Mohammed Bear – is Islam compatible with levity and humour?

The Naming of Bears is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a bear must have three different names.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Abdul, Musa, Wiqas or Ali,
But Allah forbid that you named him Mohammed,
Lest you’re beaten to death by the laws of Shari’.

Give a Jew a bacon sandwich, and he’ll roar with laughter, and what's more there will be no lawsuit for infringement of their human rights or a call to jihad. But Islam is no laughing matter, Mohammed no joke, and Allah apparently incapable of humour.

Cranmer thought he’d heard everything absurd that could possibly emanate from the 7th-century backward mindset of Islamism, but the revelation that a British teacher faces 40 lashes (which amounts to death) for agreeing that her 7-year-old pupils could name a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’ beggars belief.

The name was among the eight suggestions that the children offered, and Muhammad, which is one of the most common names in Sudan, was chosen because it was also the name of pupils in the class. In a final vote, 20 of the 23 pupils chose Mohammad, so Mrs Gillian Gibbons did what any good teacher would do, and she encouraged her charges by empowering them to name the bear.

Then all hell breaks loose. She is arrested, interrogated for hours, imprisoned, and told she faces a death sentence for insulting ‘the Prophet’, defaming Islam, and sedition.

Look here, upon this picture, and on this:












The counterfeit presentment of two brothers?
The Mohammed on the left is cuddly, warm and comforting - the very incarnation of all that Islam professes to be and aspires to convey to the world; the Mohammed on the right is a cold-hearted, murderous terrorist who participated in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks: all that Islam professes not to be.

If the naming of the bear is an insult to ‘the Prophet’ and atoned for only by the administering of 40 lashes, how many more lashes may atone for the naming of the terrorist?

The school in question, Unity High School, has stated that Mrs Gibbons teacher was guilty of nothing but an innocent mistake. The school’s director said: “We have lost one of our best teachers. She was maybe a little naive but she really had no idea what she was doing" Nevertheless, in a statement sent to More4 News last night, the school announced that Mrs Gibbons' employment with them was being terminated with immediate effect. It said: ‘The administration of Unity High School would like to proffer an official apology to all students and their families and to all Muslims for what was an individual action, which does not represent the sentiments of the administration or the school.’

This is appalling dhimmitude. For a school supposedly founded on Christian principles, it has no sense of proportion, fair play, or justice. They ought to be pleading her case, leading an appeal, reasoning with the unreasonable using their own scriptures.

For does not surah after surah of the Qur’an begin ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful’? Did not Mohammad teach that mercy should always be manifest before any punishment meted out?

The West is being conditioned by such incidents; it joins the response to the Danish cartoons, the threats to the Pope after his Regensburg lecture, and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the protests against his knighthood. Europe and the UK in particular adopt a de facto standard of self-censorship which elevates Mohammed and Allah to a plane which Jesus and Jehovah long since ceased to occupy. And the more violently the Islamists react to each offence, the more richly they are rewarded by the appeasing politicians, bishops, cardinals and popes.

Cranmer would have no problem if a teddy bear were named Jesus: in fact Spain probably has hundreds. But it is inconceivable that a school teacher could be arrested and imprisoned in the UK for so naming a bear, unless Gordon Brown intends to include the provision when he revisits the legislation to ban the incitement to ‘religious hatred’.

So let the campaign begin here that not only bears, but sloths, gannets, sheep, camels, lemmings, rats, skunks and pigs can all be called Mohammed, for the name is not sacred, and has been debased a million times by thousands of Islamists like Mohammed Atta who manifest abundantly the worst characteristics and attributes of many such creatures.