Media Lens , 18/12/2007

News that British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons had been jailed in Sudan after allowing her pupils to call a teddy bear Mohammed fed straight into the UK media’s hate factory and its “war for civilisation”.

The Gibbons story was mentioned in a massive 257 articles in UK national newspapers in the first week, providing an excuse to boost claims of “genocide” in Sudan in 10 of these.

The suffering in Sudan has certainly been appalling - it is estimated that the conflict has cost the lives of 100,000 people with two million made homeless. But Iraq is far worse - the occupation has so far resulted in the deaths of 1 million people with more than 4 million displaced from their homes. Whereas, over the last year, the term “genocide” has been used in 246 articles mentioning Sudan - many of these affirming that genocide has taken place - the results of the US-UK invasion of Iraq, and of the earlier sanctions regime, are essentially never described in similar terms.

To its credit, an Independent leader warned that it would be wrong “to treat Ms Gibbons' case, as some have done, as a harbinger of the supposedly inevitable clash between the ‘enlightened’ West and ‘primitive’ Islam”. (Leader, Ms Gibbons and a teddy bear named Mohamed,’ The Independent, November 30, 2007)

The advice was largely ignored, however. Following Gibbons’ release after eight days in jail, a December 4 Telegraph leader described how the “delight and mutual congratulations that have characterised the agreement between the Sudanese dictator and the British authorities... presents a nauseating picture”. The arrest being, after all, “testimony to the danger of allowing a rogue state to proceed unchecked”. (Leader, ‘Sudan’s grotesque stunt,’ Daily Telegraph, December 4, 2007)

Is Sudan, then, to replace Iraq as the third “rogue” member of the “axis of evil”? Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips appeared to recommend as much, writing a day earlier of how the teddy bear incident was “yet another symptom of the great onslaught being mounted against our civilisation and towards which not one inch of ground must be given if that civilisation is to survive“. (Phillips, ‘The teddy-bear teacher and Labour's spineless response to a rogue state that threatens us all ...,’ Daily Mail, December 3, 2007)

Such preposterous hyperbole belongs in the same category as Hitler's description of Czechoslovakia as "a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany". (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, on Power And Ideology - The Managua Lectures, South End Press, 1987, p.33)

Phillips was similarly outraged when 15 British sailors were “kidnapped” by an Iranian warship on March 23 while on patrol in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq. Then, she raged at “a military debacle for Britain - a self-inflicted humiliation at the hands of Iran, at a time when the mortal danger posed to the free world by this rogue state is increasing by the day“. (Phillips, ‘The real issue isn't Mr Bean selling his story. It's our utter humiliation by Iran,’ Daily Mail, April 16, 2007)

Iran was, of course, “steadily advancing towards its goal of obtaining nuclear weapons with which it is threatening to bring about the apocalypse it has been working towards for the past three decades”.

Like the rest of the media, Phillips later fell silent when evidence emerged suggesting that the British sailors had in fact strayed into Iranian waters, and had therefore not been “kidnapped” at all. On July 22, the UK Foreign Affairs Committee reported:

"We conclude that there is evidence to suggest that the map of the Shatt al-Arab waterway provided by the Government was less clear than it ought to have been. The Government was fortunate that it was not in Iran’s interests to contest the accuracy of the map.” (http://www.publications.parliament.uk
/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmfaff/880/880.pdf)

Martin Pratt, Director of Research at the International Boundaries Research Unit at Durham University, pointed out that the British government’s map was “certainly an oversimplification... it could reasonably be argued that it was deliberately misleading”. (Ibid)