Qualms & Wires

British primary school teacher arrested for naming teddy bear after prophet.

As news stories go, you couldn't ask for a better formula, or a more perfect cast...

The face of the well-intentioned noble european who sets out into darkest Africa seeking to bring education and light into the lives of those in need (stop me if you've heard this one before) and what does she get in return? Arrested, abused, and very nearly executed!

Happily, it's just a matter of Gordon Brown and his diplomats to the rescue and before you know it "common sense" has prevailed over extremism, and Ms Gibbons is, of course, on her way home within a matter of days.

And don't worry, it turns out Ms Gibbons is the gracious & forgiving type, and bears absolutely no hard feelings against the Sudanese or indeed Islam. Which is a damn sight more than they deserve. In fact, this mild, altruistic primary teacher who "wouldn't hurt a fly" sounds like an examplary individual in just about every respect, which of course makes the whole affair even more deplorable.

There's been many an indignant response to the claim from the Sudanese Embassy that the whole thing amounts to no more than "a storm in a teacup based on cultural misunderstandings", because we shouldn't be downplaying the event but instead taking it extremely seriously, despite exceptional and brief character of the whole affair. But the issue I want to address here is not about freedom of speech, religious law or whether or not 15 days in prison and/or 40 lashes for "insulting islam" is justified.

It's not so much the story itself that's objectionable, so much as the sheer amount of coverage it's been getting. And the way they've managed to use the incident to spark a "debate" about Islam.

The Sky News team has certainly been doing its bit, saying things like:

"There are going to be people who say "well this just proves what kind of a religion Islam really is..."
Are there? And are they going to be saying it on national television, or is that just you?

"Prominent religious leaders have all spoken out in unison to say that "British Islam" condemns this..."
Let's be clear about it - our own born & bred British muslims are one thing, the ones way over there in the axis of evil are quite another story. Why they should have bothered to speak out in the first place really doesn't at all seem obvious to me either.

I'm wary enough of the BBC but I absolutely loathe Sky News, it's the kind that had a camera fixed on the McCans front door for a week non-stop and calls it "breaking news". On that note, if you want a good critical & humorous perspective on TV news, I'll refer you to my hero Mr Brooker. Watching sky news doesn't so much supply information, as propose a partisan view of certain current events it has some vague notion of but really knows very little about, and tailors its scant information to adhere to the pre-conceived "plot" of the stories. If anything, it dis-informs.
I mean what is this story REALLY about?

It's just the kind of story we need to remind us all that there's dangerous extremist lunatics out there, that we should still be afraid and outraged by them - just in case we were getting rather too complacent about the state of the world and the global political consensus. And what's more, it also illustrates beautifully that our government has our best interests at heart, and will always fight our corner in the face of such trials. It's exactly the kind of fuel that threats of unilateral military action need in order to gain popular support and hey - Sudan rhymes with Iran, and everyone knows what they're up to.

Game on - nuclear annihilation.

This follows on quite nicely from my earlier discussion on sociology - that nothing above question or without an agenda of some sort.

This is what university in France taught me, and plenty of other things beside, but this is the central, fundamental key moment when something was clarified, something was lit up, and I felt as if I'd broken through a wall in my mind. Learning is normally a gradual, progressive exercice, happening over months and years, creeping too incrementally for you to realise, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it comes in a flash. In France I was brutally & suddenly confronted to the harsh reality that even the most fundamental values and foundations, the ones we build everything else upon, the ones that shape us, are the result of a struggle, an agenda, they are part of a dominant paradigm - just one of an infinity of others. And what's more - it's all imaginary. This rhetoric, this nationalism, this so-called clash of civilisations, these "revendications a l'universel" - are all riddled with implicit conceptions, that need to be dissected and taken out of context and looked at in an altogether new light and it's like performing self-dissection, and in this way it's inevitably limited, because we can only extract to a certain point... a bit like the paradox of exploring the unconscious, yet essential in order to understand the world, not understand as in comprehend the News, but REALLY understand.

We look at the problems in the world today, in society - problems like racism, globalisation, immigration, xenophobia, descrimination, intolerance, religious fundamentalism, conflict, nationalism, genocide, sectarian violence, but these are all symptons. And this is why it's so difficult to make sense of them, without seeing beyond, without looking to the underlying causes - to the roots.

In fact, it's not so much about what's there - as what isn't. As what ISN'T on the news, what the politicans AREN'T talking about, what is ommitted. As Adam Hochschild argues, our world today is "shaped far less by what we celebrate & mythologise than by the painful events we try to forget" - Leopold's Congo being one example, but that's another story...