Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi met with Sudan’s Islamofascist leader, Omar al-Bashir, to secure the release of the blasphemous Gillian Gibbons (the teacher who let her students name a teddy bear) from a Sudanese prison. They succeeded, and Warsi wrote the following in an article for Daily Mail:

Negotiations on that Saturday were far from easy. We went from meetings with government officials to religious leaders.

Sensing double standards, the clerics asked about Muslim prisoners held without trial at Guantanamo Bay and the detention without trial of terror suspects in Britain. How could Britons talk of miscarriages of justice? At least, they said, the Sudanese had tried Gillian in a courtroom, where she was sentenced to 15 days in prison.

There is a lesson here. Britain must be scrupulous in upholding its values at home if it expects to occupy the moral high ground. Extending detention without trial, as Labour currently proposes, hardly sends the right signal.

Wow, even a piece about the rescue of British citizen is turned into something political.

Meanwhile, the persecuted teacher, Gillian Gibbons, blamed herself!

That’s right:

While Gibbons expressed incomprehension at how anyone could interpret her actions as intentionally insulting, she told the newspaper she blamed herself for the incident.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “Ignorance of the law is no defence.”

Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail and deportation after a seven-hour trial in Khartoum, a judgment that triggered outrage worldwide and embarrassed moderate Muslims in Britain and elsewhere.

This is a very telling statement, for it implies that Gibbons feels that one should not hold Muslims up to the same basic standards of acceptable human behavior as the rest of our species. She blames herself for forgetting that she is surrounded by overly-sensitive and violent fanatics who are just waiting to kill someone.

The Baroness also explains:

My first reaction upon reading about Gillian’s arrest in Sudan was: here we go again. This row had the potential to become another so-called clash of civilisations, like the fatwa against the author Selman Rushdie or the dispute over the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Yeah, about that…

What was it that Lord Ahmed said about Sir Salman Rushdie in June?

Oh! That’s right! He said this:

“This honour is given in recognition of services rendered to Great Britain. Salman Rushdie lives in New York. He is a controversial man who has insulted Muslim people, Christians and the British. He does not deserve the honour. Two weeks ago Tony Blair spoke about constructing bridges with Muslims. What hypocrisy? What would one say if the Saudi or Afghan governments honoured the martyrs of the September 11 attacks on the United States?”

I wonder why he didn’t compare Gibbons to Osama?

Here’s a video of Lord Ahmed weaseling his way around an interview. via LGF

[I'm having trouble embedding the video here, but it can be found via the link to LGF above.]