Sudan solution?

A British school teacher has been arrested in Sudan accused of insulting Islam's Prophet, after she allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Colleagues of Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, said she made an "innocent mistake" by letting the six and seven-year-olds choose the name.

Ms Gibbons was arrested after several parents made complaints.

A spokesman from the British Embassy in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, said it was unclear whether she had been charged.

Embassy officials are expected to visit Ms Gibbons in custody later.

"We are in contact with the authorities here and they have visited the teacher and she is in a good condition," an embassy spokesman said.

The spokesman said the naming of the teddy happened months ago and was chosen by the children because it is a common name in the country.

"This happened in September and the parents did not have a problem with it," he said.

The BBC's correspondent Amber Henshaw said Ms Gibbons' punishment could be up to six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.

The school has been closed until January for fear of reprisals.

Fellow teachers at Khartoum's Unity High School told Reuters news agency they feared for Ms Gibbons' safety after receiving reports that men had started gathering outside the police station where she was being held.

The school's director, Robert Boulos, said: "This is a very sensitive issue. We are very worried about her safety.

"This was a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam."

Mr Boulos said Ms Gibbons was following a British national curriculum course designed to teach young pupils about animals and this year's topic was the bear.

So Ms Gibbons, who joined the school in August, asked a seven-year-old girl to bring in her teddy bear and asked the class to pick names for it, he said.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad," Mr Boulos said.

"Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name."

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad as their favourite name.

Mr Boulos said each child was then allowed to take the bear home at weekends and told to write a diary about what they did with it.

He said the children's entries were collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover and a message which read, "My name is Muhammad."

The bear itself was not marked or labelled with the name in any way, he added.

It is seen as an insult to Islam to attempt to make an image of the Prophet Muhammad.

Mr Boulos said Ms Gibbons was arrested on Sunday at her home inside the school premises after a number of parents complained to Sudan's Ministry of Education.

He said police had seized the book and asked to interview the girl who owned the bear.

The country's state-controlled Sudanese Media Centre reported that charges were being prepared "under article 125 of the criminal law" which covers insults against faith and religion.

No-one at the ministries of education or justice was available for comment.

One Muslim teacher at the school, who also has a child in Ms Gibbons' class, said she had not found the project offensive.

"I had no problem with it at all," the teacher said.

"I know Gillian and she would never have meant it as an insult. I was just impressed that she got them to vote."

Unity is an independent school for Christian and Muslim children and is governed by a board representing major Christian denominations in Sudan.

Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad printed in several European newspapers sparked violent protests around the world in 2006.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad," Mr Boulos said.

http://sabbah.biz/mt/images/mohammedhassanWWE_01.jpg

"E-laj-eee-lah-el-la-li-la"

He said police had seized the book and asked to interview the girl who owned the bear.

There are so many things wrong here that it feels wrong to spend even a moment taking it seriously, but millions of men (including five Sudanese presidents) are themselves called Muhammad. Is that alright then?

Oh wait, Hassan got booted out of/left WWE two years ago, didn't he?

"Millions" = most common name in known universe

if anything happens to her, we withdraw all aid?

obviously that's an exaggeration, but srsly, talk about biting the hand that feeds.

??? WTF, Louis, are you okay over there?

this will end well

Like, you realize ... umm, where to start here

xpost umm

hah, i realised that i'd rather put my foot in it pretty much instantly. i have issues with ungratefulness, that's all. i don't think teachers will want to go over and help out if this is what happens. bring up the question of withdrawing all aid was merely a measure of how appalled i am that this could happen to an innocent person. it's not something i'd actually want to see happen. the rhetoric of exaggeration and all that.

i'm sure most of the aid comes from the UN rather than GB, anyway. for britain to at least cut down on supplies to sudan for a limited amount of time would probably be proportional retribution should the lady be killed or maimed by the state. my initial response came before i read that the punishment will probably only be a jail term.

Umm Louis I think you have still not figured out quite how you have put your foot in it here ...

... short version being that the humanitarian aid coming from the west is mostly headed toward the south of the Sudan -- i.e., the exact people the Kharthoum government is condoning/assisting genocide/displacement of -- so cutting it off would just be doing the regime a great big favor, basically

"release this teacher, or else those people you are trying to kill will die"

as far as i can see, my suggestion that britain might consider temporarily withdrawing aid should one of its citizens be harmed by a foreign state was hasty and ill-judged, but i can't find anything else wrong. if there's any implicit prejudice in my rhetoric i assure you it's completely unintentional.

ohhh shit xxpost

:(

next time i'll fact-check before spouting off

if anything happens to her we create a memorial fund to further her work?

tbh i feel schooled

Hahaha it's okay, I'm just a little mystified -- when you heard about "genocide" in the Sudan, who did you think was behind it??? It's not like a famine we're talking about!

xpost - just so you know, this isn't some arcane "I schooled you" point -- it's, like, the whole issue

I know. I don't mean that you've gone out of your way to catch me out; I just feel a bit silly, and glad that you've set me right. I'm aware that there is a genocidal regime in charge, but I assumed the aid was somehow being routed through it. Which, in retrospect, was a lazy piece of thinking.

The situation in the likes of Sudan and Somalia is so very saddening. I can't think of a way out.

Yeah, "pay Ethiopia to invade" is not going to work on the Sudan.

the only winning move is not to play

dude is completely, utterly, depressingly OTM. The West, hell, what do we want? A bit of oil, perhaps, protection for our people, economic gain, yeah, possibly brought about through corrupt and reprehensible means, but we're not actively setting up camps to indiscriminately destroy those who don't follow our ways. I mean, the article may be painting a doomier, more pessimistic picture than it could, and I am willing to bet that with a few key figures removed the fundamentalist Islamic movement would suffer major body-blows, but in principle it is spot-on.

-- Space Gourmand (Haberdager), Monday, 18 September 2006 13:49 (1 year ago) Link

lol ken c. I thought about the other thread as soon as I saw this one !

ethan, i then realised i'd been had and refuted that about 2 minutes later, and then continued to refute it. you're painting me in colours no way reflective of my attitude towards, well, anything.

i.e. I'M ON YOUR SIDE. i merely have a habit of saying things about international politics that are ill-informed. among students or other less scrupulous judges i get away with it. among people who know what they're talking about i get rightly taken to task. i mean i ADMITTED i was wrong! isn't that enough for you?

lol who are you talking to?????????

what ever happened to humansuit?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/piles-and-piles-of-bodies-in-s-sudan-slaughter/2014/04/22/98ad7616-ca1e-11e3-b81a-6fff56bc591e_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop

https://apnews.com/article/sudan-war-military-rsf-conflict-khartoum-f12975eb72c830ed86ed6a7a49e9658d

Many dying as military and paramilitary fight it out

6 months of war

https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-reeling-after-six-months-war-statement-martin-griffiths-under-secretary-general-humanitarian-affairs-and-emergency-relief-coordinator-enar

Sorry Sudanese people

Those waters had upended her life, but also provided a food option — not a desirable one, but one of the few left.
Water lilies. They’d been keeping her family alive for two years.

They were bitter. Hard to digest. They required hours of manual labor — cutting, pounding, drying, sifting — just to be made edible. Nyaguey could still remember her initial shock at eating them, figuring they’d be a short-term measure. And now, with the floodwaters holding their ground, she could trace a two-year arc of distress in what the lilies had become: sustenance so vital that people were slogging farther and farther into the waters to find them, before someone else did

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/02/south-sudan-climate-floods-war/

Heartbreaking

the number of displaced people there, and the number of refugees, are just devastating, overwhelming even. it's just a terrible situation. and of course the Wagner Group made sure to be involved.

Very sad

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-67450204

The evil rebels have gained more ground, but now another group is saying they will help the government