Thanks to walker for alerting me to this phenomenon and, more properly, to the fact that it has a name. Dhimmi is the Sharia (Islamic law) term for the status of a non-Muslim in a Muslim state. While some emphasize the official toleration of non-Muslims as a virtue of Islamic society, others focus on the restrictions that apply.
‘Dhimmis, “protected people,” are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur’an’s command that they “feel themselves subdued” (Sura 9:29).’(Lost Budgie Blog )
Some see in particular “an ongoing initiative by some Muslims to force British society to conform to Islamic standards.” Here is a website that exists solely to chronicle the supposedly stunningly rapid advancement of the “mentality of dhimmi servitude” in the West. In particular, there have been ongoing battles over the offense taken by the displays of pig-related items including toys, piggy banks and images of Winnie the Pooh’s friend Piglet.British schools have removed or restricted access to “anti-Muslim” children’s books including The Three Little Pigs, Charlotte’s Web, the Olivia and Babe series. Animal Farm, of course, offends as well. Supposedly, an employee of an Orlando, FL Muslim-owned business was fired for eating a BLT sandwich. And one commenter warns that depictions of dogs are more offensive than those of pigs..
In evaluating all this, however, we should take a hint from the fact that much of this alarm emanates from the righthand side of the weblog world, not exactly bastions of tolerance. This is in the mold of the longstanding tendency of the right to lampoon the excesses of political correctness as if they make a mockery of all of free speech and tolerance. Especially in the wake of the London bombings in the UK, one can expect an incidence of fearful misjudgments and overreactions from some British magistrates and civil authorities. String together the most egregious examples, throw in a sprinkling of US parallels, ignore all counterexamples, and you can thoroughly obscure the distinctions between toleration of Muslims in a multicultural society and encouragement of intolerant extremism. This all smacks of Dubya’s fatuous insistence that “they hate us because we are free.” Radical Islamists stand far less of a chance of bringing down Western freedoms (such as they are) than these anti-Muslim jihadists; we’re doing it for them. In general, we in the West have much more to fear from anti-Muslim totalitarianism than the ugly spectre of the Muslim kind these writers depict.
