It started with a teddy bear. A new British teacher at a school in the Sudan thought it would be fun for her class to name a teddy bear and journal about its adventures through out the year. Its not a new teaching method and its one that has helped kids get in to creative writing and thinking for ages now. This one turned out a little different though. The class decided to name the bear after the most popular kid in the class, Muhammad. She didn’t pick the name the children did and the parents of those children in her class were ok with it.

Other parents at the school were not, and now, the teacher who meant to do good, is serving time in a Sudanese prison for insulting the religion of Islam. What makes it worse is that this supposed “peace loving” religion is calling for her to be beaten or even worse, executed by firing squad. Unfortunately, the British government has its hands tied and can only wait until she is released from prison and removed to the UK. In the mean time, I hope she survives.

Its hard to support a religion that calls for the execution of teacher over the name of a teddy bear. We saw this same outcry over a cartoon in a Dutch newspaper last year and repeatedly in France (who do you think the majority of the rioters are in Paris?). I have no issue with people who believe in their own religion, but when it gets to a point (as it has in the Sudan and other middle eastern countries) where its “MY WAY or NO WAY” something has to be done.

As a country we’ve started flinching every time something negative is said about the religion of Islam. We back peddle and apologize and try to make amends (have you heard about the email sent out at the University of Florida regarding a movie ad that claims “Radical Islam Wants You Dead”) we just make the cause for radicals even stronger.

If the revolutionaries had apologized every time they offended the Crown, we’d still be a part of the UK. I have no doubts that the majority of American Muslims want nothing more than to be accepted as nothing more than Americans and they want no harm to come to the country they’ve grown to love. But there is a radical sect out there that wants the entire world to be under Islamic Law (it’s already been beaten down once back in the medieval times).

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