Politics 2.0

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

The recent arrest of Gillian Gibbons in Sudan is yet another cultural difference between east and west. Gibbons, a 54 year old English teacher at Unity High School in Khartoum was arrested for holding a competition in her class for naming the class bear, allowing it to be called Mohammad. The Muslims are extremely sensitive to any depiction, religious or not, of their prophet. One merely has to remember the Danish cartoon riots and how the cartoons of Mohammad inflamed the Middle East.

While I am sympathetic to religious differences and respect cultural beliefs, the Danish fiasco will always be an event underestimated by world, but to me, it is a major point of reference. Depictions insulting another culture are distasteful and unnecessary. But I find it so hypocrtical, in fact socially schizophrenic, to detain or violently riot against irrelevant cartoonists or teachers on the one hand, yet on the other hand casually and unapologetically ridicule the 'infidels'. It is as if the insensitivities of a cartoonist's depiction of Mohammad are completely divorced from the insensitivities of burning an American or Israeli flag.

When Hezbollah guerillas march over an Israeli flag, is it not demeaning and highly offensive to a Jew? Is the Star of David and blue and white colours not of religious and emotional meaning to the Jewish people? Similarly, America may have divided church and state, but the stars and stripes are ideals beyond red, white and blue. To Americans, atheist or religious, the American flag is a belief in everything they hold true for which many have died in pursuit of its ideals.

Until the Muslim world collectively starts to show a fraction of sensitivity to other cultures, their protests and over-reactions to those demeaning their culture will have little credibility. In printing this article, I like to follow a habit of placing a picture suitable to the content. In deciding whether to place a picture of the Mohammad cartoon or a burning flag, I opted for neither. Denying genocides, declaring a nation the 'great Satan', burning flags or belittling prophets all have a common denominator- incitement of hate. I won't fall for that trap.