Storm Track Appeasement: The Last Year of the Pig?

China has joined the long sorry list of countries bending to the will of their Muslim minority. If you’ve ever eaten at a Chinese restaurant, you would be familiar with the Chinese calendar. The restaurants I ate at have the calendar right on the paper place mat.

The Chinese calendar is based on a twelve year cycle, each year being represented by an animal. 2005 was Year of Rooster. 2004 was Year of Monkey. 2003 was Year of Goat (sheep, ram). 2002 was Year of Horse.

This year was the year of the Pig. Muslims didn’t like that.

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.

The appeasement, or accommodation as it’s called, has not been limited to China.

Janet Levy in FrontPageMagazine.com writes comprehensively of the multitudinous ways in which some Muslims are choosing to be offended, choosing to protest and how communities around the world are also choosing to accommodate this veritable plague of Muslim religious demands.

Piggy banks, those charming inducements that promote fiscally conservative children, 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 (one is reminded of other, far more extreme attempts to cleanse society of its offending objects, including the burning of the incomparable Royal Library of Alexandria - the world’s largest - in the 1st millennium CE, Hitler’s 1930’s Juden-Rein vision for Europe, Pol Pot’s 1970s evisceration of Cambodian intellectuals and China’s effective decades-long dilution of Tibetan traditions and monasteries).

Target department stores 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.

This is such horse hockey. Jews and Hindus don’t seem to have problem with the pig issue. They’ve been living in pig land for centuries without any need by the non-Jew and non-Hindu societies for accommodation.

As I understand it, orthodox Jews, Hindus and vegetarians have little interest in pork products and many exclude pork from their daily diet with the same proficiency and commitment as do many Muslims. How come 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 instances of references to the pigs in our multicultural society? Are they any less serious about their religion, any less observant and sincere in their beliefs?

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 at issue – it’s its very existence in any form, an inverse deity as it were from hell.

Do you think if we wore a pork rind around our neck we can stave off the onslaught of Muslim accommodation?