Mad World, Part Two

Followup to Mad World.

Back to Doug's Darkworld:

[A] British woman has been arrested in the Sudan and faces a possible sentence of “insulting Islam.” Her crime? She is a school teacher and she let her class of seven year olds name a teddy bear “Mohammed.” I can practically hear Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage raving over this, it is an easy target if one wants to ridicule Islam. Of course this isn’t about Islam, it’s about a European who travelled to a foreign land and mocked their laws and way of life, but in the colonial mind set that seems to underlay the world view of many in the west…our standards of what is right and wrong should be applied world wide. I mean, I agree that whipping someone over a teddy bear’s name does seem a bit extreme, but she should have had the smarts to realize this would get her into trouble. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” is as valid today as it was 2000 years ago.

In France you can be jailed for wearing a swastika, in the USA some students were just suspended from school for using the word “noose” in a conversation. Ridiculous punishments for what would seem to be trivial or non existent crimes are not a hallmark of Islam, they can be found anywhere. But of course no one in Christian countries uses these things as a slam against Christianity in general, it’s only Muslim incidents that get used this way. As if all one billion Muslims were the same and thought the same. And of course some in the Muslim world make the same generalizations about Christians and Jews.

Another post returned to the point:

the lady and the teddy bear case continues to make far larger headlines than it warrants. She was convicted of insulting Islam (but cleared of more serious charges) and sentenced to 15 days in jail and deportation. OK, fair enough, she avoids the lash but a sop was thrown to the orthodox Muslims. Unfortunately, some of them weren’t happy with the verdict, and there have now been demonstrations in the Sudan calling for her to be executed. Lovely, just lovely.

My problem here is that a demonstration by hundreds of extremists is given front page news, but statements by Muslim groups with memberships in the tens of thousands condemning the verdict as ridiculously out of proportion to the offence…get short shrift. So people who basically only keep up with the headlines will get the impression that Muslims are all violent extremists. Again, lovely, just lovely. It’s as if all people were ever saw about Christianity in the headlines was stuff like the Westboro Baptist Church or Jim Jones.

Now you see why I found this blog. The Westboro Finnish story has apparently died down, so now Phelps can return to his usual tactic of bugging the military.

Speaking of Finland...oh, I'll save it.

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