Hating Fido - Going to Malmö? Leave your doggie at home.

Front Page Magazine ^ | 16 Feb, 2024 | Bruce Bawer

[MtnClimber]

Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden, has been notorious for years as a particularly dangerous place for people who don’t happen to be Muslim. Now comes the news that it’s not terribly safe for dogs, either. More on this in a moment. For now let’s just point out that this makes sense, given that the creatures who, in the Western world, are known as man’s best friend are, in Muslim societies, considered unclean.

Those of us who’ve been attentively following the Islamization of the West, of course, have long been familiar with the Muslim disdain for canis familiaris. Years ago, when 9/11 was still a relatively recent atrocity and when we were all just starting to learn what it meant to have large numbers of Muslims living in the Western world, there were educational headlines like this one, in the Norwegian newspaper VG: “Cab drivers refuse to take dogs.” That particular story, which dates back to 2004, was about a blind woman in Oslo named Grethe Olsen who was turned away – for “religious reasons” – by no fewer than 21 cab drivers in a row because she was accompanied by her guide dog, Isak.

In 2007, Reuters reported on the same problem, which had begun to affect taxi passengers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport: Muslim drivers belonging to the Twin Cities’ ever-burgeoning Somali community were refusing to take would-be customers “carrying liquor or accompanied by dogs” – including guide dogs. In response to these refusals, the Metropolitan Airports Commission issued new rules specifying that such drivers, after a first offense, would lose their cab licenses for 30 days and, after a second offense, would lose their licenses for two years. (As it happens, the requirement that cab drivers agree to transport guide dogs to and from that airport is still in effect.)

In 2012, the Dutch newsweekly Elsevier reported that tension between Muslim cabbies and guide dogs was on the rise in the Netherlands; a year earlier, the Dutch news site AD had profiled a woman who, at Schipol airport, took twenty minutes to find a cab driver willing to put up with her lap dog, which she was carrying in a handbag. In 2017, PJ Media’s Hugh Fitzgerald mentioned Muslim cabbies who turned away guide dogs in Toronto and Saskatchewan, and the BBC reported on Muslim cabbies who did the same thing in Britain. A 2010 article in the Daily Mail noted that not only were British Muslim cabbies turning away guide dogs – British Muslim bus drivers were actually ordering blind people with guide dogs off of their buses. In 2016, several cab drivers in Drammen, Norway, denied a ride to a woman who was desperate to take her dying dog to the vet’s; in the same year, a newspaper in Trondheim, Norway, told the story of a local blind man whose guide dog kept getting rebuffed by Muslim cabbies.

In most places in the Western world, it’s illegal for cab drivers to refuse to take blind passengers with guide dogs. But the issue hasn’t gone away. In 2022, NRK reported that Norwegian Muslim cab drivers, despite all the media attention and official regulations, were still routinely refusing to transport blind people with guide dogs. Indeed, if anything, things seem to have been going from bad to worse for a good many years. “More and more Muslim taxi drivers in Brussels are refusing to take dogs, even guide dogs,” reported a Dutch news site back in 2011. In 2015, a cab driver in Stuttgart told an interviewer: “Years ago, only about 50% of drivers refused dogs. Of the Muslim drivers I know, 100% refuse dogs. We have around 500 cars on the road every day, and a maximum of 50 take dogs.” As of 2019, the situation in Stuttgart hadn’t changed. And a 2019 report from Hamburg told the same story. Ditto Innsbruck, Austria, same year. When, in the wake of the Innsbruck story, Le Monde deigned to take up this politically incorrect topic, its reporter, one Assma Maad, loftily dismissed the notion that the refusal of cab drivers to transport guide dogs could possibly have anything whatsoever to do with Islam.

If journalists like Maad are quick to deny the Muslim angle, others are quick to side with the Muslim position. After a Dutch news site stated in 2014 that cabbies in Amsterdam were turning away guide dogs, a Reddit-like Dutch-language discussion site was flooded with self-professed non-Muslims who insisted – believe it or not – that respect for a Muslim cab driver’s religious beliefs should take priority over a blind person’s transportation needs. (Well, that’s one way to lose a country.) In some places, to be sure, the introduction of alternatives to taxicabs has proven to be a useful workaround: a 2021 article explained that thanks to Uber, it was now possible for residents of Amsterdam and Rotterdam – where drivers of old-fashioned cabs are overwhelmingly Muslim – to get from point A to point B with their dogs.

It should be underscored that the dogs-are-haram thing isn’t just about taxicabs. Last October, Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian Parliament who is the son and grandson of prime ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi, made headlines in his native country after he gave his mother, Sonia, a Jack Russell Terrier puppy. In a YouTube video, Rahul, who belongs to the Congress Party, introduced the newest member of the family to the world and announced that its name was Noorie. Hysteria ensued among Muslims in India. Mohammed Farhan, head of a political party that goes by the initials AIMIM, maintained in his own YouTube video that since Noorie is a common name among Muslim women, giving it to a dog was an insult to Muslims.

A couple of weeks earlier, another dog-related story had roiled Muslims in Nigeria. In the north central state of Kaduna, an Islamic cleric, Abubakar Sani, took the occasion of the naming ceremony for his newborn son to slaughter two dogs with the intention of serving their remains as a celebratory meal. The news outraged some of his fellow Muslims, who furiously stormed his residence on the grounds that dead dogs are every bit as haram as live dogs. After this home invasion was quelled by police, a journalist spoke to Sani and one of his students, Ismail Abubakar Rijana, who took opposite sides on the question of whether or not the Koran permits the consumption of dog meat.

The journalist, in an admirable effort to get to the bottom of this profound theological question, also consulted a “renowned Islamic scholar” named Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, who patiently explained that while “The Prophet (SAW [i.e., sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, or “peace be upon him”]) prohibited the eating of all animals that hunt or have canine teeth, which dogs have,” there exists a school of thought in Iraq which teaches that eating dog meat is, well, icky, but not explicitly forbidden. Nonetheless, as far as Gumi was concerned, the facts were clear: “the Prophet (SAW) forbade eating dogs, so…people don’t eat dogs here.”

All of which brings us – finally – back to Malmö, where, according to a February 13 report at the website document.dk (citing a story in the regional newspaper Sydsvenskan), “more than 160 cases of dangerous dog food have been reported to police.” These cases “involve bread rolls or other food” containing shards of glass or sharp bits of metal obviously intended “to harm or kill animals that eat them.” These deadly foodstuffs have been strategically placed at various locations in downtown Malmö where people are in the habit of walking their pups. One dog owner interviewed by Sydsvenskan spoke of having encountered, and disposed of, about 20 such bread rolls in the vicinity of Malmö’s city hall.

This Malmö story is no fluke. In 2011, Soeren Kern wrote at the Gatestone Institute website about the “deaths by poisoning of more than a dozen dogs” in the Catalonian city of Lérida, where during preceding months “residents taking their dogs for walks” had been “harassed by Muslim immigrants opposed to seeing the animals in public.” Kern noted that “two Islamic groups based in Lérida” had recently “asked city officials to regulate the presence of dogs in public spaces so they do not ‘offend Muslims.’” Because of this Muslim hostility toward dogs, “50 local residents” had “established alternating six-person citizen patrols to escort people walking their dogs.”

If there’s any good news on this front, it’s this: in at least a few small, presumably secular corners of the Muslim world, dogs are no longer haram. In October 2022, Africa News reported on Vetwork, a veterinary network, founded in 2019, that operates in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates and that received its start-up funding from “Egyptian and Saudi investors.” The company’s founder, a vet named Fedy Azzouny, noted that “pet ownership began to rise” in these countries “because of COVID and the influence of what we watch online. In movies, you see protagonists owning pets. Also, online influencers always have pets and we get influenced by that.” And among these pets are dogs – which, “formerly a rarity,” had, during the previous decade, “become a common sight” in Cairo.

“The culture has changed in the Arab World,” Azzouny maintained, in what might modestly be described as something of an overstatement. Africa News noted that “some well-respected Egyptian religious scholars” had recently issued fatwas “arguing that dogs were not unclean and owning them would not undermine a Muslim’s piety.” Sounds like a start, anyway. One interviewee, Mostafa Kamel al-Sayyid, a political science professor at Cairo University, theorized that pet ownership in that part of the world “reflects the desire of rich Egyptians to stress their social identity and stand out from the rest of the people by imitating certain western lifestyles that are not common in Egypt.”

Well, more power to them. May their attitudes catch on among their coreligionists in the West. Especially the ones in Malmö. Then we’ll only have to worry about forced marriages, car burnings, random knifings, machete attacks, explosions, gay-bashings, honor killings, “grooming gangs,” the cold-blooded murder of apostates, Hamas-style massacres of Jews, and sundry acts of mass jihadist terrorism of the sort we experienced in New York and Washington on 9/11, in Beslan and Madrid in 2004, in London in 2005, at the Boston Marathon in 2013, in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015, in Nice and Brussels and Berlin in 2016, at the Manchester Arena and in Barcelona in 2017, in Oslo in 2022, and so on.

[bgill]

Evil b@stards.

Good to know which cabs not to ride in.

Bring along your pig.

[DPMD]

Dogs unclean; wiping with hand clean.

Now we understand.

[IrishBrigade]

‘I’m thinking of the episode of The Twilight Zone when the dog prevents the guy from going through the wrong gate.’

that was a good episode; TZ had some great shows, and some, well you could say they were dogs...