Alas, Europe
By Callimachus | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Religion, The WorldFirst, the straight news.
NOVELTY pig calendars and toys have been banned from a council office � in case they offend Muslim staff.
Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
See what sorts of things you miss when you take your eyes off Europe for a few minutes?
Sometimes it sneaks up on you: Americans are so accustomed to the idea that Europeans handle complex problems so much more assuredly than we do, because they’ve been doing everything so much longer than we have. It takes time for me to realize what I’m seeing here: European nations spluttering and floundering in the face of actually having to absorb an immigrant population — something America has been doing (bluntly, crudely, but effectively) since Day One. The French headscarf ban. The violence in Germany. Now this.
Lost Budgie notes how far the campaign has progressed.
Along with Winnie the Pooh, some British schools have also removed or restricted the following “anti-Muslim” children’s books…
The Three Little Pigs
Charlottes Web
Babe – The Sheep-pig
Cars and Trucks and Things That Go
Olivia Saves the Circus
Animal Farm
Mark Steyn weighs in:
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.
There’s a word for this kind of behavior — a printable word, that is: dhimmitude.
[Hat tip, The Adventuress]
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, the cinema has produced a movie that’s both a bomb and a hit.
Said is a suicide bomber in Nablus. Long trained for this job, he and his friend Khaled don’t hesitate a moment when their organization’s leader announces they’ve drawn the winning straw and will be allowed to stage a double mass murder the next day in Tel Aviv. (…)
The next day the friends start out and although Khled gets cold feet at the last moment, Said goes through with it and blows himself up with a bus load of Jews. Mission accomplished.
So much for the plot of the German-Dutch-French co-production “Paradise Now.”
(Full translation available at David’s indispensible site.)
The film won the audience award at this year’s Berlin film festival and was honored as best European film. Amnesty International honored it with a “peace prize” because the film is neither “lecturing nor moralizing.” A peace prize to a film in Germany about young men who blow up buses full of Jews. “Dhimmitude” doesn’t begin to cover it.
At least the author of the “Welt” article doesn’t fall for it. He describes the final scene:
But the film doesn’t show Said’s deed: Women without abdomens, men without heads, children without arms and legs, blood and guts in seats, burned pieces of flesh all over the place. Nothing about that: After panning past Said’s eyes the screen becomes bright and white and pure.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Religion, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 4th, 2005 at 4:00 am
It may be reassuring to try to glean a little schadenfreude from those cowards that didn’t support us in OIF (but ironically support us in Afghanistan), perhaps it would be nice to see Europe implode in itself from its’ liberalism and have the US save it again.
But isolated incidents like these do not represent the total picture. I live in Germany. I can tell you factually, the Turks are quite integrated in Germany, in most places, they date German women. I was in Paris last weekend, my hotel was in what you would call a “Muslim ghetto”. They knew I was a foreign tourist. They could care less. They didn’t discuss G.W. or Iraq or how they love wearing their caps or anything like that. I go to their shops, I bought my bottled water, and they said merci and au revoir.
Since a white kid from Oklahoma decides to make home made bombs and a trustifarian from CA is found in Afghanistan (John Walker) does that mean our college age youth are enlisting to Al-Qaeda in droves?
Perhaps you are getting the “elites” confused with the “masses.” I would argue our own US “elites” are just as bumbling and confused also.
October 4th, 2005 at 8:32 am
NOVELTY pig calendars and toys have been banned from a council office � in case they offend Muslim staff.
Isn’t this the same source for the “Officers must remove shoes before raids on muslim homes” story that was bouncing about a few months ago? So far as I can tell, it’s still the *only* source for it.
Doesn’t this make the needle on your BS detector budge just a bit?
October 4th, 2005 at 9:07 am
John said… “I can tell you factually, the Turks are quite integrated in Germany, in most places, they date German women.”
John… when Muslim-Turk women are ALLOWED to date German men, then you can say that integration is starting to happen in Germany. Sharia and the Koran has long encouraged Muslim men to marry infidel women. The other way around produces honor killing and rape – as any Google search will reveal in the first ten hits.
Side note to Donklephant…
Lost Budgie says hello to our Donklephant friends. Just thought I’d stop by as we are receiving many hits from your link to Lost Budgie.
Cheers!
Lost Budgie
Toronto, Canada
October 4th, 2005 at 10:42 am
“because they’ve been doing everything so much longer than we have”
What they have been doing much longer than we have with immigrants and minorities is gassing them or chasing them out. And we have all that same expereince, because, after all, we are them – at least us white guys.
October 4th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
Jim said, ” And we have all that same expereince, because, after all, we are them – at least us white guys.”
Oh Please! Spare me the “collective guilt of the white race” trip.
Good white Christians worked hard to end slavery starting over 200 years ago – while slavery is still endemic as an institution in the cradle of Islam and half a dozen Muslim countries. Try a couple of web searches if you have any doubts.
As far as “gassing” or “chasing out” minorities by evil people in various countries and at various times – how dare you try and lay that on me or my children because of our race. Are American blacks responsible for the murder and cannibalism in Rwanda?
Try reading a few books. I suggest you start with the autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – An American Slave”.
October 4th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Oops… Blew the link for Douglass’ book.
Try here.
October 4th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
Phillip J., it’s not the only source. You can see, for instance, the local newspaper article that this report appears to be based on, here:
http://www.expressandstar.com/articles/news/es/article_81092.php
Lost Budgie’s site has many links to related stories.
John, it’s my hope, too, as a lifelong Euro-phile, that the average European folks I’ve met in my travels remain a bit more level-headed and discerning than the elites — there as here.
October 5th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
Fair enough; I am recalibrating the BS detector.
October 5th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
Well it DOES read like parody, so it’s a valid question to ask. There’s a tendency among bloggers to stampede over items like this, and few will pause to look into sources. I dug enough to find a second source, and to determine that the council member quoted in the story was in fact a Dudley Council member (but the Onion uses real names, too). Still, you might expect more coverage on something like this, but then the lack of ink may reflect on those who own the ink.
What tipped it for me was seeing it cited as authentic on British opinoon sites that would have been close enough to the source to have smelled a rat if there was one. And in Steyn’s column, which appeared in the Telegraph.
October 21st, 2005 at 10:43 pm
[...] [Continued from here] This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 and is filed under Religion, Cartoons, In The News …. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]