In a breathtaking display of cynicism Geoffery Alderman a commentator in the Jewish Chronicle famous for his negativity towards Muslims, seeks to rubbish the heroic efforts of Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi in securing the pardon from the Sudanese president of Gillian Gibbons.  Rather than celebrate the fact that our Muslim peers made a positive contribution to our country he seeks to promote the idea of a Muslim conspiracy.  This is quite typical of the writers in the Jewish Chronicle.  Read on:


A shabby triumph

Geoffrey Alderman

How exactly are we to explain the sudden, early release of schoolteacher Mrs Gillian Gibbons from imprisonment in the Sudan?

Some months ago, Mrs Gibbons commenced employment at an English-style infants' school in Khartoum. She set her class a project: to name a teddy bear. The class chose the name "Muhammad", which is a name commonly borne by Muslim men. Mrs Gibbons accepted this nomination. The school's own secretary then promptly reported her to the Sudanese authorities, and she was charged with three offences of a blasphemous nature. Last Wednesday, she was acquitted of the two more serious offences (one of which carried the punishment of 40 lashes), but found guilty of "insulting religion" and sentenced to 15 days in prison, to be followed by deportation. The judge stressed that these 15 days included the time she had already spent in custody (she was arrested on November 25), so by my reckoning she should have been deported on Monday, December 10. She was, by her own admission, being well looked after in her Sudanese jail, and, again by her own admission, was being over-supplied with an abundance of good quality food.

For British Muslims, the persecution of Gillian Gibbons was clearly a public-relations disaster. Everything that critics of Islam have been saying about its tendency towards barbarity appeared to have been borne out by her arrest and show trial. For show-trial it certainly was. Not only is Muhammad a common Muslim name, but it now turns out that Muslims themselves have routinely given the name to teddy bears and other cuddly toys.

After the verdict was announced in her case, a mob roamed the streets of the Sudanese capital baying for Mrs Gibbons' blood - literally.

Understandably, this is not the picture of Islam that British Muslims want the media to portray. So while the assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, the ubiquitous Inayat Bunglawala, was doing the rounds of the British media condemning Mrs Gibbons' persecution (he argued so passionately with a Sudanese diplomat on BBC's Newsnight (November 28) that presenter Jeremy Paxman could hardly get a word in edgeways), and while other UK Muslim organisations (such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Ramadhan Foundation) were falling over themselves in the rush to denounce what an IHRC spokesperson rightly called "this fiasco ... the unjust conviction of an innocent person," two Muslim members of the House of Lords (Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi) cleared their diaries post-haste to fly to Khartoum and attempt to negotiate the release of Mrs Gibbons.

Why did they do this? After all, the Foreign Office was already on the case. Mrs Gibbons had been spared the 40 lashes, was being well looked after in prison, and would have been free on December 10 to return home to a heroine's welcome. So why not leave matters to take their course? If there was any interceding to be done, why not leave it to official government channels? Why did Nazir Ahmed and Sayeeda Warsi push themselves into the very forefront of this case? And at whose invitation?

The astonishing answer to this last question appears to be that these British Muslim peers were invited to Khartoum by none other than the Sudanese government. Relations between Sudan and the UK are not good. The only-too-well-documented involvement of the Sudanese government in the genocide in Darfur has led the British government to adopt an increasingly hostile attitude towards the military dictatorship that runs the Sudan, and it no doubt suited this dictatorship to sanction the prosecution of Mrs Gibbons in order to bolster its charge that Britain, unfriendly to Islam, seeks to meddle in the internal affairs of the Muslim world.

But Sudan also relies on British aid. Over the last five years we have given aid to the Sudan amounting to over £300m; over the next year or so we plan to give the country another £114m. The sight of a Sudanese mob demanding the execution of a British schoolteacher threatened to jeopardise this largesse. Something had to be done, but in such a way as to shield the Sudanese government from the accusation that it bowed to pressure from Whitehall.

So, a cynical gameplan was played out. President Omar al-Bashir very kindly agreed to meet these distinguished Muslim members of the House of Lords. He very kindly agreed to their entreaties that the convicted blasphemer Gillian Gibbons be pardoned. Baroness Warsi and Lord Ahmed then very kindly returned to Britain with Mrs Gibbons, whose premature release from prison will itself be portrayed as a very kindly Muslim response to a very kindly Muslim approach.

Isn't the truth of the matter that what we have witnessed is nothing more than a sophisticated exercise in media management? Two Muslim peers - with the best of intentions no doubt - have, with the apparent connivance of the British Foreign Office, allowed themselves to be used by the brutal regime that effects to run the Sudan, and by its apologists in the UK government.

I rejoice at Mrs Gibbons's safe homecoming. I am saddened by the manner in which it was brought about.

Source: The Guardian – Comment is Free