This was old news before Porker Hitchens got his snout into it, but in the Spring of this year the Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of over a quarter of a million pigs, allegedly to prevent swine flu, although the Health Ministry insisted it was a "general health measure". Whatever! Had Uncle Sam gone into wipe out these swine in the name of health and efficiency, sanity and sanitation, no doubt Christopher would have been one of the loudest grunting his approval. But when the Egyptians — the filthy swines — try to clean up their own act by going the whole hog and end up dealing with some nasty unintended consequences, he simultaneously blames both the Mubarak regime and clerical hysteria. Now it's not often you see those two beasts feeding out of the same trough.
Then he manages with considerable dexterity to link this to Iran, anti-Semitism and irrational prejudice about pigs being "unclean because they even eat their own excrement."
Back in May, just as Egypt's anti-porcine hysteria was gathering pace, there was a proposal from Sheik Ahmad Ali Othman, a senior advisory figure at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, that all pigs be killed because they were the descendants of those unbelieving Jews who were turned into swine in the Quran. (In case you don't follow this very toxic debate between contending schools of militant Islam, there are those who maintain that Jews are the spawn of the pigs and monkeys into which Allah turned the heretics, and those who take the more moderate view that the heretics turned into pigs and monkeys were further cursed by being made barren and sterile. The latter view leads to the slightly more lenient and broad-minded conclusion that, bad as today's Jews are, they at least cannot be in a direct line of descent from the original condemned beasts. These fine distinctions are worth knowing.)
I should think very few of people do follow that type of debate. You get intelligent and yet ignorant and bigoted arseholes in any reasonably large group of people, as the presence of the Hitch among the British, US, atheist, journalist, scruffy, and scotch-drinking communities is a constant reminder. Still, once the Hitch gets its trotters moving, you can bet your bacon the trail is going to lead it to the conclusion that religion poisons everything. For comparison, in the 1990s the secular UK scientifically slaughtered 4.4 million cattle suspected of potentially being infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) after discovering that its advanced, industrialized and well-regulated agricultural sector had managed to contaminate the nation's herds by systematically feeding these herbivores with the remains of their fellows in the form of meat and bone meal. Then in 2001 alone, it illegally slaughtered over 4 million cows and other farm animals (killing all animals within 3km zones around farms presumed to be infected) as a precaution against the spread of foot and mouth disease. Let's not look at the US meat industry's record, because that would be enough to put anyone without a spongiform brain permanently off their pork chops.
Needless to say, had Egypt mounted such a cattle cull, doubtless Hitch would have found a way to make it out to be a jihad against "our friends the Hindus". So the moral of this Hitchop's fable is, as always, that when WE do something, we do it sensibly and rationally in a mature, proper and professional fashion, while when THEY do it, they invariably make a complete pig's breakfast of the affair!
To finish, here's a chap who agrees with Hitch about the Royal Family.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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