The war on Christmas continues. Here is a picture of the national Best Buy ad inviting folks to celebrate Thanksgiving and . . . Eid al-Adha, which is a Muslim festival of sacrifice. It’s actually a festival that sacrifices of goats in similitude of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son.

Best buy 1

Best Buy ad

Now, I have nothing against Best Buy celebrating a Muslim holiday, in fact I think it’s a wonderfully inclusive thing to do. No, the problem I have is that in 2006 Best Buy discontinued the use of “Merry Christmas” in their holiday advertising.

Here is a posting from the Best Buy community forums that sums up my attitude:

Among my major purchases from BB over the years were a plasma big screen, a fridge and a laptop. No more. In 2006 you discontinued the use of ‘ Merry Christmas’ in your “holiday” messages.

Yet one of your ad inserts wishes your customers a happy “Eid Al Aldha” ( a Muslim goat throat slitting festivity) . Clearly the liberal/ PC culture in your corporate offices is biased against Christians and traditional American values. So, in 2009 I discontinue Best Buy. Good riddance.

Hello A m a z o n

- A proud patriotic Christian American.

I think the poster of this message got it exactly right, the liberal/PC culture has taken control of Best Buy where they shun the word Christmas yet they are quite willing to extend holiday wishes to Eid al-Adha. /boggle

Bill O’reilly calls this the war on Christmas and this is exactly what it is. There is a concerted effort by the left in this country to discontinue any public acknowledgement of Christianity and they go out of their way to appease Islam. Another example of this is the movie 2012. In the movie they depict the Vatican and the Christ statute in Brazil getting blown up, but they rejected blowing up any Islam sites because they didn’t want to anger the Muslim community. I get it, it’s perfectly fine to anger the (much larger) Christian community, but Providence preserve us if we were to some how upset the Muslim community. Then again Christians don’t issue fatwas and jihads against crap like this so maybe I don’t blame the producers.

In any event chalk up another win for political correctness, but I think I’ll also be spending my Christmas money elsewhere.

Just as an update Best Buy has released the following statement that reflects a change in their policy that was established in 2006. The statement reads:

Thanks for sharing your point of view regarding our recent ad, which included a wish for a “Happy Eid al-Adha”.

Best Buy’s customers and employees around the world represent a variety of faiths and denominations. We respect that diversity and choose to greet our customers and employees in ways that reflect their traditions.

We do use the word “holiday” in some of our advertising because it is meant to be inclusive to everyone. However, just as we have in the past, we will also reference specific holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in our weekly ads, store signage and other advertising vehicles.

We encourage our employees to interact with customers naturally and wish them a Merry Christmas or share whatever greeting is appropriate for the holiday they are celebrating.

I appreciate this sentiment and I’m happy to hear that Best Buy has adopted this policy and that they changed from the original policy which adopted a “holiday greeting” only policy. I think that this policy is the correct one, greeting should be natural and appropriate and inclusive.