Saturday 12 May 2012

You Are What You Eat?

Mehdi Hasan has a long article in this week's New Statesman, about the use of halal meat as a proxy for attacking Muslims.

Kosher and halal meat more than bear comparison with our own meat production practices, although having banned foxhunting, we might as well ban kosher and halal meat, too. The question is whether we should ever have banned foxhunting. Let us hope that the Dutch kosher and halal ban is as unenforced, because as unenforceable, as our own hunting ban, the latter enacted to persuade disgraceful Labour MPs to vote for the Iraq War.

Do the Middle East's ancient indigenous Christians eat halal meat? If so, then there cannot be anything wrong with it in principle. Israel, meanwhile, is now so desperate that she is importing Russians who refuse on principle to eat kosher meat, and who insist on taking their IDF oaths on the New Testament alone, a purely anti-Semitic position unrelated to Russian Orthodoxy, which keeps Old Testament figures as Saints and which venerates icons of them. Oh, well, at least they are not Arabs, eh...

Meanwhile, what of the sexual exploitation of white girls by men of Pakistani extraction? Assume for the sake of argument that sex with teenage girls is integral to "Islamic" society. I am not convinced that it necessarily is, and at the very least it is certainly not peculiar thereto. But assume that it is. Is a non-Islamic culture really in any position to claim the moral high ground if its girls, even given that, are known to be more readily available due to their sexually saturated culture and their near-total lack of supervision by parents, other older relatives and the wider community?

"What we are fighting" in Afghanistan might come out of this very badly. But, at best, "what we are fighting for" does not come out of it any better.

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