Re: Sudan - not out of the woods yet.

In message <yqmdnYxqpMCn7czanZ2dnUVZ8umdnZ2d@xxxxxx>, Rob <rsvptorob-newsREMOVE@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Richard Miller wrote:
|||
||
|| The teacher in Sudan did an act that was criminal under the law she
|| is operating under. Particularly after all the fuss about the Danish
|| cartoons, she surely couldn't have been ignorant of the fact that you
|| don't mess around with the name of the Prophet.

Leaving aside the fact that it was the children and not her who named the
bear, whether in someone's subjective opinion she actually broke the law
remains open to question, just as some convictions would over here. In any
half decent legal system, at minimum some intent would almost certainly be a
requirement. Even in the UK, despite our own imperfect system, you would be
hard pressed to find someone convicted of something similarly subjective,
eg. public order offences, indecency, etc. without the accused having
knowingly and deliberately pushed at the accepted limits of behaviour.

Calling a police horse gay? Eating a sandwich while driving? And then all those ASBOs and their breaches. I don't think our system is as bad as Sudan, but it still throws up some very subjective and petty examples. Recent laws have tended to be far, far too subjective.


|| The "Lyrical Terrorist" wrote some crap poetry, posted on her website
|| that she wanted to be a terrorist and downloaded some
|| easily-available stuff off the Internet. Even one of the jury did
|| not agree that she had done anything that justified the label of
|| criminality. It is nothing more than the bragging of any rather
|| immature individual to make themselves feel big and clever. If she
|| was a white kid in the context of animal rights or just general
|| ennui, people would just say "Yeah, whatever" and ignore it, not
|| haul her up in Court and jail her. --

Whether or not there should have been a prosecution in your example is a
separate argument (I would say not) - but you surely can't believe that both
women have contributed to their own downfall to the same degree. I do not
believe that this single innocent mistake shows Gillian Gibbons to have done
anything that she thought was wrong or might cause offence to anyone. I am
not alone in that, Many Muslims from around the world seem to agree with me.


I do take your point. The Lyrical Terrorist was deliberately being provocative, whereas the teacher was just foolishly ignorant. But I don't think either of them did anything to justify being dragged into the criminal justice system. I think we are closer to the unreasonable approach taken in Sudan than your original comments suggested. Certainly close enough that we should be careful about making any "could never happen here" comments.
--
Richard Miller
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