“You’ll say, we’ve got nothing in common. No common ground to start from. And we’re falling apart.”
A lovely little one-hit-wonder from Deep Blue Something that takes us back to the autumn of 1996 when the Spice Girls had just shot to fame, England were half-decent at football and Dolly the Sheep became the first mammal to be cloned successfully from an adult cell.
It was also a time of relative calm between Jewish and Muslim communities, as the Oslo Accords had helped reduce the number of suicide attacks in Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad to just a few each year. Good times.
Sorry, but things are about to get heavier.
The 18 and a bit years since have witnessed countless murders of Jewish men, women and children by extremists, a similar number of excessive and bloody reprisals by Israel – including last year’s horrendous and drawn out bombing campaign in Gaza – and the export of violence from the region into far-removed places such as a kosher delicatessen on the outskirts of Paris.
A great many positive things happened in these years as well, so keep your chin up. But few could deny that most of the images beamed into our sitting rooms over the years make it abundantly clear that if Jews and Muslims celebrated Christmas, few would make it onto each other’s card list.
Time to lighten the mood again. Momentarily.
“You’ll say, the world has come between us. Our lives have come between us. Still I know you just don’t care.”
Good old DBS. Fairly recently, the band’s lead singer, Todd Pipes, revealed that promoting the song became tiresome: “As the song had Breakfast in the title, radio stations thought it would be genius to have us on at breakfast time. We’d be up till 3am and they’d wonder why we were pissed off playing at 6am.” Well, at least Todd and the boys have had plenty of opportunity to sleep in the years since. The world hasn’t come between them; it’s left them well alone.
The same can’t be said for Jews and Muslims. Although the origins of their animosity are complex, it’s painfully apparent that the world – represented here by the United Nations and its members – handicapped their ability to live side by side in peace. I’m talking, of course, about the bugger’s muddle made in managing the formation of a Jewish State in territory held sacred by both Jews and Muslims.
Far more learned people than I have pondered how it could have been done differently. But it doesn’t take a scholar to see that things couldn’t have gone a whole lot worse: 70 odd years of West Side Story meets Groundhog Day, in which Bernardo blows up Riff on a bus, Tony launches retaliatory air strikes killing Bernardo, his family (including Maria) and neighbours, and Chino fires mortars at Tony’s apartment block. And then the same thing happens the next day. And the next. Oh, and there’s no love angle in West Bank Story. Or music. But the special effects are quite something.
Thanks, the world.
“And I said what about Breakfast At Tiffany’s? She said I think I remember the film and, as I recall, I think we both kind of liked it. And I said well, that’s the one thing we’ve got.”
That damn catchy song comes to our rescue again and wades us through dangerous waters to the point of this post: despite their many differences, Jewish and Muslims communities appear to have a little more in common than they realise.
Friday’s front page of The Times reminds us of one shared ritual: Breakfast At Tiffany’s where the eponymous restauranteur piles their plates high with meat obtained in one of the most appalling ways imaginable: slow death from blood loss following an incision through the jugular vein, carotid artery and windpipe. And would you like ketchup with that, sir?
Now, I bloody love meat and, as a consequence, I accept that animals have to be bred and killed for my pleasure. But I strongly support current legislation requiring those responsible to refrain from causing or permitting the animals to suffer any avoidable pain.
In line with the law, the majority of animals killed for meat in this country are put out of their misery pretty quickly and painlessly. To achieve this end, it’s been mandatory since 1979 for a stunner to be used on all EU livestock pre-slaughter, subject to certain religious exemptions addressed below. By “stunner”, I don’t mean Emily Ratajkowski, but a mechanically operated device broadly similar to that used to tumble Princess Leia to the deck early in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
The purpose of stunning an animal is to leave it insensitive to pain prior to ending its life (rather than to make it easier to haul it before Lord Vader and admit where it’s hidden the secret plans). When you think about it, it seems the very least we can do.
But, as things stand, the law does not require pre-slaughter stunning in kosher and halal abattoirs. Why? Because vocal sections of Jewish and Muslim communities believe that books and scriptures written thousands of years ago prohibit it. And remember, these books aren’t even written by celebrity chefs or anything.
Followers of Judaism believe that for meat to remain kosher the animal must be healthy and uninjured when the “schechita” process is carried out. They argue that a stunned animal would fail this criteria. Many also contend that animals feel no pain during the ritual, pointing to certain inconclusive scientific studies and the dubious doctrinal argument that their God would only provide for a merciful and compassionate method of killing his creatures.
Islam differs in the sense that it only requires the animal to be alive when its throat is cut to qualify as halal. Due to this lower threshold, many halal abattoirs follow the rest of the industry in stunning animals pre-slaughter. But a significant and growing number of British Muslims operate under the misconception that stunning often kills the animal. In Friday’s article, written by Ben Webster, it’s reported that in 2013 some 37 per cent of sheep and goats, 25 per cent of cattle and 16 per cent of poultry brought onto halal premises were killed without being first stunned. This is a very significant increase from the figures for 2011 and mean that, in 2013, some 2.4 million sheep and goats were killed in halal and kosher abattoirs. No figures have been given for cattle and poultry.
“Oh, crikey! There’s a lot of talk about slaughter here, isn’t there? Can’t we go back to that tune again, eh? What about the instrumental bit two-thirds the way through? “De-de-dew de-de-dew de-de-dew de-de-dew”. So catchy.”
Sorry, folks, but not even the best DBS could muster can drag us away from the blood and guts quite yet. According to Webster’s article (taking its figures from the European Food Safety Authority’s scientific panel on animal health and welfare), it can take up to 20 seconds for a sheep to lose consciousness once its throat is cut, up to two minutes for cattle and “two and a half minutes or more” for poultry (an odd choice of words suggesting that poor Chicken Licken sometimes waits an eternity before its sky falls in).
An unlikely brotherhood of Jews and Muslims downplay the significance of these statistics, by pointing out that no-one really knows whether animals suffer during this time lag. Even Webster is only prepared to say that the gap between throats being cut and losing consciousness means “that they might experience pain for that period.” But why should the burden of proof fall on the rest of society? If the EU has already determined it inhumane for abattoirs not to stun first, slaughter later, shouldn’t the onus be on these communities to prove (at least beyond reasonable doubt) that no additional pain and suffering occurs.
And if they can’t, what then?
“I agree that all this is rather horrible but I respect, above all else, people’s right to practice their religion“. Not a DBS lyric, but a conceivable response nonetheless and one with which, for now at least, the Government agrees.
As stated above, it seems that Muslims can adhere to their religion and meet the standards set for the rest of society. Use a stunner. If they won’t, compel them to. Legislation could actually help the Muslim community in this regard, as the Koran permits Muslims to eat non-halal meat if there’s no other halal food available and he or she is forced by necessity (Surah 2:173). Problem solved.
Of course, Kosher meat is tougher (especially if overcooked) owing to the different test applied. We’ve got to ask ourselves a very important question here: what rights (if any) should be placed above the right of people to practice their religion freely? The indignation voiced by many following the recent Charlie Hebdo killings seems to confirm the primacy of free speech over religious dogma. But, in a civilised society, can the humane treatment of animals be ranked lower than the freedom to draw, print and disseminate insulting cartoons?
The Danish Government doesn’t think so. It outlawed all non-stun slaughter in early 2014, announcing that “animal rights come before religion“.
It’s surely time for the British Government to follow suit. The alternative is to pick the low hanging fruit and clamp down on halal practices only. In a country where many Muslims already feel marginalised, this option is wrapped in risk. The better approach must be to ban non-stun slaughter from halal and kosher abattoirs and, in the process, give the Jewish and Muslim communities something else in common.
Fortunately, there are a good number of similarly minded people in this country, including the British Veterinary Association which has launched a petition calling for the matter to be debated in the House of Commons. On Thursday, the number of signatures passed the 100,000 mark and it remains open until the end of March 2015.
The petition can be signed here and I urge you to do so.
It could form a common ground for us to start from and has to be better than watching that awful film again.
Project Refuse 