Time Immortal

It’s Wednesday, and Muslims are offended again. This time, the object of their ire is a new advertisment for the Tayside (that’s in Scotland) police force which advertises the service’s new phone number for “non-emergency” calls.

The advert in question, pictured below, features a cute little puppy sitting in a policeman’s hat. And owing to the fact that dogs are considered unclean in Islam, this postcard advert “has sparked outrage from Muslims.”

Yes. This image:

…has sparked outrage.

The advert has upset Muslims because dogs are considered ritually unclean and has sparked such anger that some shopkeepers in Dundee have refused to display the advert.

Strangely, I’ve not heard any news of Muslim outrage over the blatant discrimination and oppression of women that is evident in e.g. the following:

(for reference: that’s a picture of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the woman who is apparently his wife — Iran’s “First Lady”, so to speak)

Also lacking: Muslim outrage over e.g. the honour killing of Aqsa Parvez and other daughters of Muslim parents over essentially trivial matters (Aqsa herself was murdered for refusing to wear the Islamic headscarf, the hijab).

It’s bad enough that the Muslims complaining about this advert don’t have the presence of mind to realize that they are a minority group with no intrinsic right to force their views or beliefs on anyone else, let along on the society to which they have come. As Mark Shea points out, they just “can’t seem to get it through their infantile heads that the rest of us are not obliged to bother our heads about their particular cultural taboos.”

Dundee councillor Mohammed Asif said: ‘My concern was that it’s not welcomed by all communities, with the dog on the cards.

‘It was probably a waste of resources going to these communities.

‘They (the police) should have understood. Since then, the police have explained that it was an oversight on their part, and that if they’d seen it was going to cause upset they wouldn’t have done it.’

I usually give up alcohol for Lent, O Reader, and I usually try and observe the tradition of eating fish on Fridays during that time as well. A lot of Catholics do the same. How many of us, do you suppose, have ever expressed “outrage” that bars continue to feature happy hour specials and deals on steak sandwiches on Friday evenings? Yeah…didn’t think so. And while I’ve heard more than a few hilarious jokes from Jews about the impact of eating pork on one’s mental prowess, how many Jews do you suppose have ever expressed outrage over seeing coupons for bacon in the flyers that get delivered to their houses on a weekly basis?

But evidently, Muslims in and around Tayside evidently are not familiar with the concept of maturity in faith.

And the police are apologizing for this? Where’s that Scotch spirit? Where’s that Celtic fire? Where is someone — anyone — with the courage to say to Mr. Asif and all the others who have filed complaints about this advert: “This is Scotland. Sod off and deal with it. The advert stands, your grubby traditions be damned.”

Update: There is hope!

Mr Asif’s comments have won little support among the public or Dundee’s Islamic community.

Last night Mahmud Sarwar, trustee of the Scottish Islamic and Cultural Centre and the Dura Street mosque, appealed for calm.

He said he had no problems with the postcard and called on homeowners and local businesses to display them as it is in the public interest.

“I’ve not heard anything about that from members of the community,” Mr Sarwar said.

“I was round some shops today and at the mosque and nobody has said anything about it.”

Mr Sarwar said that religious sensitivities would prevent him from displaying the postcard on a building of religious significance but there was nothing to stop them being displayed in shops.

“There is not a dog—it is just a picture,” he said.

More like Mahmud Sawar, please!

Turns out that burning crosses weren’t a “Klan” thing after all:

The Scottish apparently originated cross-burning, but it was your friends in the mass media who helped sell the idea to the KKK–media being somewhat broadly construed here to include novelists and filmmakers. You think media complicity in the more disreputable aspects of pop culture is a recent phenomenon? Uh-uh. Try 1810.

Eighteen-ten was the year the Scottish romantic writer Sir Walter Scott, a great admirer of ancient Scottish traditions, first brought the “fiery cross” to modern attention in his poem The Lady of the Lake. In the poem the cross is set ablaze on the hilltops to summon the Scottish clans. Scott’s work was especially popular in the American south, where much of the populace was of Scotch-Irish extraction.

The original Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1866 and disbanded in the early 1870s, didn’t burn crosses, but that didn’t stop author Thomas Dixon from saying they did in his pro-KKK novel The Clansman (1905). “The Fiery Cross of old Scotland’s hills!” a character in the book announces. “In olden times when the Chieftain of our people summoned the clan on an errand of life and death, the Fiery Cross, extinguished in sacrificial blood, was sent by swift courier from village to village.”

Though it had done well enough on its own, The Clansman didn’t become a national phenomenon until Dixon sold the movie rights to the pioneer filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who used it to make his groundbreaking film The Birth of a Nation. In a dramatic scene, the movie’s hero rears up his horse and brandishes a flaming cross to summon the Klans to drive out the black oppressors (!) and their northern white allies who controlled the south during Reconstruction. Meanwhile the movie theater’s orchestra (remember, this was the silent era) struck up Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Southern white audiences generally when nuts at this point, clapping and cheering.

Knowing a good idea when he saw one, William J. Simmons, the founder of the Klan in its second incarnation (1915-1944), cobbled together a cross and burned it at a meeting of the newly-established Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on Thanksgiving night, 1915, on Stone Mountain near Atlanta. Flaming crosses have been a Klan trademark ever since.

Just one problem. The fiery cross of Scottish legend wasn’t the upright Roman cross commonly used by the Klan. Rather it was the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew. St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and an X-shaped cross probably also was a lot easier to make a signal bonfire out of. But nobody ever said the Klan’s big attraction was its meticulous sense of detail.

In other words, it looked cool in a movie and made for an exciting read in print…so the burning cross was adopted as a symbol by the KKK. What is more, they adopted the wrong cross as a symbol.

The point, I guess, is that it wasn’t a religious statement at all. That’s not to say that many in the Klan didn’t call themselves Christian — many very likely did. Of course, calling oneself Christian and being Christian are…different concepts entirely.

You know, I almost feel sorry when I and other stumble over little facets of history such as this; it gives the atheists less to complain about, the little darlings.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)