Mick Hartley

More on Sainsbury’s sorry appeasement of Muslim posturing, from Scotland’s Sunday Herald (via b&w):

Scanning the bleeping rows of checkout operators at my east end Sainsbury’s, perhaps two faces out of 22 will be white, pensioners in a second lease of working life. Bangladeshi immigrants and their British-born families make up the majority of the customers and staff.

On a busy afternoon last month, the snaking queue was the scene of a rare fracas. A young Asian checkout operator, with pious beard and a crocheted Kufi Muslim skullcap, made a big deal out of serving a middle-aged white man who had included a bottle of vodka in his groceries. His wasn’t a discreet arm wave for the attention of a supervisor, it was a full-on hissy fit. At the sight of the vodka bottle he reared from his seat as if the conveyer had presented a freshly slaughtered pig’s head.

Polite society, or that part of it that is a Tower Hamlets queue, did the British thing and turned away as if religious protest was nothing to do with them. The customer, who bore the appearance of someone whose lifestyle choice was to sink the vodka soon after he’d cleared the checkouts, was having none of it though.

“What the bleedin’ ‘ell are you working in a supermarket for if you won’t handle booze?” he shouted, setting the queue to Defcon Two on the London racial tension scale. Fair question I thought, as I played spot the bigot. I was sure it wasn’t the guy with a taste for vodka.

The hothead till worker’s protest was more testosterone than Taliban but he succeeded in making his point, loudly, in front of 18 female Muslim staff who won’t let their religion bother their job.

Fast forward to this week, and my refurbished local store has doubled its floorspace (while strangely halving its selection of wines and spirits) and, I notice, given in to this brand of inverse bigotry posing as victimhood.

Sainsbury’s, “keen to accommodate the religious beliefs of all staff”, now allows Muslim workers who object to alcohol on religious grounds to have a colleague take their place. The company didn’t see that such cack-handed posturing does Islam no favours, reinforcing a perception of an intolerant and unbending religion, which is not, I believe, where the majority of British Muslims are.

Worse still is the atmosphere it creates within its own workforce. The craven attitude of Sainsbury’s creates a space the religious fanatics will use to bully their mostly female fellow workers, arguing they are not good Muslims if they choose to serve alcohol when they have the option not to. […]

All Sainsbury’s has done is given this code of religious behaviour, inherited from rural, patriarchal societies, elbow space in the staff canteen where it will be used to intimidate moderate Muslims.