[Klug-general] How's this for Political Correctness gone mad?

[Sue Casely]

This story is in today's Daily Telegraph.
Heavens above!!!!


Making a pig's ear of defending democracy
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 04/10/2005)

A year and a half ago, I mentioned in this space the Florentine Boar,
a famous piece of porcine statuary in Derby that the council had
decided not to have repaired on the grounds that it would offend
Muslims. Having just seen Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which Porky
Pig mentions en passant that Warner Bros has advised him to lose the
stammer, I wondered if for the British release it might be easier just
to lose the pig.

Alas, the United Kingdom's descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody.
Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now
announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work
pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and "pig-related items" will
be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee's box of tissues,
because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
And, as we know, Muslims regard pigs as "unclean", even an
anthropomorphised cartoon pig wearing a scarf and a bright, colourful
singlet.

Cllr Mahbubur Rahman is in favour of the blanket pig crackdown. "It is
a good thing, it is a tolerance and acceptance of their beliefs and
understanding," he said. That's all, folks, as Porky Pig used to
stammer at the end of Looney Tunes. Just a little helpful proscription
in the interests of tolerance and acceptance.

And where's the harm in that? As Pastor Niemöller said, first they
came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney
character and, if I was, I'm more of an Eeyore.

And aren't we all? When the Queen knights a Muslim "community leader"
whose line on the Rushdie fatwa was that "death is perhaps too easy",
and when the Prime Minister has a Muslim "adviser" who is a
Holocaust-denier and thinks the Iraq war was cooked up by a conspiracy
of Freemasons and Jews, and when the Prime Minister's wife leads the
legal battle for a Talibanesque dress code in British schools, you
don't need a pig to know which side's bringing home the bacon.

A couple of years ago, when an anxious-to-please head teacher in
Batley was banning offensive "pig-centred books", Inayat Bunglawala of
the Muslim Council of Britain commented that "there is absolutely no
scriptural authority for this view. It is a misunderstanding of the
Koranic instruction that Muslims may not eat pork." Mr Bunglawala is a
typical "moderate" Muslim - he thinks the British media are
"Zionist-controlled", etc - but on the pig thing he's surely right. It
seems unlikely that even the exhaustive strictures of the Koran would
have a line on Piglet.

So these little news items that pop up every week now are significant
mostly as a gauge of the progressive liberal's urge to self-abase and
Western Muslims' ever greater boldness in flexing their political
muscle.

After all, how daffy does a Muslim's willingness to take offence have
to be to get rejected out of court? Only the other day, Burger King
withdrew its ice-cream cones from its British restaurants because Mr
Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe, after a trip to the Park Royal branch,
complained that the creamy swirl on the lid resembled the word "Allah"
in Arabic script.

It doesn't, not really, not except that in the sense any twirly motif
looks vaguely Arabic. After all, Burger King isn't suicidal enough to
launch Allah Ice-Cream. But, after Mr Akhtar urged Muslims to boycott
the chain and claimed that "this is my jihad", Burger King yanked the
ice-cream and announced that, design-wise, it was going back to the
old drawing-board.

Offence is, by definition, in the eye of the beholder. I once toured
the Freud Museum with the celebrated sex therapist Dr Ruth, who
claimed to be able to see a penis in every artwork and piece of
furniture in the joint. Yet, when I suggested one sculpture looked
vaguely like the female genitalia, she scoffed mercilessly.

Likewise, Piglet is deeply offensive and so's your chocolate
ice-cream, but if a West End play opens with a gay Jesus, Christians
just need to stop being so doctrinaire and uptight. The Church of
England bishops would probably agree with that if, in their own
misguided attempt at Islamic outreach, they weren't so busy
apologising for toppling Saddam.

When every act that a culture makes communicates weakness and loss of
self-belief, eventually you'll be taken at your word. In the long
term, these trivial concessions are more significant victories than
blowing up infidels on the Tube or in Bali beach restaurants. An act
of murder demands at least the pretence of moral seriousness, even
from the dopiest appeasers. But small acts of cultural vandalism
corrode the fabric of freedom all but unseen.

Is it really a victory for "tolerance" to say that a council worker
cannot have a Piglet coffee mug on her desk? And isn't an ability to
turn a blind eye to animated piglets the very least the West is
entitled to expect from its Muslim citizens? If Islam cannot
"co-exist" even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King
ice-cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic
principles of a pluralist society? As A A Milne almost said: "They're
changing guard at Buckingham Palace/ Her Majesty's Law is replaced by
Allah's."

By the way, isn't it grossly offensive to British Wahhabis to have a
head of state who is female and uncovered?

I doubt whether the Post Office will be in any rush to issue another
set of Pooh commemorative stamps, or the BBC to revive Pinky and
Perky. Forty years ago, Britain's Islamic minority didn't have the
numbers to ban Piglet and change the Burger King menu. Now they do.
What will be deemed "unacceptable" in the interests of "tolerance" in
20 or even five years' time?

It has been clear since July 7 that the state has no real idea what to
do to reconcile the more disaffected elements of its fastest-growing
demographic. But at some point Britons have to ask themselves - while
they're still permitted to discuss the question more or less freely -
how much of their country they're willing to lose. The Hundred-Acre
Wood is not the terrain on which one would choose to make one's stand,
but from here on in it is only going to become more difficult.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/10/04/do0402.xml

(c) Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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Sue C