Puppy Manages to Outrage Brit Muslims

John O'Sullivan today shares another story of Muslims forcing Western people to live like Muslim's for sake of Muslim sensibilities.

In a campaign to promote their non-emergency phone number, the Tayside (Dundee area, Scotland) police featured an irresistibly cute German shepherd puppy on a postcard advertising the phone number. O'Sullivan tells us that "a local Muslim councillor...pointed out that Muslims considered dogs ritually unclean and asked for a police apology. The Tayside police promptly conceded that they should have consulted their 'diversity officer.' ...[T]he police withdrew the ad, and everyone agreed to be more sensitive in the future." But he presents the situation as a few radicals stirring up strife and division. If only those in charge would stand up to this power play and to the left wing cultural anthropologists who stand blindly and suicidally behind it.

If you go the story in Britain's Daily Mail, however, you get a fuller picture. Always go to the source!

First, the Muslim city counciller is Mohammed Asif who said, 'My concern was that it's not welcomed by all communities, with the dog on the cards." Councillor Asif is also a member of the Tayside Joint Police Board and he raised the matter with Mr Vine at a meeting of the board.

What the story calls a postcard appears to be a cardboard sign that was distributed to local businesses to display in their shop windows. The statement in the story that the image of the dog, considered ritually unclean by Muslims, on the cards "has sparked such anger that some shopkeepers in Dundee have refused to display the advert." The statement is ambiguous in its meaning. At first I thought it was the Scottish shopkeepers that feared violent reprisals from Muslim neighbors, but there does not appear to be reason to go beyond understanding simply that Muslim shopkeepers were angry that the police would insensitively ask them to post this image in their store windows, and they refused to comply with the request. Well, that's understandable.

Councillor Asif said, "People who have shops just won't put up the postcard. But the police have said to me that it was simply an oversight and they did not seek to offend or upset."

Of course, there is no reason that the rest of the Dundee area can't use the signs. O'Sullivan appears to be right that the police timidly overreacted. Bernard Lewis points out in What Went Wrong that it is hard for a strict Muslim to live in a non-Muslim land, a land not governed by Sharia law. There is a certain kind of Muslim (by far most American Muslims are not of this sort) that will constantly crow about violations of Islamic Sharia law by the wider non-Muslim society until the Western majority has submitted itself ("Islam" means submission) to Sharia law, effectively transforming itself into an Islamic state. While making the sort of concessions that civil decency requires, Western democracies will otherwise have to stand up to such demands and in so doing help these recent arrivals understand the liberal character of the world in which they have chosen to live and, yes, its Christian character.

On this last point, see Without Roots: the West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and Marcello Pera, president of the Italian Senate.

You can still follow the Puppy Training Diary on the Special Units page of the Tayside police website.