Chad/Darfur/Sudan. Scene of an ongoing and pretty incomprehensible disaster. In June, Save the Children reported that

Over 70 children under the age of five die every day in Darfur

(It’s a fair bet that about 30 of them are probably named Mohammed, of course.)

As Alun pointed out in a comment here, we should maybe start looking at what lies behind the ludicrous Sudanese Toy Story?

I’d like to put all the blame for this on religion, but, I’m something of a materialist and religion is so often just the gloss on real-world struggles over power and wealth.

The UN has reached agreement on sending in a peace-keeping force, according to Associated Press.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno warned the Security Council on Tuesday that the Sudanese government is putting up numerous obstacles to the deployment of the so-called “hybrid” force that could destroy the effectiveness of the joint AU-U.N. mission.

Reuters reports that the Sudanese are blaming the UN for the delays. Maybe I am biased but I tend to see the UN point of view as likely to be more accurate. According to Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of the U.N. peacekeeping force, Khartoum is putting conditions which would render the UN force unable to achieve anything.

International experts estimate some 200,000 have died and 2.5 million been driven from their homes in almost five years.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for a junior government minister and a militia leader accused of colluding in war crimes (More from Reuters)

Spanish Inquisitor made some excellent points about the disaster that is the Congo and got some great thought-provoking comments, including ones from the Exterminator, XanderG , Philly Chief and John Evolutionary Middleman the other day.

Although they were discussing the Congo, the issues they talked about apply to the man-made disasters that are increasingly consuming the African continent.

Most of the commenters (being Americans) felt that the USA should do something, although the Iraq debacle didn’t seem like a great model. PhillyChief said, somewhat ironically, “Too bad there’s no oil in Africa.” Tim Little pointed out that there is plenty of oil in Africa in general and a lot of mineral wealth in the Congo.

I have referred to this debate because it expresses where many of us are in relation to the horrors of the world. If we live in the rich countries, we don’t know enough about what is happening elsewhere. These are places we only hear about in terms of war, genocide or political turmoil.

A comment posted here on T_W’s first teddy bear post said:

This is appaling – if she is not freed today I will definately boycot anything Sudanese.

However, I doubt you can find anything Sudanese to boycott. These countries liek Sudan and the Congo are on the very edge of disintegration. And the people are turning on each other, as any people tend to do in the face of social disaster. The insane Islamic stuff is just a part of this process of disintegration.

So given the futility of applying more normal means (like boycotts and tough words at the embassy) of expressing international outrage over the situation in Darfur, all that’s left is the UN.

My feeling here is that the hapless British teacher has been used in the most cynical manner to stir up nationalist outrage, by reference to religion. Governments in Muslim countries are well aware of the ideological power of an appeal to Islam, which provides an opportunity to gather international support in the name of an (imagined) attack on the Prophet.

To misquote Dr Johnson, religion, combined with patriotism, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

However, the technique is likely to backfire drastically. The rich countries have already gone so far down the road of an inability to distinguish Islam from rabid fundamentalism that most Western populations are starting to assume that any appearance of possible Middle-Eastern descent (as in the case of Jean-Charles de Mendes) implies that an individual is a terrorist.
People in the UK have responded to the Toy Story case with unbelieving shock and anger.

As an irrelevant aside, the suggestion that she was being culturally insensitive and should have known better is utterly mistaken. She was teaching in a Christian school, ffs. Any muslim parents who sent their kids there would have had to accept that they were getting taught by non-muslims. She was clearly English, so she brought her own culture and customs. that is part of the experience of immigrants across the whole world. It’s pretty clear – except to the neo-fascists who use anti-immigration as a rallying cry to bigots – that we all have much to learn (accept/reject) from other people’s backgrounds.

In any case, I can imagine few Muslim families in the UK would stop their children calling their soft toys whatever they chose. Suddenly, not calling your toys after muslim religious figures has become an article of Islamic faith. Have the five pillars of Islamnow become six?

Wikipedia says

The Five Pillars of Islam (Arabic: أركان الإسلام) is the term given to the five duties incumbent on every Muslim. These duties are Shahadah (profession of faith), Salah (ritual prayer), Zakah (alms tax), Sawm (fasting during Ramadan), and Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca)

If I were to add “non-blasphemous naming of soft toys” to the wiki entry, I suspect I’d have a fatwah on my ass before I’d left the page.