As a matter of principle I expect of everybody to respect the laws of the country they live in or leave it. Even if you spend your holidays wherever, you are obliged to respect the laws just as much as we would expect anyone visiting our country to abide by our rules. So if you do not want to be whipped for drinking alcohol, you better not visit Saudi Arabia.

We ask the very same of everybody in our society, which more or less is a Judeo-Christian, and of everybody visiting our society. We demand everybody to refrain from the abominable practice of female genital cutting (female circumcision) or giving children into forced marriages.

Also we do not stand by when - in our eyes - ultra-traditional men from Turkey or Pakistan commit so called honour killings - plain murders in our sight - because they feel that their sisters or daughters or nieces have tainted their honour or reputation by choosing to exercise their right to explore a free, sensual sexuality with the men they are attracted to. We do not tolerate these practices even if we can clearly see, that the action was consistent with social values fully accepted in the homelands of those culprits.

We send them to prison, apply our laws and we are right in doing so: it is our society, the freest society our planet has yet seen, and I am very glad, we do not allow any foreign government to interfere with our judicial system and the rigid separation of government and religion.

On the other hand, we very easily feel superior, because we seemingly condemn such behaviour, even make it illegal - but let me remind us: our image suffered heavily since Abu Ghraib. The so called ‘civilized’ world is considering torture as a valid means of interrogation again and shows a clintoneon attitude when solemnly banning torture whilst allowing ‘water boarding’. Or as it is the case in Germany, rebuke the US for applying torture publicly and at the very same time our government turns over to the CIA those people we like to be interrogated ‘harshly’.

So - as much as I hate to say it - the British teacher should have been aware of the religiously charged atmosphere in Sudan, a country, where female genital cutting still is prevalent, a country, where you are subjected to the Shariah, the religious law of Islam. It is a sorry law or may be a sorry understanding of the law, but we must abide by it, when in an Islamic country.

And we have been warned. The Danish caricatures did not amuse the Islamic world and obviously, they have no heart for children and teddy bears.

But honestly: would we take notice, if the teacher concerned were a Sudanese woman? Where is the outcry over all the other people suffering under those conditions? Our outrage is very pretentious, we do not object to the practice as such but to the fact, that a white, anglo-saxon person is subjected to it. This is clear racist hypocrisy.

We even arrogate the right to tell an independent, sovereign nation how to apply the Sudanese law. That is not for us. We may not like their laws, even oppose them or fight them were we can - but if we do not allow them to mess up our system, we have to respect theirs. Everything else is colonialism.

I am surely not an advocate of Islamic Law and as much as I detest corporal punishment I do ask the question: Is it really better - instead of whipping someone - to send him/her to jail, where prisoners are subjected to physical threads and gang rape? Are we not just closing our eyes? Is our prison system really better?

Incidents like these proof how much a personality like the reformer Martin Luther is needed to adjust this tribal religion and free it from customs, views and teachings derived from a long lost time and thus allowing it to bloom into the modern religion of peace Islam claims to be.

Without risking my life - at least in good, old Europe - I can discuss with every Christian I know, whether Jesus Christ is a God, the God or the Son of God or maybe simply a human being that possibly even didn’t exist, and at the very same time,  it is not possible to call an innocent child’s teddy bear Muhammad in Sudan.

Shame on you!

Religious tolerance is always to extent our religious beliefs and practices no further than our epidermis - the outermost layer of our skin. It is imperative to strictly restrict our religious claims to our own person and I’m inclined to think, that we even have to spare our own children. Let us not them mess up. They will find their way. Religious tolerance let’s everybody believe, what they choose to believe, and it is the fundamentalists of all colours and beliefs, that speak otherwise.

As for Mrs Gibbons, I wish her well and may she be relieved without charges and return home - wherever that is - safely and unhurt. I find no fault in her actions.

But at the very same moment I see that young Turkish men and his father, who killed their sister and daughter, because she refused to go back and marry the men, her father had chosen for her. None of them denied the crime, none of them accepted guilt, both feel it was their duty to commit the murder and they are respected for it - in their homeland. They have been convicted for manslaughter in Germany and will spend the next fifteen years in a German prison.

Well done!