What, No Dogs?

I don't know what to make of it, this poster seen adorning a bus stop in the Londonistan borough of Walthamstow (hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog citing Gates of Vienna).

Is it a genuine production of hegemonic Islamic forces in the district?

Or is it, as some suspect, a spoof? [Update: Guess not - see http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=35465 for what's left of a story pulled by the newspaper that carried it!]

Some of the bans reek of sound common sense, but the ban on music and concerts is all too redolent of the views of some Muslim parents in Blighty  from various benighted Third World locations who pull their children out of compulsory music lessons at school on the grounds that music and Islam don't mix.

And if all these things are banned, but there's no specific reference to dogs being so, does that mean that dog ownership and dog-walking is permitted in the borough?

Several weeks ago Al Beeb trumpeted a story about a rabbinical court in Jerusalem sentencing to death by stoning a stray dog thought to be possessed of the spirit of a dodgy secular lawyer. 

The report was nonsense, of course, but in its apparent zeal to present Israeli Jews in a bad light, and basically just to have a scoff and a laugh at religion (well, some religions, anyway), Al Beeb didn't bother to check  its sources, and since Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and his minions seem not to know an aleph from a beit or a dalet from a gimel the Corporation was unaware that a Hebrew-language newspaper had already exposed the story as rubbish.

End result: Al Beeb doing what it doesn't do very often and taking the original report down, posting an explanation on that part of its website devoted to editors' blogs. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/06/story_removal.html

The article had told us towards the beginning that dogs are regarded as unclean animals in "traditional Judaism".

And just to make sure that Brits, a nation of dog lovers (I'm a cat person myself), got the message, the fact that "traditional Judaism" views dogs as unclean was repeated at the end.

Al Beeb forgot to mention that dogs are also regarded as unclean animals by Islam.

Dollars to doughnuts, if legislation is ever enacted in Britain to make dog-ownership illegal -  consequently robbing Al Beeb of the privilege of broadcasting the annual Crufts Show - it won't be owing to the disapproval of the canine species by "traditional" Jews.

Woof!