The soft bigotry of appeasement.

United Kingdom

Mark Steyn

Daily Telegraph

Britain’s desperation to placate Muslims is “beyond parody,” said Mark Steyn in the London Daily Telegraph. Any Muslim who feels slighted, no matter how “daffy” his complaint, is immediately appeased, and laws are enacted that restrict the rights of everyone else. In Dudley, for example, the town council has decreed a workplace ban on all pictures of pigs because one Muslim employee was offended by the sight of Piglet frolicking with Winnie the Pooh on a tissue box. Where will this political correctness end? “First they came for Piglet, and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character…” Burger King has actually stopped selling ice cream sundaes in Britain because someone complained that the design on the lid looked like the Arabic word for “Allah.”

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Other religions are not so coddled. Christians who complained last year about a play featuring a gay Jesus were told to just lighten up. Apparently, they must be “tolerant”—but Muslims need not be. The implications for Britain, and for other European nations with swelling and disaffected Muslim populations, are grave. “If Islam cannot co-exist even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King ice cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic principles of a pluralist society?”