Putting the PC In PC

A Muslim police officer given bacon and wine as a Secret Santa gift decided to treat it as a harmless, if tasteless, joke. But a non-Muslim colleague failed to show the same level of tolerance.

The officer who supplied the gift, 26-year-old PC Rob Murrie, was reported to his superiors for racism. And PC Murrie subsequently came under such pressure that he felt he had no option but to resign from the Bedfordshire force.

Yesterday, the target of the joke, 31-year-old Arshad Mahmood, said he still regarded PC Murrie as "a good officer and a good friend", while Muslim community leaders accused police chiefs of "overreacting" to the incident at Luton police station.

Here we can see the folly of PC culture. Here we have a good man in the Muslim employee who does not give a stuff about the joke, and yet the officer who gave him the present was forced to resign.

Don't get me wrong: such a joke is no longer clever or funny, if it ever was to begin with. But it is not "racist" (somehow no one seems able to grasp the fact that Islam isn't a race) and no offense was meant by it; it was just a joke in poor taste. It is the PC nanny state gone mad.

This line also caught my eye:

"I would never have given him the present if I had known the consequences. I suppose it's like giving condoms to a Catholic."

But that DOES happen; I have heard cases of people posting condoms through Catholics' letterboxes. And no charges have ever been pressed against them, and Catholics themselves have never been overly offended or filed police reports. So why are Muslims being consistently given protected status?

I was also disappointed to see that the police officer who played the joke, while acknowledging that this country is too PC, apologises for his joke and bows down in submission to the state, rather than standing up against this tyranny. But at least we have seen a rare case in which a decent Muslim actually took some ribbing on the chin instead of crying, screaming and decapitating at the first opportunity.