Teddy bear's picnic

In connection with the case of Gillian Gibbons, in a Sudanese jail for her alleged insult to Islam in the naming of a teddy bear, the Guardian has an instructive editorial today. Here's the key passage:

This sad little Sudanese tale is part of a larger story, from the Rushdie affair to the storm over the Danish cartoons, in which some Muslims, and some Muslim governments, seem to be almost searching for slights and fights, to be almost determined to be insulted, pushing aside those ready to take a more tolerant and relaxed view.

There are objective reasons why Muslims are now more prickly about their rights and about what non-Muslims say about them than they used to be. But the resulting process is one in which the lines which non-Muslims must not cross are being repeatedly redefined, always more restrictively, at times with dire penalties threatened. The majority of Muslims may be much less concerned than the activists and radicals, but it is the activists and radicals who often set the pace. This constant raising of the bar does not increase respect for Islam but instead makes it appear coercive and threatening. In Sudan, it is not the bear which is of little brain.

What is instructive about this is the way in which the paper that has made such a specialism of root-causes 'understanding' these past few years here gestures towards it once again, this time to retreat from it. There are 'objective reasons', it tells us, for the sort of sensitivities that have now once again, in the case of Gillian Gibbons, been activated. Yet, instead of being urged to understand sympathetically or to reflect on who else might be at fault in the case than the relevant Sudanese authorities, the Guardian's leader-writer simply cuts to a blunt conclusion: not to put too fine a point on it, their action is brainless, without justification. Nice to have a lesson in not making feeble excuses from the newspaper that has been so full of them.

But what is the secret of the variation? It's a very simple one: the causal reference ('objective reasons') is exculpatory or mitigating only when you want it to be, and not otherwise.