This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. A British teacher could get flogged 40 times publicly because her seven-year-old students named a teddy bear Mohammad.
I have only brought up the news one other time on my blog and that was when archeologists unearthed a couple of skeletons that were holding each other in an embrace.
You surely know that I am accepting of all religions and philosophies even though I claim no religion of my own. But this is one of the reasons Islam has such a bad wrap in the minds of white anglo-saxon Protestants and many other westerners. If they want people to convert to their faith or to be more accepting of it, this is not the way to get it done.
I urge all Muslims to support the release of this woman. This borders on insanity and if the Sudanese religious men have any brains in their head, they would know that Gillian Gibbons had absolutely no intention of insulting their Prophet.
If anything, Mohammad should be pleased that children think so well of him to name something after him. The truth is, Ms. Gibbons and the children weren't even naming the teddy bear after the Prophet; they were naming it after the most popular boy in class, whose name is also Mohammad!
Tonight, I am flabbergasted and angry.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1687755,00.html
8 comments:
Yes, I can understand your point, Sophia, but the news is carefully selected and pruned to make you angry and flabbergasted. Please don't waste a minute of your life on its falsity.
There are more ridiculous things going on in the respective square miles where you and I live, I'm sure, but most of them go unreported, thank Heaven.
I don't mean that that piece of news is false in itself, what I mean is that the selection of news issued by the media is biased in order to produce these reactions in us.
Vincent,
Horrifying as the news is, I wonder why I watch it at all. It seems, however, that to be a worldly human, one must submit to doing so once in a while.
Two stories recently have really got to my emotions. The piece in this blog post, and the story about Baby Grace.
I can't bare to think of the possible future of this woman being tortured publicly, nor the thought of a child being tortured.
It's no wonder why I go weeks without watching or reading any news.
Like many other people many times before, I'm shaking my head and wondering about the evil in this world. It's during these times that we really need to pay attention to the beautiful and wonderful things about earth.
The Baby Grace story hasn't travelled across the Atlantic, as far as I know but it's an age-old story, fortunately rarer these days when hitting children has become culturally frowned on if not illegal. I really don't like how such stories are served up like delicacies for the public to feast upon. Here the big story for many months has been the missing child Madeleine whilst parents on vacation in Portugal left her to dine with friends. The fun for the readers is to wonder if the parents are responsible for her going missing and if she is still alive. Perhaps parents accidentally killed her with sleeping pills and disposed of body etc etc.
People could read Agatha Christie stories instead but the media whip up this thing to entertain everybody.
Sometimes I think I would prefer to live in Cuba, or somewhere that a dictatorship controlled the news.
I know you think I shouldn't let these news items get to me, but last night I read a headline in the news that said they're thinking about executing the teacher? As if a public flogging wasn't bad enough! All over a teddy bear, and it really gets me going. I don't see how the men from Sudan can take this so seriously.
In the meantime, as you've said there are enough things going on nearby, as a neighbor might have had her dog kidnapped by a wondering man in a black trench coat. She lives just across and down the street a bit. I have two dogs of my own and now I'm paranoid that someone will try to dognap Peabody and Princess. People might kidnap pets to use them as lab experiments, or to torture, and I couldn't sleep very well during a nap today because it's been on my mind. I think of that poor little dog and wonder where he is, and if he's being hurt. It drives me crazy.
Oh, I changed the subject. To get back to it, I'd say that the media would do well to focus more on positive events. They try to sometimes, but their attempts are not enough to neutralize the effects that negative news segments have on us. Either that or it's just that bad news affects us more than good news.
I made a typo. By "wondering man" above, I meant "wandering man".
LOL, it is good to know, Sophia, that you check what you've written afterwards. I giggled at the "wondering man".
The business in the Sudan is being stirred up for political revenge against Britain for its interference on Darfur - that's what I heard.
It's all tinged with politics. When I was a child, my grandmother returned from a stay in Kenya and spoke of the atrocious Mau Mau terrorists and how no white person was safe. She didn't actually say they were cannibals who loved to eat white babies, but that rumour was allowed to spread unchecked by the British authorities. We now understand that the Mau Mau (even the name so dreaded then!) were freedom fighters, risking their own lives to demonstrate pathetically against the British colonists who had taken their best land and were treating them like childish pests and called them lazy for not wanting to be servants to those who had stolen their land.
So when I hear that Sudanese are chanting in the streets that they want that teacher killed, I know that someone has been stirring them up and spreading lies: the same thing that happens in Britain and America to gain approval of the government which spends our money shooting our "enemies" on our behalf.
I don't know enough about history to know why the British were once so hungry to colonize other countries. Interestingly, today I watched part of a movie about British colonization in Ireland. It's called "The Wind that Shakes the Barley". Only, to me it was mostly a dreadfully boring movie, although my husband says it was good.
This group thing in Sudan, where the people are chanting in the streets to have the teacher executed, must be some kind of group think pattern. It's amazing how thoughts can become so contagious amongst peers. One man sees his neighbor chanting for her execution, so he does, too. They can't think for themselves. Because, surely if they really thought, I mean, thought hard, they'd see how foolish this really is.
Well, the good news is, tonight I read a bit on some news sites that says talks are going on to keep this woman from being punished so harshly.
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