Gillian Gibbons was arrested yesterday in Khartoum after she let her class of 7 year old students name a class teddy bear Muhammad. She was arrested for blasphemy and faces 40 lashes or 6 months in jail.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, was arrested at at Khartoum’s Unity High School yesterday, and accused of insulting the Prophet of Islam.

Her colleagues said that they feared for her safety after reports that groups of young men had gathered outside the Khartoum police station where she was taken and were shouting death threats.

The Unity school is a Christian-run but multi-racial and co-educational private school that is popular with Sudanese professionals and expatriate workers.

Is this sick or what? I’m getting so tired of people apologizing for the religion of Islam. It is what it is. A religion of violence. Islam might be a “religion of peace”, but, the radicals of the religion have turned it into something much different. People are killed, tortured, put in jail and terrorized every day in the name of Islam. We do not live in the middle ages, we live in the year 2007 and it’s time for the people that practice this religion to join the rest of the world in the year 2007. The moderates, if there are any, of the religion need to step up and have their voices heard because the radicals are the only voices that are being heard now.

The sad part about this whole incident was that it involves 7 year old children who don’t know any better. The teacher was just teaching, and the loony Islamic police arrested her for insulting Islam. Give me a break!

n September, she asked a girl to bring in her teddy bear to help the class focus and then asked the children to name the toy.

“They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad. Then she explained what it meant to vote and asked them to choose the name,” Boulos said.

Twenty out of the 23 children chose Muhammad. Each child was allowed to take the bear home for weekends and asked to kepp a diary about what they did with the toy. Each entry was collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover, next to the message “My name is Muhammad.”

Boulos said that the bear itself was not marked or labeled with the name in any way, adding that Sudanese police had now seized the book and asked to interview the 7-year-old girl who brought in the bear.

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, unfortunately.