Pork sausages were served to passengers on a deportation flight from Ireland to Pakistan, it has emerged.
The men, from the Muslim-majority country, were offered a traditional Irish breakfast on the flight from Dublin to Islamabad last year, which was described as “inappropriate” in a human rights monitor’s report.
If only we could believe that this was intentional.
Why were they being given food?
Did they get Guinness too ?
Pigs do fly…
Halal/kosher should not be available in a country that values the humane treatment of animals! Strictly enforced, this would be a deterrent.
I agree, though anyone who has visited a non halal/kosher slaughterhouse would struggle to see it as humane.
The only humane thing to do is probably to eschew meat altogether, but I like meat so fuck it, I’m inhumane.
But, but, wait! Don’t we all love being multi culti?
…
As I’ve mentioned before, things like halal and bans on pork were reasonable public health measures in ancient times. We now have better quality control so there’s no need for either measure to be enforced and if they don’t like it they can lump it.
Ancient times in hot places.
Making it a religious requirement gave it the stamp of authority.
Chap reading article on his clay tablet, The Daily Torahgraph.
“Says here we should stop eating pork. Bollox to that, another rasher please dear.”
Or
“Moses was in the temple today, saying we shouldnt eat pork. I guess he knows what he’s on about. Then he did that trick with the stick and snake. Ha ha, that one never gets old !”
Nearly all of them couldn’t have read The Daily Torahgraph (very good, haha).
One of the things with priests/rabbis is that they were the only bloke in the village that could read. They studied and then went out. They were not just “god says” but were educated men. The Victorian Sunday School movement was about teaching peasants to read.
Also, a lot of people in Israel wouldn’t have known why shellfish was a bad idea, but that some of their mates got sick from it. So errr God?
By the time of rabbinic Judaism, there was more emphasis on teaching at least male children to read so they could study at least the Torah, and possibly also the Talmud. Rabbis were generally not the only literature Jews in a village. As you say, Protestant mass literacy comes from a similar place. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/jewish-literacy-as-the-road-to
Also gave the peasants an opportunity to make more peasants without doing so in front of the little peasants. Very Victorian.
“things like halal and bans on pork were reasonable public health measures in ancient times” There’s no evidence that that was the reason. The archaeology says that at some times people kept pigs in Palestine, at other times they didn’t. In the similar climate of Spain people kept pigs all the time, as far as I know – until the Moslem invasion, presumably.
Technology at work.
Knowledge of and access to salt, for instance.
Also being nomads it would be difficult to control what pigs ate
French 15th Century song by Claudin de Semisy
Je ne menge point de porc.
Telle que je vois dire,
S’il a mengé cent estrons,
Il ne s’en fera que rire.
Il les tourne, il les vire,
Il leur rit et puis les mort.
Je ne menge point de porc.
Le porc s’en alloit jouant
Tout au long d’une rivière.
Il veit ung estron nouant,
Il luy print a faire chere,
Disant en ceste maniere:
“Estron nouant en riviere,
Rend toy ou tu es mort.”
Je ne menge point de porc.
A Hymn to Spud!
Anyone living near the Dead Sea had far more access to salt than someone living in the middle of the central plateau of Spain.
Anyway the Torah was written so late that it can’t possibly explain the taboo against pork as revealed by archaeology. I’ve never seen a plausible explanation of it.
“Anyone living near the Dead Sea had far more access to salt than someone living in the middle of the central plateau of Spain.”
Should I take you on a trip along the Stone Age through Roman Era Iberian rock salt mines, or do you take my word for it? 😉
Dead Sea Salt water is *heavily* “polluted” with “bittersalts” ( = anything not NaCL ). Far more than the Mediterranean salt water.
And needs to be refined twice to be even usable for consumption. Once to get the heavy metals and most of the iron out, a second time to get the …fertiliser salts… and the remaining iron out.
Even bog salt from salt peat only has to be refined once to be useable…
( one of the Useless Factoids ( and a dissertation) I picked up from my re-enactment hobby is “salt production in the Roman Rhine Delta” and …welll… you know… Nerd….. )
The Torah was *edited* while the Jews were in Babylon. That isn’t when it was written.
Pigs are forest foragers. They’re not a grazing animal you can herd & drive.
As such they are major carriers of tapeworms which is why pork products have to be well cooked. During WW11 in England there were major outbreaks of tapeworm infection amongst female workers in sausage meat factories who apparently used to sneak raw meat to supplement their diets.
World War Eleven? I must have slept through eight!
WW Eleven is a current meme to assist Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in her beclowning of her foreign self.
And are we in the ninth?
Shellfish, too.
That’sh intolerable.
I doubt if it was a health issue. Both Judaism & Islam are the religions of goat herding peoples. And religions tend to want to preserve the status quo & the culture to keep the dominance of the priestly class & its influence. The keeping of pigs would result in a markedly different lifestyle & would threaten religious dominance. You can probably make the same sort of connection with shellfish. A product of settled coastal people.
Herding people tend to be tribal & monotheistic. Pig keeping people non-tribal & polytheistic.
It’s worth thinking about this from the perspective of where we started. Originally evolved as hunter gatherers. So we talk about the invention of agriculture & a settled lifestyle. The emphasis is on gathering But you can only do that in areas will support agriculture. But you have areas won’t support agriculture. So you get a development from hunting, which is herding, where you follow the grazing animals. When they’ve grazed out an area you move on to another. With herding your cultural anchor is the tribe not the location. And tribes have leaders & followers. The one who decides which direction to go for the grazing & walks in front. So produce religions with a single leader/god. You can see it in the language we use. For some peoples we talk about their leader & followers. Talk about villagers in Asia & it’s the headman of the village with the subscript that he sits in his hut & his people gather round him.
Polytheism is far more natural. Humans are communities not singulars. Why wouldn’t their gods be? The entirety of Europe – mostly good agricultural land – was polytheistic. Still really is. Look at Catholicism with all its saints. Last week the Portuguese/Brasilians were praying to Fatima its patron saint. Very pretty she seems to have been judging by her pin-ups. But herding tribes make a natural military. No doubt the peoples of Palestine resented the Israelites descending on them from out of the hills & stealing their crops. So it’s not surprising they end up dominating
That’s a fascinating point about polytheism that I hadn’t thought about that much. The saints being a lot like the old Roman and Greek gods. St Christopher and Hermes are basically the same thing.
I used to wonder what Jesus and the Virgin Mary were for, if God is omniscient and omnipotent, and “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me“.
But then, in wondering this I’m making a category error, aren’t I?
Roman Catholicism being polytheistic is a pretty old notion, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the case. For the average “peasant” over the centuries, saints and angels are as godly as the one god (in his three persons, oops).
I suspect the whole thing is a racket designed some considerable time after any actual founding events, which were probably quite different and less significant than celebrated. Just a feeling based on not much hard evidence, of course, but that describes pretty much all of that aspect of history.
For the average “peasant” over the centuries, saints and angels are as godly as the one god (in his three persons, oops).
The schoolboy error of thinking olden days people were stupid, when they were more sophisticated thinkers than today’s would-be scholars.
St John Chrysostom is way ahead of you, by many centuries. You can read his words if you like, and judge for yourself.
The basic error of not reading what was said. I included the present in “over the centuries” since the thread referenced current examples. If people are praying to multiple supernatural entities, it’s polytheism by any other name. At least it is to non cult members.
I will defo read about John Chrysostom but probably only to wiki level.
Prefer worshipping the Aeryn Sun, meself.
Polytheism is far more natural.
It would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s only one God, and Jesus Christ is his son. Others disagree, but I am pleased to inform you that the Increate is not a six-armed elephant monster.
Idk if you heard, but great Pan died some time ago. All the little godlets and nature spirits of man’s infancy still ‘exist’ in some sense, I’m sure. But pagan magic ceased to function at the central point of history, the incarnation of God as Man. The First Coming.
Why do you suppose small numbers of Christians – armed only with their faith – were able to convert Britain to Christ? Our pagan ancestors were strong, proud, and fierce men. They were not simpletons or fools. Their eyes and souls were open to the supernatural.
The owls are not what they seem, BiS.
“Why do you suppose small numbers of Christians – armed only with their faith – were able to convert Britain to Christ?”
They weren’t armed “with only their Faith”…
The very much *Byzantine* Ascetic orders that set up on the british and irish isles only did so after begging the local bigwig for a Quiet Spot, and got to….work… from there.
After importing some ….Security…
The “inheritance” of the Roman Emperor Cult as defined by Constantine the Great during Nicae helped a lot in ..convincing… the local bigwigs of converting to the White God.
Not because they were particularly devout, but it gave “legitimacy” to their claim to power, leaning on a Higher Authority whose seat was ( at the time still..) safely away in Turkey, and later still safely far away in Rome.
And saved them all the challenges to their Leadership by their Sons and In-Laws..
From those early Monasteries “The Word” was indeed spread… But not just by Faith…
All those early “Saints” travelled with Mates. Armed Byzantine style…
And behaved like …well… thugs…. Destroying local shrines, cutting down sacred trees… And generally terrorising the smaller tribes and villages and browbeating them in “accepting” the New God.
You could do a *lot* in those days with just 30 well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened veterans…
Of course this was reported to The Boss and spread around the Neighbourhood as “Great Success”, acieved only by the Power of Prayer.
One thing the Byzantines picked up *really* hard on was good oldfashioned Roman Propaganda.. And they dialled it up to 11…
One of the best of them still survives, and is a Staple of British History:
It’s called: “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles”. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
And I strongly recommend reading a modern translation/transliteration of it.
With the same kind of scrutiny we reserve for Groaniad Opinion Pieces.
It’s… a bit of an eye-opener.. when you do it that way…
Incidentally, and in the same book: Peeps at the time treated the White God with a fair amount of Laissez Faire once the Thugs had moved on and they went through the Motions… And kept most of the Old Ways.
The Complaining about this by the Devout Learnéd Men in this particular tome is… well… another eye-opener about how things *really* were dealt with by the local oiks back then.
Not forgetting that the New God crew stole and bastardised the major festivals of the Old Ways.
The Koran chatters about people going to their fields, olive trees and so on. That ain’t nomadic goat-herding. (It also ain’t the neighbourhood of Mecca so the Holy City must have been somewhere else. Some people suggest Petra.)
“Herding people tend to be tribal & monotheistic.” There’s no sign that Judaism as a monotheistic religion existed before the Exile; recent work puts it even later as the third century BC. The first evidence of mass following of Jewish religious practices in Judah/Yehud/Judaea is as recent as the second century BC.
The OT is not a history book (and neither is the Koran nor much of the NT).
True, but to be fair most history books aren’t history books either. If we were to discipline ourselves to only accepting historic accounts that are confirmed by archaeological evidence dated by independent “scientific” means, we’d have pretty thin gruel. Exclude all self and cross referencing from history and basically there’s no there there.
But when people start going to their fields & olive groves is when you’re going to get the proscription against eating pork. The religion is trying to preserve its dominance. Herders possibly wouldn’t even have thought about it. As I said, you can’t herd swine. They’re not grazing animals. The people are adopting a sedentary lifestyle but the religion wants to preserve itself. So it introduces strictures to keep believers separate from others.
Disagree that it was about health. Like all the other rules it’s there primarily for religious purity testing and always was. Israel has plenty of early settlements where pork bones are found in the local midden.It’s just that as different geographic groups specialised in swine herding versus others went for goats/sheep then different farming practices got tangled up with cultural s practices (as they often do). Add in competition between the groups for land/resources and this lead to othering of the swine herding peeps by the goat lovers. Over time this ended up being codified by the ‘winning’ side into the orthodox religious laws we have today.
Goat lovers find them much more co-operative than pigs, I’m guessing.
A more convenient height?
Pigs don’t herd the same way as cattle or ovines. With the latter, absent the dominant male, the females are fairly passive. So you can drive a herd without much problem. If you’ve ever encountered pigs in the wild – like we have – the sow is hardly passive. Corner her & she’ll go for you. Especially if she’s got piglets with her. Herding swine requires an enclosure, so a sedentary lifestyle. Whereas for cattle or goats you can be nomadic. Which in areas of poor grazing like the middle east is a necessity.
For the settled people of the area, tribes like the Jews must have been like locusts. Rather like having the Pikeys arrive. Ruin your land & steal your lawnmower. And the Bible stories like hearing about the Pikeys from the Pikeys’ perspective. Descending on Canaan or whatever & ravaging it.
Nah. Look, in Bronze Age times, people had already figured out how to breed and cook pig safely. We know that, because the Prodigal Son had to get a humiliating job, feeding the foreigner’s pigs.
The pork ban is not about health, it’s a shibboleth. Same reason ultra Orthodox Jews wear strange clothes and hairstyles, it’s to keep them a people apart. Shibboleths are important to every tribe and group of humans, because they define the boundaries of in-group/out-group. But they’re more important in non-proselytising faiths, such as Judaism. The Christian wants you to bow down before the throne of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. The Mohammedan wants you to prostrate yourself before Allah. The Jew just wants to be able to live his life as a Jew. A people apart will always have to pay more attention to the in-group/out-group boundaries, if they want to remain a distinctive tribe. Not so much for fear of The Others, but for fear their daughters might marry The Other.
Ummm… The Ole’ Time Jews did some heavy protelitysing… By fire and sword… Their Way or Babies’ Heads Smashed Against Walls Way.
All quite….Cultural….
And, of course… it was All Good when *they* did it instead of the Evil Abhorrent Furrin Sinners…
Propaganda wasn’t invented by the Romans, and the Old Palestines handily borrowed Useful Stuff from their alternating Egyptian and “Persian” Overlords..
Taken Exodus at face value… Mozes was fully inducted in the Egyptian Court.
Which means he was *fully* aware of all the propaganda practices and politics that lot employed.
Wot, no bacon?
(And no black pudding – or the white, Irish, version)
The Irish actually have deportation flights?
Can they tell our Home Office how to do them?
Yeah, but you need an airline that most closely resembles a prison service.Restrictions, searches, severe limitations on freedom…
Ryanair!
Someone has a sense of humour. Delicious.
Halal, if starving and nothing else to eat.
They were not obliged to eat the sausages, so fuck ’em.
I inferred
“were offered” to mean , would you like this? followed by
“were served” to mean, those who said yes got fed the Irish breakfast.
Fuck that human rights monitor – sounds like a lanyard job to me
Interesting to know if any of them ate and enjoyed it. It’ not impossible, but peer pressure would be in play.
A Jewish chap (OK different but similar food rules) I worked with enjoyed a morning Bacon sarni and his only chance of having one was at work because his wife took the food rules more seriously than him. He would have been offended if someone went out to get them and not asked if he wanted one bringing back. I don’t recall him ever going for a sausage one but I expect he would enjoy it if that was the only option.
We had some Hindu friends from South Africa that we went with to the Black Country Museum once. They have a chippy there that still does chips done in beef fat.
The husband was dying to try them, so the missus engineered a distraction for the wife while we queued up. Sadly she clocked us moments after we layed hands on the chips and gave him a bit of a bollocking. She being somewhat more strict with the dietery requirements.
The husband had grown up dirt poor in Pretoria and was a little more flexible in that regard.
I was knocking around with a Jewish woman for a while. Her cousin Terry used to come round Saturday mornings (Shabbat) for bacon ‘n eggs breakfast with us. He used to chunter on about Searchlite he was a member of & the evils of discrimination. Then segue seamlessly into how he’d found a Jewish after school club for his son so he could meet Jewish friends.
Steve’s right about them not marrying the Other. The Aunts were very keen on me & always asking about my bank balance. Thought I was a “nice Jewish man” because I was was so up to speed on frumm. Oh boy did they go cold when they learnt the truth.
So breakfast is a human rights issue now? I must ask them for a ruling on my apparent obligation to make my wife’s porridge every morning.
Was the ‘human rights monitor’ left in Islamabad?
AND WHY NOT?
I wonder if I asked for Pork in Islamabad or Karachi what the response would be and whether it would trigger the same level of ‘faux outrage’ from a self-appointed ‘human rights’ monitor. Which is an interesting pseudonym for traitor. How language evolves…..
I asked the question – about the availability of pork, not directly for it – in Dhaka. And was told yes, it’s available. All the folk up in the NE along the Burma border eat it happily. So, no ban on it.
I seem to recall being told something similar about places like Kuwait and Dubai. Basically, if Westerners – and it’s usually oil engineers and the like, so indispensable peeps – want pork then there’s a place at the back of the supermarket where they can go. It’s all a bit shady, a bit like visiting a cat-house with a false moustache. But there you go. No idea if it is true.
It will be.
I once played Doha, in 1984. The Colonial Club, or something similar: served booze to the expats. The crowd was about 60% Arabs in dishdashes, with blondes on their laps. Nearly all were obviously drinking.
I came away with a poor impression of the locals, reinforced by talking to Gulf Air stewardesses (the source of most of the blondes) who were essentially treated as a harem by these people. Utter bunch of cunts.
You should hear our local working girls’ opinions on Moroccans. You even see adverts “Hot girl! Does everything! Nothing refused! Here & waiting for you! No marroquis!”
I seem to remember reading about archaeological discoveries of shellfish middles along coastal Philistine settlements…. nowadays called Gaza.
It was presumably to tempt them into returning.
Not to frighten them off???
With an Irish breakfast? That’s not going to frighten anyone – just show them what they;re missing.
From what I’ve read, there was also a halal meal offered. The outrage was simply over the fact that pork was on the airplane.
In other words, manufactured fake outrage.
. . . for prisoners.