So, I've been thinking about the (now resolved) Sudanese teacher crisis...
As such, I realised it was probably time for my extremely rare political entry. Yaknow, the ones where I let let my social conscience out of the little box I keep it in and allow it, mewling and abused, to stand up straight for a few hours before it gets soundly ignored for another ten months.
As background, a British-born teacher got arrested for naming a teddy bear Mohammed, and calls were made by mobs of citizens for her execution. She's now released, but she spent a reasonable amount of time in jail.
Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press has been all over it, condemning the Sudan as a country of bigoted extremists. Slightly more surprisingly, the left-wing press has been almost equally condemnatory, and a fresh wave of anti-Muslim sentiment has erupted.
O'course, things get a little more interesting when you look a little more closely at the story. The school board didn't want her arrested, and in fact felt she should have been released immediately. Several legal and police officials involved felt that, since the teddy's naming clearly was not intended as any sort of denigration of the Prophet Mohammed, it was not therefore covered under blasphemy laws. The fact that she was imprisoned was quite clearly A Bad Thing, and was made worse by the seemingly irrational reaction of many Sudanese to the situation.
So why did things ever get so out of hand?
The Sudanese government is fairly anti-Western, and it certainly does contain right-wing nuts with only a tenuous grip on reality. In that latter respect, it's fairly similar to our own. Large proportions of the press exist solely to massage the prejudices and preconceptions of its readers, and as such encourage them to support (subtly or otherwise) the nigh-fascistic principles of their owners. Again, not much difference there to ours.
In one camp, their extremists and rabble-rousers make out the British to be evil imperialists seeking to denigrate the name of a sacred prophet. In the other, our extremists and rabble-rousers make out the Sudanese to be a bunch of scary bearded AK-47 wielding types with no concept of good ol' British values. As a result, the facts (that the name was proposed by a member of the class also called Mohammed in honour of himself, and had been chosen by popular vote because he was the most popular child, thus meaning the bear was named after Mohammed-the-small-boy and not Mohammed-the-prophet) were ignored, and the extremist elements managed to whip up a baying mob to order, helping our own to do the same here. If you were about to forestall me with how we don't do baying mobs -- there's nothing quite like the idea of an immigrant willfully ignoring all of their adopted country's values to get people hot under the collar. When that resentment and rage is stoked by demagogues, the media, and ministers of religion, whose lives' work it has been to manipulate their flocks and readers into believing as they wish... then it's powerful, and quite often unthinking.
And both our governments grow fat on the fears and furies of their populaces, for a frightened or angry population is an easy one to manipulate. Once more, our would-be masters use the comparatively small amount that divides humanity to sow strife and conflict, preferring to ignore the far greater qualities that unites us. I'm not for a second suggesting that what happened to Gillian Gibbons was in any way acceptable, or that it shouldn't have been widely reported -- I just resent the way it's being cynically used to increase global tension.
I mean, if the fate of one British citizen is of such concern, then we've got a few prisoners in appalling conditions in jails across parts of Asia who the evidence suggests have been stitched up locally for various unsavoury crimes, so shouldn't we be saturating the news media with their awful plights?
But wait, those countries are our friends, and we're not currently using that particular type of Johnny Foreigner as the bogeyman. I wouldn't be so bitter if I hadn't fallen quite so thoroughly for it myself, I will admit.
But yeah, I did.
Flame on.
That's quite enough intellectual thought for one night. Time to put those higher brain functions back into an alcohol induced coma.
As background, a British-born teacher got arrested for naming a teddy bear Mohammed, and calls were made by mobs of citizens for her execution. She's now released, but she spent a reasonable amount of time in jail.
Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press has been all over it, condemning the Sudan as a country of bigoted extremists. Slightly more surprisingly, the left-wing press has been almost equally condemnatory, and a fresh wave of anti-Muslim sentiment has erupted.
O'course, things get a little more interesting when you look a little more closely at the story. The school board didn't want her arrested, and in fact felt she should have been released immediately. Several legal and police officials involved felt that, since the teddy's naming clearly was not intended as any sort of denigration of the Prophet Mohammed, it was not therefore covered under blasphemy laws. The fact that she was imprisoned was quite clearly A Bad Thing, and was made worse by the seemingly irrational reaction of many Sudanese to the situation.
So why did things ever get so out of hand?
The Sudanese government is fairly anti-Western, and it certainly does contain right-wing nuts with only a tenuous grip on reality. In that latter respect, it's fairly similar to our own. Large proportions of the press exist solely to massage the prejudices and preconceptions of its readers, and as such encourage them to support (subtly or otherwise) the nigh-fascistic principles of their owners. Again, not much difference there to ours.
In one camp, their extremists and rabble-rousers make out the British to be evil imperialists seeking to denigrate the name of a sacred prophet. In the other, our extremists and rabble-rousers make out the Sudanese to be a bunch of scary bearded AK-47 wielding types with no concept of good ol' British values. As a result, the facts (that the name was proposed by a member of the class also called Mohammed in honour of himself, and had been chosen by popular vote because he was the most popular child, thus meaning the bear was named after Mohammed-the-small-boy and not Mohammed-the-prophet) were ignored, and the extremist elements managed to whip up a baying mob to order, helping our own to do the same here. If you were about to forestall me with how we don't do baying mobs -- there's nothing quite like the idea of an immigrant willfully ignoring all of their adopted country's values to get people hot under the collar. When that resentment and rage is stoked by demagogues, the media, and ministers of religion, whose lives' work it has been to manipulate their flocks and readers into believing as they wish... then it's powerful, and quite often unthinking.
And both our governments grow fat on the fears and furies of their populaces, for a frightened or angry population is an easy one to manipulate. Once more, our would-be masters use the comparatively small amount that divides humanity to sow strife and conflict, preferring to ignore the far greater qualities that unites us. I'm not for a second suggesting that what happened to Gillian Gibbons was in any way acceptable, or that it shouldn't have been widely reported -- I just resent the way it's being cynically used to increase global tension.
I mean, if the fate of one British citizen is of such concern, then we've got a few prisoners in appalling conditions in jails across parts of Asia who the evidence suggests have been stitched up locally for various unsavoury crimes, so shouldn't we be saturating the news media with their awful plights?
But wait, those countries are our friends, and we're not currently using that particular type of Johnny Foreigner as the bogeyman. I wouldn't be so bitter if I hadn't fallen quite so thoroughly for it myself, I will admit.
But yeah, I did.
Flame on.
That's quite enough intellectual thought for one night. Time to put those higher brain functions back into an alcohol induced coma.