The Last Year of the Pig

We may have seen the Year of the Pig fully celebrated in accordance with the Chinese calendar for the last time. References to pigs were banned in China's television advertising in 2007, the official Year of the Pig, to prevent offending the Muslim population. In Taiwan citizens were put on notice about using 'pig' postage stamps for mailings to Muslim countries or recipients.

Janet Levy in FrontPageMagazine.com writes comprehensively of the multitudinous ways in which today's Muslims are offended and spurred to protest, and how communities around the world are accommodating this veritable plague of Muslim religious demands.

Piggy banks, those charming inducements to fiscally conservative children (or maybe "youth"), are objects many of us remember very fondly. They have now been banned in the United Kingdom as marketing gifts by certain financial institutions. Pig calendars, toys and objects are increasingly disappearing from public offices and institutions. We are on our way to becoming a 'pig free' society, echoing other, far more extreme attempts to cleanse society of offending objects and subjects (see Caesar's burning of the incomparable Royal Library of Alexandria, Hitler's Juden-Rein vision for Europe, Pol Pot's evisceration of Cambodian intellectuals and China's effective decades-long dilution of Tibetan traditions and monasteries).

Target department stores in the United States have, in specific instances, allowed their Muslim check-out employees to excuse themselves when pork products are presented at their counters. Yet these same employees were well aware of Target's product selection when they applied for their jobs.

As I understand it, Jews, Hindus and vegetarians have little interest in pork products: many exclude pork from their daily diet with the same proficiency and commitment as many Muslims. How do they operate checkouts at supermarkets, drive taxis, receive piggy banks as gifts and visit government offices replete with pig paraphernalia without protest? How have they managed for decades at our schools and universities without kosher and meatless cafeterias? Why are they not insulted by the many references to pigs in our multicultural society? Are they any less serious about their religion, any less observant and sincere in their beliefs? Of course not.

It seems, in a kind of reverse idolatry, that the Islamists have imbued the pig, in all its physical and symbolic manifestations, with a kind of mystical evilness, a negative energy of boundless proportions. It's not only the ingestion of the pig that is now taboo - it is also its very existence in any manifestation of this inverse deity from hell.

It is not yet scientifically proven that the solid molecules of pig meat can migrate from inside hermetically sealed packages onto the hands of the employees at the checkout counters. Are Target's Hindu employees unknowingly walking around with contaminated hands - are they irrevocably compromised? Will they forever be impure in the eyes of the Muslim community?

Seemingly, these offended Muslims not only want to distance themselves from pork and other disagreeable pig-issues, they are also refusing to allow non-Muslims their own beliefs, their own preferences. This imposition of personal views onto others is more clearly a (rather fascistic) political statement than a religious one. Indeed, radical Islam is becoming, in its various expressions, a far more political ideology than the private and personal religion that is typical for the average orthodox Jew, Christian or observant Hindu.

The old adage "Live and let live," an eminently civilized tenet of the Western World, is a concept that seems to have no place among the more radical Muslim communities, both inside and outside the West.

Is this because these Islamists believe that only their views have any validity, that only their religion has any value? Is it because only their god inhabits this world, or that their concern is only for their own people, religion, or domination? The Western World is bending over backwards in a multi-cultural orgy of inclusiveness to welcome all people, all sects and all religions. In particular Muslims are to be treated with exceptional sensitivity and understanding in a (vain) attempt to defuse anticipated protests.

It seems however, to be a one-sided love affair. Radical Islamists by contrast want very little to do with our world. They would impose their beliefs on us, forcing ever-increasing changes and accommodations. Yet they prefer to live and keep apart, remaining un-integrated and separate until such time as Islam becomes dominant and all non-Muslims are subverted to the overpowering will of Islam. Where is the reciprocity, the appreciation of a free, modern and democratic society? The Irish, the Vietnamese, Koreans and Russians have all integrated, have all respected us as we now respect them and their traditions. They were aghast at the tragedy of September 11th. We still await however any declarations of sympathy for the victims, any castigations for the perpetrators, from the Radical Islamists and their representatives.

Does it have to remain one-sided? Why is it that our liberal preferences have to be subverted to the will of an illiberal minority? Why does it remain highly problematic for a mini-skirted woman with a Pekinese and a bottle of scotch to hail a taxi, a Muslim taxi, at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport?

The Three Little Pigs, that traditional English story, has now been banned in a primary school in England. Another school in the United Kingdom specifically excluded stories about the talking pig "Babe" and other pig stories. These and other incidents represent, in fact, expressions of potentially self-destructive cultural hypersensitivity on behalf of Muslims. Buddhists are not catered to, neither are Orthodox Jews, Animists, Baha'is, Shintos, Hindus, vegans, nor every other ethnic, cultural or religious minority, many of whom also have strong views and delicate sensibilities. Who decided that Muslim sensitivities were deeper and stronger than all others? Perhaps the vociferousness of the complaints, perhaps the fear emanating from the many media reports of suicide bombers in New York, London and Madrid, has patently colored our motivations, our compromises and our accommodations.

It seems that we are ever more focused on healing the emotional wounds of the angry rather than formulating pragmatic practices to cope with increasingly dangerous "creeping Shariah," Islamic radicals and Jihadist coalitions. Appeasement may be defined - given the actions of many of our politicians listed above - as the rewarding of others for their bad behavior.

It is ironic that the Koran itself is replete with references to pigs, often in a particularly derogatory light where Jews are concerned. For example:

Verse 5:60: "those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil"

The 10th Century commentator Al-Tabari, referencing Verse 5:112-115, says of those who commit blasphemy that they were turned into apes and pigs. [3]

In April 2002, Sheik Tantawi, the highest ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world called the Jews "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs." [1]

Sheik Al-Sudayyis, imam at the Al-Haraam mosque, the most important in Mecca, sermonized that "Jews are the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs." [2]

If Jews are pigs, is it inconceivable to imagine a world where stories about Jews and Zionists are banned since they certainly offend much of the Muslim population? Israel already has ceased to exist on many Muslim and Arab world maps and in many of their school textbooks.

Orthodox Jews have never marched for kosher cafeterias. They privately and quietly arrange their dietary habits without voluble demands. In contrast, we in America now know that a youngster in Maine was suspended from school in early 2007 for the 'hate crime' of placing a lunch box with ham in front of Muslim students. It used to be that the label hate crime was reserved for beatings, rapes, murders and the like. No more - ham sandwiches and Danish cartoons rank in the pantheon of hate crimes with lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan and the July 2006 shootings by a Muslim at a Jewish community center in Seattle.

FeedthePig.org is an innovative new website designed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It encourages 40 million Americans age 25-34 to take control of their personal finances through a savings campaign, courtesy of Benjamin Bankes, the website mascot. Is AICPA aware of the provocative insult their website presents to some Muslims; are they prepared for future attempts by Shariah proponents to ban Benjamin from the web?

Will the Quran replace George Orwell's Animal Farm as required reading, as Janet Levy fears? What would the Super Bowl be without pork rinds? As Levy further notes in her FrontPage article, pork products include heart valves and skin grafts for burn victims, never mind $40 billion in contributions to the US GNP. Would these heart patients and burn victims be banned from Muslim communities - would Muslims refuse to do business with them? The implications would be most comedic if they weren't in fact frighteningly realistic. Sharia law or democratic law - the choice remains ours.

Footnotes:
[1] http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR01102#_
[2] http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR01102#_
[3] http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR01102#_

Published on Canada Free Press: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3656
Published on The Absurd Report: http://www.theabsurdreport.com/2008/the-last-year-of-the-pig-by-leslie-j-sacks/
Published on The Investigative Project on Terrorism: http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/683