Terrorism a Prerequisite for Religious Respect?
Getting back to the IKEA flap from last week:
Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is guilty of sex discrimination by showing only men putting together furniture in its instruction manuals, Norway's prime minister says.
IKEA, which has more than 200 stores in 32 nations, fears it might offend Muslims by depicting women assembling everything from cupboards to beds. Its manuals show only men or cartoon figures whose sex is unclear.
Like Ed Morrissey and Michelle Malkin, I couldn't give a frog's fat leg about the gender of the cartoon people in IKEA's assembly instructions, or the offense that Norway's idiot PM takes at the absence of women in their number. Frankly, I think it's a pretty sad indication of what a backwater Scandanavia must be if Norway's head of government has nothing better to do than monitor such picayune minutia as this.
What does concern me is twofold:
1) What does it say about the inexorable Islamicization of even Northern Europe that a furniture chain like IKEA is feeling sufficiently intimidated as to sanitize their instruction manuals per Koranic dictates?
...and...
2) Why is there such bending-over-backwards ubiquituous attention paid to Muslim religious sensibilities, even in the United States, at the very same time that atheist groups are trying to stamp out every last public vestige of Christian religious expression?
IKEAgate came to mind when I heard Rush Limbaugh bring up a similar situation at Dell Computer on his Friday program:
Try this one, ladies and gentlemen. "A national Muslim organization says it wants to mediate with Dell Inc, over 30 Somali workers who are at the center of a dispute over prayer at work." Now, strap yourselves in on this. "The Council on American and Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C. sent an e-mail and letter yesterday to Dell president and chief executive Kevin B. Rollins--" this is in the Boston Globe today, "--after the Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, reported that the workers walked off their jobs last month because they were forced to 'choose between their faith and their employment.' The workers, who loaded boxes or operated forklifts at Dell’s Nashville plant, requested time off to pray at sunset and were told they could not, said Ibrahim Hooper, executive director of the council. Dell spokesman T.R. Reid said the Texas-based computer manufacturing firm has a longstanding policy of accommodating workers of different religious faiths. He said Dell is working with the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission in Nashville 'to better understand and resolve the issue.'"
Now, here we have the ACLU, civil rights group, litigating all over America to ban Judeo-Christian religious symbols from the public square, no prayer in school, and if somebody did try to pray at work, you know there would be hell to pay for that. Now we have private companies being pressured by other groups to accommodate the religious practices of others than the Judeo-Christian religious ethic....here you have the ACLU trying to ban any reference to the Judeo-Christian God throughout all walks of America. Here comes another group demanding that Muslims be allowed to pray on the job. It's just the twilight zone. Hello? Parallel universe.
It certainly is an appalling contrast and an outrageous double-standard. But it prompts me to ask why the Christophobes are so tolerant of, and even friendly to, Muslims. Is it a subconscious fear of terrorist retribution if they heap as much hostility and bigotry on the followers of Mohommed as they do on the followers of Jesus Christ? Is it multiculturalism run amok? Or is it a shared hatred of Jews and Christians (i.e. "the people of the Book"), even to the degree that ACLUniks sympathize with the ultimate goals of al Qaeda (as long as they get exempted from them, of course - heh, heh, and heh...)?
This, in turn, harkens back to the whole pathetic Giuliana Sgrena episode, another Western leftie who thought her blanket hostility to the "Great Satan" would make her a heroine to the "insurgents" in Iraq. And as her endlessly changing story illustrates, she hasn't learned a blessed thing from the whole misbegotten experience.
Almost makes you wonder whether some, shall we say, "Christian militancy" is the way to earn radical secularist "street cred." Almost, that is, until you remember that that is precisely one of the smears hurled at people of faith every time some nutbag shoots up an abortuary.
I guess the difference is the Islazis know why they hate the West and what they're trying to accomplish, and are willing to do anything to attain that goal, even if the goal itself (a global eighth-century caliphate) makes pipedreams seem ridiculously accessible. Comm-symps just hate their own country and the political opponents they cannot defeat for hate's own sake.
Call it "Sgrena Syndrome."
Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is guilty of sex discrimination by showing only men putting together furniture in its instruction manuals, Norway's prime minister says.
IKEA, which has more than 200 stores in 32 nations, fears it might offend Muslims by depicting women assembling everything from cupboards to beds. Its manuals show only men or cartoon figures whose sex is unclear.
Like Ed Morrissey and Michelle Malkin, I couldn't give a frog's fat leg about the gender of the cartoon people in IKEA's assembly instructions, or the offense that Norway's idiot PM takes at the absence of women in their number. Frankly, I think it's a pretty sad indication of what a backwater Scandanavia must be if Norway's head of government has nothing better to do than monitor such picayune minutia as this.
What does concern me is twofold:
1) What does it say about the inexorable Islamicization of even Northern Europe that a furniture chain like IKEA is feeling sufficiently intimidated as to sanitize their instruction manuals per Koranic dictates?
...and...
2) Why is there such bending-over-backwards ubiquituous attention paid to Muslim religious sensibilities, even in the United States, at the very same time that atheist groups are trying to stamp out every last public vestige of Christian religious expression?
IKEAgate came to mind when I heard Rush Limbaugh bring up a similar situation at Dell Computer on his Friday program:
Try this one, ladies and gentlemen. "A national Muslim organization says it wants to mediate with Dell Inc, over 30 Somali workers who are at the center of a dispute over prayer at work." Now, strap yourselves in on this. "The Council on American and Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C. sent an e-mail and letter yesterday to Dell president and chief executive Kevin B. Rollins--" this is in the Boston Globe today, "--after the Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, reported that the workers walked off their jobs last month because they were forced to 'choose between their faith and their employment.' The workers, who loaded boxes or operated forklifts at Dell’s Nashville plant, requested time off to pray at sunset and were told they could not, said Ibrahim Hooper, executive director of the council. Dell spokesman T.R. Reid said the Texas-based computer manufacturing firm has a longstanding policy of accommodating workers of different religious faiths. He said Dell is working with the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission in Nashville 'to better understand and resolve the issue.'"
Now, here we have the ACLU, civil rights group, litigating all over America to ban Judeo-Christian religious symbols from the public square, no prayer in school, and if somebody did try to pray at work, you know there would be hell to pay for that. Now we have private companies being pressured by other groups to accommodate the religious practices of others than the Judeo-Christian religious ethic....here you have the ACLU trying to ban any reference to the Judeo-Christian God throughout all walks of America. Here comes another group demanding that Muslims be allowed to pray on the job. It's just the twilight zone. Hello? Parallel universe.
It certainly is an appalling contrast and an outrageous double-standard. But it prompts me to ask why the Christophobes are so tolerant of, and even friendly to, Muslims. Is it a subconscious fear of terrorist retribution if they heap as much hostility and bigotry on the followers of Mohommed as they do on the followers of Jesus Christ? Is it multiculturalism run amok? Or is it a shared hatred of Jews and Christians (i.e. "the people of the Book"), even to the degree that ACLUniks sympathize with the ultimate goals of al Qaeda (as long as they get exempted from them, of course - heh, heh, and heh...)?
This, in turn, harkens back to the whole pathetic Giuliana Sgrena episode, another Western leftie who thought her blanket hostility to the "Great Satan" would make her a heroine to the "insurgents" in Iraq. And as her endlessly changing story illustrates, she hasn't learned a blessed thing from the whole misbegotten experience.
Almost makes you wonder whether some, shall we say, "Christian militancy" is the way to earn radical secularist "street cred." Almost, that is, until you remember that that is precisely one of the smears hurled at people of faith every time some nutbag shoots up an abortuary.
I guess the difference is the Islazis know why they hate the West and what they're trying to accomplish, and are willing to do anything to attain that goal, even if the goal itself (a global eighth-century caliphate) makes pipedreams seem ridiculously accessible. Comm-symps just hate their own country and the political opponents they cannot defeat for hate's own sake.
Call it "Sgrena Syndrome."
posted by JASmius at 5:51 PM
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