Pandering to political correctness has its funny moments.

 

Seems that everyone knows that Muslims hate everything about pigs. Some die-hard mosque opponents had once suggested that the best way to prevent a mosque from being built was to poison the land with pigs blood and even a buried dead pig. England has almost three times the Muslim population as the United States so the Muslims there have more influence. So protecting their religious sensibilities often becomes more obvious, sometimes to the point of absurdity. The UK Daily Mail has this story on their web site about a British toy company that makes a childhood learning kit of a toy farm and the animals found there. The farm set used to have a pig but some Muslims were offended so the toy company removed it.

Early Learning Centre bans toy pig from farmyard set for fear of offending Muslims (but keeps sty and oink noise)
By Louise Eccles
Last updated at 2:51 PM on 16th November 2010

A children's shop has removed toy pigs from farmyard sets in case they offend Muslims and Jews.

The Early Learning Centre ditched the pig from its HappyLand Goosefeather Farm toy set after it upset some customers.

One mother realised the pig was missing from the set she bought for her daughter’s birthday when she found a pig sty and a button that made oinking noises, but no pig.

The interactive set, which also has a chicken, a horse, a cow and a sheep, makes the animal noises when buttons are pressed.

When the mother complained, she was told in an email: ‘Previously the pig was part of the Goosefeather Farm. However due to customer feedback and religious reasons this is no longer part of the farm.’
In some religions, pigs are seen as unclean.

Last night, the retailer did a U-turn and agreed to bring back the pigs after disappointed families complained at such a move driven by political correctness.

The angry mother, named only as Caroline, told The Sun newspaper: ‘This is political correctness gone loopy. Surely if someone has an issue with a toy they don’t agree with then they don’t buy it.’

This wasn’t the first time that pigs were found to be so controversial in Great Britain. The renowned expert on Islam, Robert Spencer, wrote a story in Front Page magazine  five years ago about pigs disappearing all over England. Here is part of that almost humorous account.

Britain's War on Pigs By: Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, October 06, 2005

Pigs are disappearing all over England, but not because of some porcine variant of Mad Cow Disease: rather, the most implacable foe of the swine is turning out to be multiculturalism.

The latest assault came in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, where employees were told that they were no longer allowed to have any representations of pigs at their desks. Some had little porcine porcelain figurines. Others had toys or calendars of cute little pigs. One had a tissue box depicting Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. All of this had to go, not because of new some new anti-kitsch ordinance, but because Muslims might be offended — particularly now, what with Ramadan beginning. How could a pious Muslim in the Dudley Council, West Midlands benefits department redouble his efforts to conform his life to the will of Allah with all these…pigs staring him in the face? It was an insult!

This was not the first anti-pig initiative in Britain. In Derby, Muslims took offense at plans to restore the statue of the Florentine Boar, which had stood in the Derby Park for over a hundred years before it was decapitated by a German bomb in 1942. Recent plans to rebuild the Boar’s head ran into resistance from local Muslims. Suman Gupta, a local Council member, warned: “If the statue of the boar is put back at the Arboretum I have been told that it will not be there the next day, or at least it won’t be in the same condition the next day at least. We should not have the boar because it is offensive to some of the groups in the immediate area.” However, after more than 2,000 locals signed petitions in favor of the Boar, local authorities decided to bend to public opinion and go ahead with their original plans to restore the statue.

Why have pigs become so unpopular in Britain? Mahbubur Rahman, a Muslim Councillor in West Midlands, summed it up in explaining why the toy pigs had to go: “It’s a tolerance,” he said, “of people’s beliefs.”

How’s that again? It’s “a tolerance of people’s beliefs” to deny to others the right to display harmless pictures and figurines? Mahbubur Rahman seems unacquainted with the dictum, widely attributed to Voltaire, that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet this is what tolerance really is: the acceptance of the fact that in a free society, some will do and say things of which one may disapprove, and that one has no consequent right to command or force them to stop. If this is not recognized in any given society, that society is not in fact free at all — any more than Henry Ford’s offer that “You can have a car in any color you want, as long as it’s black” represented a genuine choice.

For Rahman instead to equate a British capitulation to Muslim sensibilities with tolerance indicates that he has confused Islamic supremacism with tolerance. This is perhaps not surprising given the near-universal tendency among Muslims and non-Muslims alike to laud Medieval Muslim Spain as a proto-multiculturalist paradise of tolerance, when actually it was a paradise for Islamic supremacists. Christians and Jews lived in harmony with Muslims only as inferiors. Historian Kenneth Baxter Wolf notes that the after the Muslim conquest, the conquerors imposed new laws “aimed at limiting those aspects of the Christian cult which seemed to compromise the dominant position of Islam.” After enumerating a standard list of the laws restricting non-Muslims (dhimmis) — no building of new churches, no holding authority over Muslims, distinctive clothing, etc. — he adds: “Aside from such cultic restrictions most of the laws were simply designed to underscore the position of the dimmîs as second-class citizens.”

Multiculturalism? Tolerance? Not by any modern standard. And neither are the disappearing pigs of Great Britain.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.

Also today comes a story on the very politically incorrect web site Sheikyermami about a shootout that took place between two Muslim religious leaders, What makes it funny is that Islam is supposed to be the Religion of Peace.

Religion of gun-fighting clerics

    QUETTA, Pakistan — A shootout inside a mosque in southwestern Pakistan wounded 18 people Wednesday in a dispute over who should lead prayers for one of Islam’s most important holidays, police said. (Canadian Press)

    Don’t judge this too harshly. After all, don’t we hear about shootouts in churches all the time, over who has to clean up after the potluck supper, or who gets to be head of the parish council? Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes, It’s Really A Religion of Peace Update: “Pakistan mosque shootout leaves 18 injured,” from the Associated Press, November 17:

        A shootout in a mosque in south-western Pakistan, caused by a dispute over who should lead prayers on one of Islam’s most important holidays, has left 18 people injured, police said today.Followers of the two rival religious leaders pulled out weapons and began shooting after arguing over which one should start Eid al-Adha prayers at a small mosque in the Khuzdar district of Baluchistan province, Javed Ahmed, a police official, said….

    And given the ever-present journalistic imperative to whitewash Islam, AP hastens to assure us that this is not the norm in a paragraph that would never find a counterpart in a story about a pedophile priest or money-grubbing evangelist:

        Millions of people throughout Pakistan have been peacefully celebrating Eid al-Adha….

    Oh, well, then!