Teddy Bears

Since the beginning of the Darfur genocide in 2003,

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died from violence, disease, and starvation, and thousands of women have been raped. More than 2.5 million civilians have been driven from their homes, their villages torched and property stolen. Thousands of villages have been systematically destroyed and more than 230,000 people have fled to neighboring Chad. But most of those displaced are trapped inside Darfur. Although large-scale government attacks against civilians have declined since 2005, millions remain at risk. Most of the displaced are not returning home for fear that their villages will be attacked again.

Deaths and destabilization continue, perpetuated in part by the world’s apathy in face of the ongoing tragedy and the media’s presentation of Darfur as a far-off conflict with little relevance to our lives.

The arrest of a white western woman for allowing the children she taught to name a teddy bear Muhammad, however, drew a flurry of media attention. Some commentators, attempting to place the incident in a somewhat larger context than stereotypes of “Muslim hysteria,” speculated that the Sudanese government was attempting to punish Britain for its condemnation of the Darfur genocide, but few connected the dots:

The genocide, as well as the Gillian Gibbons incident, show that Sudan’s “Islamic” state - a vicious, genocidal regime - has a remarkably poor understanding of Islam

Most news reports avoided this wrinkle, however. Rather, they allowed the story to fuel cheap prejudices about Islam.

The media mobilized the usual gambit of images to make their point. Protests against the teacher were depicted as the prevailing Muslim view on the situation…a sad and ironic point to focus on, considering that many Muslims spoke out against the Sudanese government (including British Muslim leaders) and that activist groups in the United States who protest the genocide in Darfur receive almost no when they protest. CNN offered to let readers “watch men brandish knives, shout,” as though Sudanese Muslims were barbarians in a museum exhibit. “Thousands of Islamic Fanatics Wielding Knives Demand Teddy Bear Teacher is Executed,” proclaimed the Daily Mail. Hovering beneath much of the coverage was the suggestion that Muslims - not specific Sudanese Muslims, but an undefined Muslim morass - are incapable of “western,” rational thought, only hatred and rage.

Buried in many articles, however, were nuggets that suggested a more complex picture. USA Today informed us that the protests over Gibbons were

far smaller than rallies by tens of thousands of Sudanese that were held with government backing in February 2006 after European newspapers ran caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, suggesting popular anger against Gibbons did not run as deep.

But why do any Muslims protest at all? Many Americans ask. It’s just cartoons and teddy bears.

Well, some Muslims protest because, rightly or wrongly, they feel that these incidents symbolize western prejudice against Islam. And some Muslims protest because they are fanatics.

But why do some Christians protest outside abortion clinics? Some protest because they believe abortion is wrong, and some protest because they are fanatics. But in any case, we don’t judge all Christianity by the actions of a relatively small minority.

Americans often ask people who defend Islam why we don’t see more “moderate Muslims.” But moderate people, even if there are a lot of them, don’t tend to make the news. Moderate people tend to quietly and moderately live their lives. And even high-profile actions by moderate Muslims, such as a recent letter signed by over 130 leaders and sent to major Christian leaders calling for greater dialogue, tend to receive less attention than cartoons and teddy bears.

Finally, it is the media itself that whips up anger on both sides. Reactionary Muslim leaders bear some responsibility as well - but the media bears substantial responsibility for amplifying radical voices over more moderate and more representative ones.

One of the unfortunate effects of incidents like the Gillian Gibbons story is that they fuel racism and hatred in our country as well. A recent comment thread on Reddit, where several commenters connected the teddy bear incident to allegations that the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile to “prove” that Muslims are somehow intellectually and morally inferior to secular westerners, and have been for 1400 years, was not atypical of the racism and bigotry toward Arabs and Muslims that lurk beneath the surface of our “tolerant” American culture.

What does such bigotry achieve? For one thing, it obscures the concrete conditions of violence and instability that create governments like Sudan’s “Islamic state,” and it plays into the hands of the administration’s argument that America is threatened by radical Muslims around the world.

Columbia University professor Mahmoud Mamdani wrote in 2004, in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, that

After Bush’s early public flirtation with the idea of an anti-Muslim crusade, both he and Blair have taken to warning audiences about the need to distinguish “good” Muslims from “bad” Muslims.

But oftentimes it seems we haven’t even moved that far. The idea that America is locked in a war with the entire Muslim world crops up with depressing frequency, from the pages of Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs to subtle hints in the mainstream media. The way the media reports stories like the teddy bear incident often contributes to this climate of fear, distrust, and hate.

We cannot afford to think of the Muslim world in such simplistic terms. Sudan is a genocidal and predatory state. Sudan is one of the few states in the world that is a genuinely deserving candidate for western-enforced regime change, or at least massive military intervention to stop the Darfur genocide. What happened to Gibbons must be seen as a result of the nature of the contemporary Sudanese state, not the nature of Islam. Because if Gibbons’ class had named a teddy bear Muhammad in Morocco, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, or any number of other Muslim countries, there never would have been a story to report in the first place.

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