When I was a kid I had a little piggy bank that my grandparents gave me. Actually, I had several of them during my childhood years.
I “fed” my piggy bank money and, like most pigs, it just never seemed to have enough until one day it’d finally become stuffed. And, oh, the joy of seeing it stuffed and knowing I could unstuff it and that my smiling piggy friend had helped me save some money.
Little did I know that when I used my piggy bank I was indulging in an activity insulting to Islam…if I had lived in Great Britain:
British banks are banning piggy banks because they may offend some Muslims.
Halifax and NatWest banks have led the move to scrap the time-honoured symbol of saving from being given to children or used in their advertising, the Daily Express/Daily Star group reports here.
Muslims do not eat pork, as Islamic culture deems the pig to be an impure animal.
But WAIT!
With a name like “Gandelman,” then why didn’t my orthodox Jewish grandfather Abraham Ravinsky, or my grandmother Anna Gandelman Schnierman object? They didn’t eat pork, either.
Why didn’t they march down to the toy store, grab owner Howard Schmidlap by the lapels and insist he stop selling those cursed made-in-Mexico impure-animal figures that SHOULD have been offensive to non-pig-loving Orthodox Jews as well, file a lawsuit, or clamor to have the offensive pig banks banned?
Maybe they were deficient in their religious upbringing. Or maybe they had other things to do. Or maybe they were a bit more tolerant. Or maybe it never crossed their minds as they focused on trying to make better lives for their families in substantive ways:
Salim Mulla, secretary of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, backed the bank move.
“This is a sensitive issue and I think the banks are simply being courteous to their customers,” he said.
Definitely. It’s so traumatic to offer a child a piggy bank and it smacks of insensitivity.
So what if a bank has 500 kids who see nothing wrong with a piggy banks; if a parent of one kid thinks it’s a scandal, what makes better sense than calling piggy banks offensive and yanking them out of circulation? Just think of the risk in allowing that swine bank to be circulating out there — the searing anguish it would cause in a impressionable child’s mind.
But, strangely, apparently not everyone agrees with the banks’ decision in England:
“The next thing we will be banning Christmas trees and cribs and the logical result of that process is a bland uniformity,” the Dean of Blackburn, Reverend Christopher Armstrong, said.
This has been quite a week of victories for the PC crowd, internationally.
First, came the news that England’s Prince Charles intends to lecture President George Bush on being more tolerant to Islam (GWB…he who held hands with a Saudi Prince, perhaps making Israel’s Prime Minister jealous).
And then came the news that some schools in the United States are now curtailing Halloween activities since some parents consider Halloween offensive and evil.
We would like to call all this baloney — but we won’t.
Delis will accuse us of being “meatist.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.