November 30, 2007

Mohammed Bear

Joseph Parish

By now we have all heard of the dilemma facing the British teacher who inadvertently permitted her pupils call a teddy bear Mohammed. The most recent events in this epic terror episode is that the 54 year old women had so far escaped the flogging but must now endure 15 days in a Sudan jail.

Gillian Gibbons will be incarcerated at the squalid Omdurman women's prison in Khartoum, which is massively overcrowded and infested with mosquitoes.

Mrs. Gibbons although she had done nothing wrong apologized to the court all to no avail. This entire thing has boiled down to a cultural misunderstanding. In her statement which was read to the court, Mrs. Gibbons tearfully stressed she had not meant to cause offence and pointed out that it actually had been her pupils who had selected the name. In most cultured and pious societies the very act of naming the Teddy Bear after a deity would have been implicitly an act of honor as most children revere and possess devotion towards their Teddy Bears.

Am I angry? I am furiously that this scum of a nation could even contemplate such actions to a lady who is purely trying to advance their country. As Mike Blakemore so aptly stated "The sentence is a mockery of justice……".

Once again we envision the kindness of someone repaid with barbaric compensation. This is precisely how her belief in helping to educate the illiterate Sudan’s is repaid? This is disgraceful. She only named a teddy bear and she is serving 15 days in jail.

Let the cleric and the Sudanese government now know that I too have a Teddy Bear named Mohammed. You can see his picture below. I guess I have nothing to fear since I am not a 54 year old helpless woman.

Delmarva Survival training urges the Sudanese Government to come to reality and let the women go home!