[wvns] The Tale of a Teddy Bear
The Tale of a Teddy Bear
by Ian Buckley
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/messages
What does this tale signify? I refer - of course - to the story of
Mrs. Gibbons and her imprisonment in Sudan over the case of the toy
bear named 'Muhammad'. Granted, Muslims in Sudan take their religion
seriously, and the appellation 'Muhammad' is more an honorific, not a
common or garden name as understood in the west.
Indeed, we must note in passing that - in former days in Western
Europe - anything that savoured of blasphemy was once quite severely
punished. Even during the age of steam and machinery, the restored
Bourbon monarchy in France introduced the death penalty for sacrilege.
But the wealthier classes of the West have other gods to worship now,
hence they are unable to have empathy with those who put their faith
first.
Though maybe such people are in reality less content than the average
Sudanese peasant. As British politician and diarist Alan Clark wearily
commented : 'I've got £700,000 in my Abbey National Crazy-High
Interest account. But what's the use? Lay not up for thyself treasures
on earth.'
As is so often the case, a seemingly trivial event was the trigger
that activated and re-awakened deeper discontents. The arrest and
brief imprisonment of Gillian Gibbons must surely be seen in a much
wider context.
Mrs. Gibbons became a symbol of the distant but omnipresent enemy that
has looted, degraded and bombed Sudan. World Bank, IMF, NATO - a
litany of control. But who in Britain, who in the USA, even remembers
the cruise missile raids on Sudan? The major pharmaceutical plant in
Khartoum was destroyed by thirteen Tomahawk missiles, for no reason
whatever, except possibly to distract attention from the
Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Operation Infinite Reach they called it, a
name that sounds like hubris, as the Greeks would say.
There has never even been a simple apology for the destruction of the
Al-Shifa plant, which therefore joins an extremely long list of
ignored crimes. Here we are beginning to see some context for the, er,
over-reaction of Sudanese officials. Such as they feel that their
country, culture and religion are under threat. Who is to say that
they are totally wrong?
It goes without saying that the plight of Mrs. Gibbons received
twenty, nay a hundred times, the coverage in the media than was
allotted to the fate of Iain Hook. Iain Hook, who, huh - as the
victims of the establishment media might say! As a UN official, Iain
Hook would ordinarily have been considered to be more 'important' than
a junior schoolteacher, but not when the agenda is concerned.
What does the mainstream media dish up? A sludge of trivia here, a
spice of propaganda there, and a flavouring of war fever permeating
the whole broth. It is some sort of awful commentary on the state of
the mass media when one considers that reading Sir Richard Burton or
Sir John Glubb provides more sensible and sensitive comment on the
Arab world than the tendentious junk poured out today.
Not to forget historian Alan Moorehead, who said this, ironically
enough in reference to Sudan in the 1880s : 'If this state had been
governed entirely by greed, by inhumanity and by crude emotions it
would not have continued as long as it did; the bulk of the people
were not crying out for liberation as the Europeans liked to imagine
they were.'
'This was the atmosphere of war, when all things become exaggerated
and touched by propaganda. It was scarcely possible for any man,
particularly if he was a public figure, to take a detached view, or to
argue the case for the Arabs : to have done that would have meant
being branded not as a liberal, not as a realist, but as a traitor.'
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