Compliant

This has caused much hilarity in half-educated circles:

Question Asked by Lord Mawhinney: To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their estimate of the proportion of (a) beef, (b) pork, and (c) lamb, in United Kingdom supermarkets that is halal compliant.[HL5497]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Henley): We do not hold information on the proportion of Halal compliant beef and lamb sold through UK supermarkets. Muslims are not permitted to eat pork and no pork on sale in UK supermarkets will be Halal compliant.

EBLEX, the organisation for beef and lamb levy payers in England, has recently published a report on the Halal meat market. This provides an insight into the preferences, perceptions and motivations of Muslim consumers when buying meat. This report confirms most Muslims buy Halal meat mostly from Halal butchers and specialist outlets.

Halal pork? Who ever heard of such a thing?

Read on.

We are told that Turkey is basically a Western country, welcome in NATO and to be welcomed into the EU. Its ruling AKP is led, we are assured, by "former Islamists", and is "Muslim Democrat" in the way that some European parties are Christian Democrat, and wholly fit to legislate for us at Strasbourg or behind the closed doors of Brussels. But in fact, the AKP government is going to enormous and vicious legal lengths to kill off the pork industry in Turkey. And what way are those pigs being slaughtered, if not the halal way? If there is any other way of doing it at all in Turkey, then that can only have become the case in the very recent past, and must be very far from universally practised. I have seen, in this country, Turkish pork products labelled as halal-slaughtered.

Do the indigenous Christians of the Middle East eat halal meat? I have been asking that for a while, but have been unable to obtain an answer. I suppose that they must, since what other meat is there? And if they do, then there cannot be anything wrong with it in principle. It certainly bears comparison with the products of many of our own raising and slaughtering practices. In similar vein, there is most definitely nothing wrong with financial services that eschew usury. The problem is our failure to reach into our own authentic tradition, thus leaving the way clear for Islam.

But we must not mention our own authentic tradition. Just as we must not mention the indigenous Christians in the Middle East, including Turkey. And just as we must not mention the beleaguered Turkish pig farmers, with all that their plight represents.