Bid to free teddy insult teacher
British officials are trying to secure the release of a British schoolteacher arrested in Sudan for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Gillian Gibbons, of Liverpool, may face blasphemy charges for insulting Islam's Prophet. A conviction could mean six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.
Her colleagues said she had made an "innocent mistake" by letting the six and seven-year-olds choose the name.
Lots of countries develop this sort of insanity at various stages in their development, this is exactly the sort of thing that happened for many centuries in the UK, the US and througout the developed Christian world.
There's a great line in the film 'The Killing Fields' "maybe what we underestimated was the kind of insanity seven million dollars worth of bombing could produce" - Sydney Schanberg making the link between the brutalising of Cambodia and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge.
Countries like Sudan and Afghanistan have failed to develop, have been ravaged by war and civil war and have become pretty crazy places as a result. We passed this way ourselves and resorted to burning, drownings and stonings of witches as well as the wrong sort of Christians.
That's not to say we should accept the situation, but lets keep in in proportion (one bizarre incident in a very messed up country) and in context (a phase that all societies, including our own, pass through).
Evil, power and stupidity use all available means including religion. Lets hope she's freed as soon as possible.
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