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August 15, 2006
UK: Passport Pic Of Five Year Old "Offensive to Muslims"
A story from today's Telegraph shows how paranoid some people are about offending Muslim "sensibilities". Dr Jane Edwards, from Sheffield, took her five-year old daughter Hannah into a photo booth to take a snap for her passport. The picture can be viewed here.
Young Hannah has her shoulders exposed in the picture, though she is wearing a dress with a halter-neck top. But when her mother took the pic to a post office with a completed passport application, the woman at the counter said it would not be accepted by the Passport Office. The woman told Dr Edwards that there had been at least two other applications rejected because shoulders had been exposed, and would have caused offense in a Muslim country.
Dr Edwards said there was nothing on the form to state that bare shoulders were forbidden. She fumed: "It is just officialdom pandering to political correctness. t is a total over-reaction. How can the shoulders of a five-year-old girl offend anyone?"
It seems that the reaction of the woman employee at the Post Office was not related to policy, either from the Post Office or Passport Office. A spokesman for the former said: "It was clearly a mistake made by the clerk at the post office. It is the first time we have heard of such a rejection and we will take it up with that particular office."
A spokeswoman for the Identity and Passport Service confirmed that it is not policy to ban images with bare shoulders, saying: "The guidance set out on the application form doesn't include it, this picture should have been absolutely fine."
There is still a large proportion of people in Britain bending over backwards to avoid offending or inflaming "Muslim sensibilities". I wonder how many Muslims are doing the same to avoid inflaming "kaffir sensibilities"?
Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at August 15, 2006 12:20 PM
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