TOWNHALL.COM: Here we go again. Thousands of Sudanese Muslims took to the street last week to threaten death to a British schoolteacher in Khartoum.
Her crime? She inadvertently committed the felony of allowing her class to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.”
The teacher, Gillian Gibbons, has been pardoned by Sudan’s president (after initially being sentenced to 15 days in prison) and sent home to England. Yet that happy ending doesn’t erase the reaction in the streets of Khartoum. The tired story behind irrational anger in much of the Muslim world remains the same.
Watch out if Westerners somewhere are judged blasphemous to Islam when they draw a cartoon, write a novel, make a movie or discuss history.
In their furious reaction, thin-skinned Muslims may issue death threats. And they expect apologies. Sometimes the offense — like the reporting of a Koran flushed down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay — turns out to be false but still causes riots and murdering thousands of miles away.
Likewise, the reaction to this madness is now stereotyped. Often apologies — not condemnation — follow from contrite Westerners. To prevent a recurrence, Western writers, filmmakers, teachers and religious figures quietly edit their work and restrict their speech — but only when Islam is involved. Of Teddy Bears and Cartoons >>>
*Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
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