The great multiculturalism fraud exposed, through the eyes of a pig

Here's Robert Spencer's brilliant summation of the problem with Britain's capitulation to Muslim sensibilities regarding displaying pigs (y'know, Piglet, etc.):

Why have pigs become so unpopular in Britain? Mahbubur Rahman, a Muslim Councillor in West Midlands, summed it up in explaining why the toy pigs had to go: “It’s a tolerance,” he said, “of people’s beliefs.” How’s that again? It’s “a tolerance of people’s beliefs” to deny to others the right to display harmless pictures and figurines? Mahbubur Rahman seems unacquainted with the dictum, widely attributed to Voltaire, that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet this is what tolerance really is: the acceptance of the fact that in a free society, some will do and say things of which one may disapprove, and that one has no consequent right to command or force them to stop. If this is not recognized in any given society, that society is not in fact free at all — any more than Henry Ford’s offer that “You can have a car in any color you want, as long as it’s black” represented a genuine choice. For Rahman instead to equate a British capitulation to Muslim sensibilities with tolerance indicates that he has confused Islamic supremacism with tolerance. This is perhaps not surprising given the near-universal tendency among Muslims and non-Muslims alike to laud Medieval Muslim Spain as a proto-multiculturalist paradise of tolerance, when actually it was a paradise for Islamic supremacists. Christians and Jews lived in harmony with Muslims only as inferiors. Historian Kenneth Baxter Wolf notes that the after the Muslim conquest, the conquerors imposed new laws “aimed at limiting those aspects of the Christian cult which seemed to compromise the dominant position of Islam.” After enumerating a standard list of the laws restricting non-Muslims (dhimmis) — no building of new churches, no holding authority over Muslims, distinctive clothing, etc. — he adds: “Aside from such cultic restrictions most of the laws were simply designed to underscore the position of the dimmîs as second-class citizens.” Multiculturalism? Tolerance? Not by any modern standard. And neither are the disappearing pigs of Great Britain.

And that, in a nutshell, is really the problem with Western style multiculturalism. It's not about accomodating all cultures to the best of our ability, and allow them to jostle along, check-by-jowl, in the marketplace of ideas. It's about Western abasement to anyone else's announced sensitivities and supremacies. It turns out the Multiculturalism is one of the greatest frauds perpetrated on a gullible public that believed that it would be an idea to advance all cultures, not to debase its own. [I've decided to try tagging. My invisible tags refused to work -- Technorati ignored them -- so I'm going to create a few visible tags and see if Technorati picks them up. The category for this post is Multiculturalism]