TEDDY BEARS AND GENOCIDE

Has anybody been following this story about the English teacher in Sudan jailed for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed?

15 days in jail, she got, for inadvertently insulting the Prophet, from a government that has presided over the death of 200,000 people in Darfur (I think that's how you spell it).

Consensus seems to be that this is an excuse on the part of the Sudanese government (who weren't democratically elected, remember), to promote anti-Western feeling and therefore help drive out aid workers etc. trying to ease the conditions created by the genocide.

I wrote a poem yesterday (posted at MySpace), asking why there seemed to be so little enthusiasm for helping prevent Bush and Brown mount a bombing campaign against Iran.

You can see how in unsophisticated Western minds our efforts to support Muslims across the world might be viewed with suspicion. Not that these medieval Sudanese thugs bear the vaguest resemblance to any of the Muslims I know.