Did You Know...

Just arrived!

In addition to all our regular Hot Air gear and merchandise, we’re offering Christmas shoppers a new item: limited edition Mohammed Teddy Bears. Each cuddly Mo Bear costs $18.50, which includes shipping and handling. (Note: We can only accept domestic orders inside the U.S.)

They’d be great to pair up with an “I Will Not Submit” tee or bumper sticker. Treat yourselves.

Or send one to your favorite local CAIR official.

***

Mohammed Teddy Bear teacher Gillian Gibbons spoke to the Guardian about her ordeal. An excerpt:

After several hours of interrogation, Gibbons was locked up with no explanation, unable to understand the guards’ rapid-fire Arabic. ‘I’d only had three Arabic lessons and we hadn’t got to the bit about “What to do if you’re arrested”,’ she says.

The open-air cell had three grey-tiled walls, a basic squat toilet in a corner and steel bars running across the facade and ceiling. ‘I just stood there for three hours, thinking I was going home. It was filthy, there were ants all over the floor and in the corner there were rat droppings. There was a light shining into my yard that attracted all the mosquitoes, so I stood there and got bitten to death.

‘It started to get dark about 6.30 and it got quite cold and all I had was my wrap, I didn’t even have a handbag because I only thought I was going for an hour.’

At eight in the evening, a guard brought her some cheese-and-tomato sandwiches left for her by staff at the school. ‘Nobody actually came to tell me that I wasn’t going home, so I just guessed at that point. I was panicking and I was crying. I didn’t actually sleep all night. I was so distressed, so uncomfortable and so cold, that at four in the morning I just paced round and round trying to keep warm. It felt like this was happening to someone else. It was just mad, just surreal.’

Drima at PJM:

It amazes me how some of us can get so upset over a teddy bear whose name was democratically chosen by a bunch of seven-year-olds but feel no anger at the mass atrocities which took place in Darfur over the last four years. Honoring the countless Darfurian lives lost apparently isn’t important.

Brainwashed by self-interested religious clerics into believing that Ms Gibbons’ act was in fact part of a bigger Western plot against Islam, thousands of angry protesters marched the streets of Khartoum apparently to protect the honor of the Prophet. Where were they all this time when Darfur was burning? Where were they when Mohammed Atta flew into the World Trade Center? No, wait, sorry. That particular Mohammed was not a teddy bear.

200,000 dead, no problem. A teddy bear gets named Muhammad, all hell breaks loose.
The teddy bear extravaganza also succeeded in making Islam look utterly ridiculous again. Let us not forget though that Islam is as monolithic as we Muslims ourselves are – hardly at all. Many Muslims rely on reason and their own conscience rather than blindly following religious clerics.

The lunatics we saw protesting – and those who mobilized them – are a symptom of a dangerous global cancer. It must be staunchly challenged. If it isn’t, episodes like this one will become increasingly common not just in Sudan, but everywhere else in the world.