The furore over M&S's Muslim staff policy shows that Islamophobia is a problem… http://t.co/j20zyokgSh
— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) December 23, 2013
After allowing Muslims to refuse to check out customers who were buying alcohol or pork, Marks & Spencer reversed its policy due to the ensuing firestorm. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), true to form, is crying “Islamophobia” — but what is really at stake here is the principle of equal access to services for all people. Marks & Spencer is in the U.K., of course, and the U.K. did not fight the long civil rights battle that was fought in the U.S. to overcome segregation and the idea that whole classes of people could be denied access to services on the whim and prejudice of the provider of those services.
In the Jim Crow South, people were denied equal access to services, such as service in some restaurants and favorable seating on buses, because of their race; now Britain is in danger of allowing people to be denied equal access to services, such as access to certain checkout lanes at Marks & Spencer, because of their religion: the idea that Muslim employees could refuse to check people out who were buying articles banned under Sharia amounted to discrimination against non-Muslims.
Marks & Spencer was right to reverse this policy, and if Hamas-linked CAIR really believed in the principle of the equality of rights of all people, it would applaud the reversal. Instead, it reveals its Islamic supremacism yet again, and its use of the spurious propaganda concept “Islamophobia” as a weapon to intimidate people into giving them what they want.
(Thanks to Thief Boy for the Hamas-linked CAIR tweet.)