Hopes that a British teacher could be cleared of blasphemy charges were raised after a Sudanese embassy official said the "minute" matter would be resolved very quickly.
Gillian Gibbons, 54, could be given 40 lashes or six months in jail after she let her seven-year-old pupils in Sudan name the class teddy bear Muhammad.
Hanh? Exsqueeze me? Are we talking about beating and imprisoning someone for naming a stuffed animal? Well, of course we are -- if it's a brutal, over-the-top punishment for a non-offesne, it must be an Islamic thugocracy. I suppose it's stereotyping, but if they wanted to buck the stereotype, then they'd stop brutalizing people for things like getting raped and naming toys.
Dr Khalid al Mubarak, a spokesman for the Sudanese embassy in London, told BBC Radio 4's PM the police had no choice but to follow procedure following a complaint from a parent, but added that the "minute" issue would be resolved amicably.
He said: "The police is bound to investigate just as is the case in any country in which there is rule of law. Our relationship with Britain is so good that we wouldn't like such a minute event to be overblown."
He added: "I am pretty certain that this minute incident will be clarified very quickly and this teacher who has been helping us with the teaching of children will be safe and will be cleared."
Asked about the potential punishments of six-months jail or 40 lashes, he said: "I hope people will not give their imagination free rein to think about such things. That is based on the premise that a person will be charged and the person will be after that condemned and then the judgment has to be passed. But these are all steps ahead of us and my impression is that the whole thing could probably be settled amicably long before we reach stages like these."
Right. Meanwhile, the teacher gets to linger in a Sudanese jail while these people "settle" things "amicably".
Let's also consider how these thugocracies operate. Even the more openly American-aligned ones (Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia) have an important common thread with Sudan and Iran. All of those countries are run by regimes which are despised by the majority of their citizens, but are cynically implored by these regimes to despise us even more.
So maybe the ridiculous interpretation of medival religious strictures is the wrong prism to look at this through. Sudan especially has been very canny in cozying up to China, thus insulating itself from any possibility that we might actually do anything about the slaughter in Darfur. The key here is in what Sudan thinks it may have to gain by using this weird case as leverage to talk to the British.
And as long as bozos like Romney -- who, as a member of a minority sect himself ought to know better than to pick on Muslims -- inadvertently help stoke the fire, there'll always be another tinpot asshole in the desert to leech off his own people while yanking our chain.
Update: 15 days for her brazen act of something-something, and of course hundreds of hillbillies have taken to the streets and demanded her head. Literally.
It would be a fucking shame if some natural disaster swept the street of these "protesters", who are really just Islamic Fred Phelpses further marginalizing a puckered bunghole of a country.
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