrying that moniker, and put to the lash every woman who gave birth to one.
If nothing else, that would tie up these idiots time for a long, long time. Such nonsense is worthy only of derision and scorn. And a ready object lesson about what might happen if anything happens to Gibbons. Seems the more this beast is fed the hungrier it gets.
Even the BBC is being to understand that impotence means impotence.
All the words of protest from Gordon Brown and the British government appear to have done little to help Gillian Gibbons in the dusty courtrooms of Khartoum.
Sudan's leaders are rather used to the sound of western outrage - and have come to realise that it rarely amounts to much.
But having played the dangerous game of appeasement so long the price of being taken seriously has risen so high that it is now prohibitive. The time to respond to provocations is in the beginning when a sharp rap on the snout will send the jackal looking for easier prey. Now that the jackals are well and truly into British guts their taste for offal is not so easily banished.
The goons in the Sudan, so often praised as "Islamists" when the simpler word t-h-u-g would do, cannot help being themselves. They are no more culpable than the hyena. But Western politicians, the ones who have sold out their responsibilities for the worthless praise of the multiculturalists, ought to have known better.
To Paraphrase General Patton, I'd raather have a mob of jihadis in front of me than a crowd of Whoopis behind me"
Whoopi is the only person obnoxious enough to make me say, "I miss Rosie..."
Any moment now I am waiting to read about how "American actions in Iraq" have diminished British credibility to the point where Gordon Brown cannot be taken seriously. And there will be no shortage among readers of the BBC, Independent or the Guardian who will believe this to be entirely true.
On an earlier thread one leftist commenter expressed disbelief that Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims would ever make common cause to rid their country of kidnap and murder gangs. Yet the same left sees no problem in thinking that Muslims are willing to chop off a woman's head because she names a teddy bear Mohammed. The Left is willing to believe the worst about Muslims; only they call it "Respect", just like George Galloway does. And a big cheer goes up from the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian.
Sudan has been under the heel of these brutes for decades and the UN has been pleading for permission to save what's left of their victims. News reports now say that self-inflicted UN incompetence now means they won't be able to mount any "peacekeeping mission" any time soon; but that doesn't mean that the Sudanese regime and it's mobs aren't criminal. It only shows the "international community" po-lice are the Keystone cops.
I think we need to bring back the notion of savages. Steps should be taken to identify them when they sojourn in civilized lands from their native hellholes and to return them thence.
Certain marks of savagery must be prima facie disqualification for entry into civilization. Wahabism, and the veil are but two.
The real problem here is that a boy named Mohammed is the one who named the bear Mohammed. He named it after himself. The teacher didn't realize that any conventions were being broken. BTW, she had just gotten a divorce and was there to learn about other cultures. She didn't realize that it would be the hard way.
wretchard said in the comments: "The goons in the Sudan, so often praised as "Islamists" when the simpler word t-h-u-g would do, cannot help being themselves. They are no more culpable than the hyena. But Western politicians, the ones who have sold out their responsibilities for the worthless praise of the multiculturalists, ought to have known better."
I agree totally . . . the goons "cannot help being themselves." And we've taught them that there are rewards for being savages.
I wonder though, if the implied distinction between "western politicians" and "multiculturists" is a true one. I suspect many "western politicians" are multiculturists, true believers in the multicultural ideal, as opposed to cynical opportunists who see only advantage by pretending to be so.
After all, most were schooled in the multicultural tradition, and have known little if anything else. For example, here in the US, our education system has for the most part abandoned traditional teaching of traditional subjects: just look at our textbooks, teaching colleges and universities, not to mention press, and you see the world and its history taught through the prism of white oppression and exploitation, and all the various "isms." People who don't buy into the canon are depicted and reviled as neanderthals, racists and red necks.
Could we not also say that our multiculturists -- and our multicultural politicians -- cannot help being themselves?
I'm an optimist, though, and I think deep down, most of us in the west are able to distinguish between reality and fantasy if we just have our noses rubbed in the difference often enough.
I think that's where the internet and blogs have come in: thinking people thoughtfully exploring ideas in public, as never before, will eventually corrode parts of the fantasy world, though never abolish it entirely.
Regarding God's own hyenas and jackals naturally seeking easier prey, what could be easier than prey who asked themselves what they did to make somebody do 9/11 on them?
Did any of you get that? What did we do to make them so mad at us?
I mean, get it in email. Obviously it's non-gettable as a concept.
What did we do to make them mad at us?
Nothing. Yet.
Western politicians have failed at being "multiculturalists" too. They never understood who they were talking to. They've perversely sent all the wrong signals. In tribal society instant retribution or blood feud is expected when on tribe raids another for booty or slaves. That's how peace is maintained; how waterholes and resources are shared. Had the West responded to provocations early but mildly the situation would have communicated itself with perfect clarity to the Sudanese regime. An understanding would have been reached amid much laughter and backslapping. Gordon Brown would be yukking it up in Sudan today, honored among chiefs.
Instead the West presented the Sudanese with a puzzle. Offenses were met with insulting words and supposed outrage yet the West did nothing. The lack of action was baffling because the "multiculturists" of the West didn't know how to talk the lingo at all. As Mark Steyn often pointed out, Western multiculturalism is really provincial Fabianism tricked out in costume finery; it believes that under the fancy dress everyone is as homogeneous as the population of a small English town.
And so the misunderstanding grew. By and by the raiders came to understand that their forays could be repeated with impunity. They first became bold; now they have become reckless.
But it's a tragedy in the making. Because one day the West may change its leadership and set up the chain guns around the perimeter for the next time the raiders come galloping in heedlessly ... and if that happens some sympathy must go the raiders sprawled in the desert looking sightlessly up with the expression of surprise still on their faces. They never understood. And we never told them.
Whoopi Goldberg ought to know better than to cringe toward those with an appetite for strange fruit. After all, it was precisely this supine behavior on the part of the North that led to acquiescence to Jim Crow and the doctrine of Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Gillian Gibbons was nowhere near as incendiary in her behavior as Rosa Parks. Or the Freedom Riders. Or Martin Luther King. Caving in to a Sudanese mob now makes no more sense than caving in to a mob of Klansmen in Birmingham who regarded segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever as the most sacrosanct part of their religion.
The struggle for civil rights is not over; it is not even half over. I fail to see how genocidal bigotry in the name of Islam is supposed to be an improvement over genocidal bigotry in the name of the "white race". Whoopi Goldberg seems to be more inclined to be "culturally sensitive" to the "needs" of Muslim bigots than to the "needs" of white racist bigots.
Asking a bigot "Why do you hate us?" is an invitation to receive a whipping. He hates us because he thinks he owns us by right and is frustrated whenever we don't do what we are told. Westerners are just too uppity for the tastes of the Sudanese government, so whenever the Khartoum government can show it has the whip hand, it will.
The more I read stories like this one or the one from Saudi Arabia where the court wants to sentence a gang rape victim to prison and 200 lashes with a whip, the more I think that it's a fool's errand to try to bring civilization to Muslim countries. When someone like Ms. Gibson tries to do a good deed by educating their children, the Muslims return good with evil. The Saudis and the Sudanese are barbarians. Period.
Here's a hopeless bunch of liberal theologins. They apologize for the crusades.
Christian leaders ask for Muslim forgiveness I argue that such men are dead in their sin. For future reference here is a list of the signatures
(Liberal theologins are men who believe that Jesus is fully Man but not fully God. Its the same heresy that the Nicean creed addressed in the 3rd century. It was still practiced in North Africa by the Vandals and in Jerusalem and in Spain when the moslem armies came calling in the 400 years later. In today's world the Arian heresy pretty much murdered the Christian church in Europe--by way of higher criticism.)
Time to revive the PRIME DIRECTIVE.
Using the Whoopster's logic, European slave traders were anxious to learn the customs in Africa. They are Whoopi's kind of people.
Here's a hopeless bunch of liberal theologins. They apologize for the crusades.
Christian leaders ask for Muslim forgiveness
I read this reported in GulfNews, where it's reported as sort of a victory with the West acknowledging their victimhood.
It's also reported as if these doofuses speak for *all* of us so that the average Arab reader is left with the impression that everyone in England (or America)is really really sorry for the bad things our ancesors did to their ancestors, which must add to the confusion Wretchard speaks of.
Left unsaid is that in the West there are many more than this one Christian religion; that in any case these Christian ministers do NOT speak for all Christians (the article I read never did specify exactly WHO these guys are so you could get in contact with them); and we're really not at all sorry for the Crusades and think the benighted barbarians ought to just get over it and move on with whatever tattered lives they have managed to fashion for themselves.
I'm always a little surprised whenever Muslims find a brand spanking new way of feeling sorry for themselves, claiming victimhood, and pointing the finger of outrage at England (or America or Israel) as being responsible. My momma used to tell me when I tried to throw a temper tantrum, "Be quiet or I'll give you something to cry about." As far as I can see, the Crusades are NOT something that modern-day Arabs can rightfully cry about, and they should be really really afraid of what that something will be if we do decide to give them something to cry about.
Nahncee...
My Momma used to shut me up with those same words. I'm glad to see I'm not the only bloodthirsty westerner. (The on-going Annapolis conference has reignited my warlike self.) I wish Americans, British, and others would sound more aggressive, especially to the Muslims, who seem to be especially full of themselves these days.
And no, we should not apologize for the Crusades. What kind of churchmen think it's necessary? They need psychiatric help.
... one day the West may change its leadership and set up the chain guns around the perimeter ...
I rather suspect that the West changing its leadership is not likely to be a calm process. The PC crowd are so well entrenched that it will probably take external shocks followed by internal physical conflict before truly new leadership emerges in the West.
On the other hand, this is not necessarily good news for the Islamist types. While the West is destroying itself, Islamists will have to be very careful to avoid giving offence to the Russians or the Chinese. Think Chechnya or Tibet.
Muslims are exceedingly ingenious about the ways they can collect the jizya.
I have no sympathy for Ms Gibbons. She went deep into injun country to “learn about other cultures” and her lesson has been delivered in a much less benign manner than she could have anticipated. Or was it? Perhaps somehow, she conflated the writings of Sir Richard Burton, Omar Khyaam, and Khalil Gibhran into a rich perimenopausal sexual fantasy. I am sure that she is currently thrilled beyond her wildest dreams with her current adventure. She gets the adrenaline rush while upholding her benign image of herself as loving, nonjudgmental “giver.”
Nothing is more dangerous than an amateur.
deepinjuncountry:
"I have no sympathy for Ms Gibbons."
You are a moral idiot. Ms. Gibbons may have been naive, foolish or even arrogant, but that is not the point of this event. The point is the barbaric savagery of our adversaries, people who call for the death of someone for a name given to a stuffed toy.
Mr Rosen: Certainly, you mean I’m an immoral idiot or an amoral one, and not an idiot with morals.
Anyway, I didn’t say that she got what she deserved but what she wanted. She’s at the center of an international incident. She gets to both be the victim AND sympathize with the barbarians. How morally superior she is!
And don’t fret about her safety. It is all theatre after all.
And don’t fret about her safety. It is all theatre after all.
Tell that to the guy in Afghanistan who wanted to quit being a Muslim and received so many heated death threats after that that the government had to declare him insane and whisk him out of the country before his fellow Afghans could get to him.
Or to the two Israeli's who found themselves on the wrong side of the Palestinian line, were arrested, torn from their jail cell, beaten to death and then - literally - ripped asunder with their various bloody bits and pieces flung from what passes for a tall building in Gaza.
Muslims evidently never heard of Lady MacBeth's plaint about the inability of washing blood off, but instead revel in it, the more the merrier.
If only we could talk the British into taking it all back.
They should have not only named the teddy bear Mohammad but also equipped the little furry pseudo-critter with a pretend suicide vest of explosives.
Everything would have been just fine, then.
Or better yet, equipped him with a real vest of explosives and mailed him to the country's leadership.
And it's not too late to implement that suggestion. How many explosive-laden teddy bears can a B-52 carry anyway? I have been in the bomb bay of one of those beasts, and I think the answer is "enough."
Gary quoted "deepinjuncountry" who said:
"I have no sympathy for Ms Gibbons."
Gary commented:
"You are a moral idiot. Ms. Gibbons may have been naive, foolish or even arrogant, but that is not the point of this event. The point is the barbaric savagery of our adversaries, people who call for the death of someone for a name given to a stuffed toy."
With respect, Gary, it's both, and I think your criticism of "deepinjuncountry" is misdirected.
The barbaric savagery of our adversaries is every bit as much a problem as you suggest.
But that doesn't absolve Gibbons entirely. Who is responsible for her naivety, foolishness or arrogance, the qualities that placed her in jeopardy, if not she herself? Who was it who tried to lie down with the jackal?
Now, I'll cut her a just little slack, since she's trying, IMO, to live according to the utopian fantasy of the multicultural ideal, the putative virtues of which she's probably been immersed in for decades.
But the fact is that there are many vocal others who've been similarly immersed in multiculturalism who've seen it for what it is, written about it ad nausia, and would have told her that by going to the Sudan and trying to do good works, she'd be in danger of tweaking the jackal's tail, irrespective of the purity of her motives or the depth of her commitment to multiculturalism.
The examples you cite in a followup comment (Afghanistan and Israel) are inapt.
I, too, think this is pure theater. She is in no danger, just as the British marines captured by the Iranian pirates some months ago were never in any danger.
Here's how it works: you create a crisis, raise all sorts of fear about what might happen to some hapless victim, and then -- just as an impotent world is about to implode with anxiety over a crises that offers no "out," you graciously solve the problem you yourself created and emerge looking reasonable and understanding.
Your victim's nation is relieved that she's safe, and demand no retribution. Your own citizenry and others of your ideological bent are tickled that you have embarrassed one or another of the various western satans.
We have of course been "talking" to our adversaries who still hold the Crusades against us and our children forever.
I hear Osama's latest tape complains that we have been mean to Afghanistan because they didn't really do anything, his own myth is that he only one responsible for 9/11, etc.
Sounds like they are little pissed that impregnable Afghanistan fell to the weak Westerners.
If losing Afghanistan hurt, how must losing Iraq torture our Islamist enemy?
Oh, we're "talking" to them all right. As long as the Democrats can't make us step off the cliff of history and surrender, we'll be okay.
Iran is starting to look a lot like Iraq to the UN Security Council, even to China and Russia. Sorry dudes, it's one world now.
If only the Democrats and our MSM media hadn't been teasing and seducing our enemies with hope that we'd surrender, they might have seen the wisdom of peace by now.
Just think what this protracted war has done to our military - has any higher percentage of all our troops ever been blooded - since the Civil War?
Oh, we're "talking" to them all right.
I hear Osama's latest tape complains that we have been mean to Afghanistan ...
I got a giggle out of that tape, too. He's beseeching the Yurpizoids to quit "helping" us. What war, exactly, has he been watching that he thinks anyone except the English have lifted a single pinky finger to help America? (Always excepting the Aussies. LOVE Australia!)
I suppose he could be referring just to the hostilities in AFghanistan, where NATO's Europeans have managed to help us so much that they've given back to the Taliban the conquered country that we asked them to maintain several years ago while we were doing the heavy lifting in Iraq. Obviously Osama must approve of the job NATO and the Yurps have done in Kosovo where Muslims and Serbs are *still* killing each other after we left in 1999.
I found this definition of "moral idiot". I confess, the term is new to me. I thought it was a mistaken form of "moral imbecile", and much as I disagreed with deepinjuncountry, I thought calling him a psychopath was a bit over the top.
This incident has little to do with teddy bears or Mohammed and everything to do with throwing up a smokescreen to help Sudan continue to resist UN and Western efforts to halt the rape, slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
Now, Jean-Marie Guehenno, the United Nations peacekeeping chief, has said that the obstacles raised by Sudan are putting in doubt the planned deployment of a peacekeeping force for Darfur.
Is the UN any use whatsoever?
(more at blogolob)
So where are the calls to punish the child, who presumably knew the "customs" of his own culture, and wanted to name the teddy bear "Mohammed?"
Excellent post and comments. Well said!
Whoopi and Co. pretty much neglect to mention that we don't jail and want to KILL foreigners who come to America and make faux pas which insult.
Green Ink has a great cartoon of a MoTeddy, THAT would get the European Muzzies rioting too.
This would make a wonderful Ramadan gift. A New Dark Age is Dawning has a link to them for sale at the Cafe Press store.
Calling these ignorant freaks in Sudan human garbage is just too kind. Oh so peaceful, effin SICK animals...
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
give a pig a prophet's name
glorify the godly swine
and thank him for his bacon
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
outlaw all teddy bears
before some little kids
try to honor a prophet
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
pay your teachers with DEATH
for visiting to help out
your ungrateful country
http://citizenwarrior2.blogspot.com/
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
.
Kinuachdrach said...
I rather suspect that the West changing its leadership is not likely to be a calm process. The PC crowd are so well entrenched that it will probably take external shocks followed by internal physical conflict before truly new leadership emerges in the West.
My belief and hope is that this will happen with the passing away of my "boomer" generation. Though most of us are good and have done many worthy things my generation has brought in the worst in the political, media and educational fields. Ten more years and we shall mostly be out to pasture as our worst tend to be in the oldest part of the "boomers" who came of age during the mid to late 60's.
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