Joseph Loconte: "Teddy Bear Totalitarianism"

The British teacher who was jailed in Sudan after naming a teddy bear Mohammed is now home in England, having received a pardon from the president of Sudan. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Joseph Loconte is not impressed with the less-than-Churchillian reponses from the West:

Well-intentioned responses like these don't make them any less insensible or misleading. Reassurances about respect for Islam fail to see the violent irrationality of the mob in Khartoum for what it was: an expression of barbarism, shamelessly cloaked in religious garb. Complaints about a "disproportionate response" by the Sudanese government fatuously imply that some sort of punishment was justified. Moreover, it is not "unfortunate" that Sudan's political and religious establishment stoked the embers of sectarian blood-lust: It is a ghoulish throwback to the Inquisition.