A pig gets poked

If you aren't aware now that a British city has banned all pig images (including Piglet) out of respect for their Muslim compatriots, you haven't been tracking the news as much as you should. It's a nauseating story of craven Liberal behavior, but it really isn't over (in my mind) until Mark Steyn has opined on it, which he does here. Only a small part of Steyn's column will give you an idea of how stupid the British conduct is:

Cllr Mahbubur Rahman is in favour of the blanket pig crackdown. "It is a good thing, it is a tolerance and acceptance of their beliefs and understanding," he said. That's all, folks, as Porky Pig used to stammer at the end of Looney Tunes. Just a little helpful proscription in the interests of tolerance and acceptance. And where's the harm in that? As Pastor Niemöller said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I'm more of an Eeyore. And aren't we all? When the Queen knights a Muslim "community leader" whose line on the Rushdie fatwa was that "death is perhaps too easy", and when the Prime Minister has a Muslim "adviser" who is a Holocaust-denier and thinks the Iraq war was cooked up by a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews, and when the Prime Minister's wife leads the legal battle for a Talibanesque dress code in British schools, you don't need a pig to know which side's bringing home the bacon. *** Offence is, by definition, in the eye of the beholder. I once toured the Freud Museum with the celebrated sex therapist Dr Ruth, who claimed to be able to see a penis in every artwork and piece of furniture in the joint. Yet, when I suggested one sculpture looked vaguely like the female genitalia, she scoffed mercilessly. Likewise, Piglet is deeply offensive and so's your chocolate ice-cream, but if a West End play opens with a gay Jesus, Christians just need to stop being so doctrinaire and uptight. The Church of England bishops would probably agree with that if, in their own misguided attempt at Islamic outreach, they weren't so busy apologising for toppling Saddam. When every act that a culture makes communicates weakness and loss of self-belief, eventually you'll be taken at your word. In the long term, these trivial concessions are more significant victories than blowing up infidels on the Tube or in Bali beach restaurants. An act of murder demands at least the pretence of moral seriousness, even from the dopiest appeasers. But small acts of cultural vandalism corrode the fabric of freedom all but unseen.

I've maintained throughout the 1990s that the Islamic attacks on us were triggered by Carter's weak response to Iran in 1979 (I still can't get over the fact that he apologized to them) and to Reagan's weak response in 1983 when over two hundred Marines died. We made it plain to the Islamists that we were weak (or weakening) and we turned ourselves into carcases to their jackals. Britain is doing precisely the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if, in my life time, the Queen dons a Burkha.