Dogwash

Sajjad Karim, a Conservative MEP for the North West of England, writes on his EU blog about the European Commission's current proposals on food labelling.

Amendment #205 calls for the labelling of all meat and meat products derived from animals that have not been stunned prior to slaughter (i.e. have been ritually slaughtered by religious methods) to be labelled as "meat from slaughter without stunning".

This has caused great concern amongst the UK's religious communities, particularly Jewish and Muslim, who feel that if compulsory labelling were to go ahead then the supply of Kosher and Halal meats would stagnate as much of the meat slaughtered through these methods relies heavily on sales in the wider market. It is believed this market would dry-up as a result of such labelling making the supply economically unviable.

(My emphasis.)

Cheeky bastard. So as well as tolerating these alien food processing practices in our land, we are also expected to cross-subsidize them, are we?

It's the blatancy of this, as much as anything else, which grabs you warmly by the throat. According to Sajjad, halal meat sales in the UK are dependent on economies of scale which can only be achieved — at least until the ongoing Muslim breeding and importation programme reaches critical mass — by getting the kaffir communities to buy halal meat. And this can only be achieved by conning them, for if they knew what they were buying they would assuredly reject it.

And dear old Sajjad is so confident of his righteousness he says all this quite openly.

(Incidentally, Sajjad tries to rope shechita into this bleat. Well I'm happy to be set right on this, but frankly I'm not convinced that stealth kosher is all that prevalent.)

Hmm. Lying to the kaffirs and getting them to pay financial tribute to the Umma? We know the words for that, don't we, children?



While I'm on the subject of halal, perhaps I can offer a comment on the current wave of opposition to halal in the UK, as evidenced by recent reports in the Mail and elsewhere and in the activities of the EDL in demonstrating outside KFC's experimental halal outlets.

It seems to me that people are placing too much emphasis on the animal welfare aspects of this argument. I can understand why. It's a specific, concrete and essentially technical objection which avoids getting bogged down in cultural and religious issues with the concomitant danger of accusations of intolerance and, heaven forfend, racism. And we have all been thoroughly trained to do absolutely anything to avoid the remotest danger of breaching the taboo of racism, haven't we, children? (Well, not quite all of us. I was born in 1948. The State Religion of Antiracism didn't really get properly underway until the mid-to-late 1960s, when I was already a young adult and well beyond the Xavier threshold.)

Unfortunately, this circumspect timidity leaves us open to counterarguments about the levels of cruelty actually practised in the mainstream slaughtering process. A useful distraction technique, that, like chucking a handful of Huguenots into an immigration debate.

Remember the brouhaha about stealth halal in Harrow school canteens?

Quoth one local spokesmuzzie thusly...

But chief co-ordinator of the Harrow Pakistani Society, Mohammad Rizvi, thinks the issue has been blown out of proportion.

He said: “For Muslim children the only option they have is to eat is Halal, it is part of their religion.

“Whereas it isn't a problem for children of other faiths to eat Halal.

“This isn't about Islamification or pandering to Muslim's it's just common sense.

“If you go into any restaurant you will find that a lot of the meat is Halal anyway, it doesn't taste any different or better it is just part of our religion.”

I'm sure you mean well, Mo my old China, but passing that through a taurocoprolytic filter I end up with

What's the problem? We're Muslims, it's important to us. But you worthless subhuman kuffars will eat any old shit.

Well, I'm sorry, Tosh, I'm not buying that. I dislike halal on animal-welfare grounds, but I also expect meat to be offered by default in this country which has been slaughtered according to the dominant and indigenous secular Christian traditions practised here. Yes, I'd quite like to see the banning of halal and kosher slaughterhouse practices that do not render the meat animal humanely unconscious before slaughter. But even if you can adjust your practices accordingly, why should I blithely accept meat slaughtered by some bearded loon chanting Bismillah, Allahu Akbar! or whatever it is as he cuts the beast's throat?

I might do that, and if I choose to patronize an Indian (sc. Bangladeshi) restaurant or a kebab shop that are clearly marked as حلال, then I knowingly elect to do so. But you have no right to assume that acquiescence in your alien practices unasked. That is cultural arrogance of a kind we have, regrettably, come to know all too well.