The terrible consequences of Egypt's swine slaughter

[jimmy olsen]

http://www.slate.com/id/2229830/

First They Came for the Pigs
The terrible consequences of Egypt's swine slaughter.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Sept. 28, 2009, at 11:05 AM ET

According to all recent reports, the ancient city of Cairo now presents to the world the image of a growing pile of festering trash. Nothing new, you say. The streets have never been exactly uncluttered, and the levels of noise and traffic and pollution are an object of wonderment. When I first visited the place, I was amazed to find people living with great dignity and aplomb in what were called "the cities of the dead"—among the graves and stones of Cairo's massive cemeteries. I was also struck by the number and variety of animals living cheek by jowl, as it were, amid the buses and taxis, with the human population. Looking down from the high window of Shepheard's Hotel, I saw that some enterprising person in a neighboring low-rise had managed to get a small flock of goats onto his roof. Other flocks and herds could be met with on the thoroughfares. And a great deal of excellent work was being unobtrusively done by that most useful of animals, the pig. As mass consumers of organic waste, pigs are hard to beat. They would chomp their way through great heaps of it, very often under the unspoken supervision of Cairo's quite large Christian minority.

I have to use the past tense about these noble beasts because, in the spring of this very year, they were all slaughtered on the orders of the Egyptian government. And it is this crazy action that has shifted the Cairo trash scene from the awful to the near-calamitous. It was alleged by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, on the basis of no evidence whatever, that the swine themselves were the carriers of the so-called "swine flu." (Several friends and relatives of mine have already caught and recovered from this mild infection; everybody knows that actual encounters with pigs have absolutely nothing to do with it.) As a consequence of the pig massacre, the streets of Cairo have become almost unlivable, and the Christian garbage collectors, locally called the zabaleen, have been robbed of their livelihood. "They killed the pigs, let them clean the city," as one former garbage collector and pig man, Moussa Rateb, was quoted as saying of the Egyptian authorities.

I read all the way to the end of Michael Slackman's well-written and vividly illustrated report in the New York Times with that vague need one sometimes feels to hear the sound of another shoe dropping. When was he proposing to mention that there was something sectarian—possibly even something religious—in the decision to simultaneously butcher the pigs and downgrade the Christians?

This wouldn't be the only instance of clerical hysteria generated by the outbreak. Iranian television recently broadcast an item suggesting that the swine-flu virus had been deliberately incubated by the usual shady cosmopolitan "circles" and that the vaccine against it had been monopolized by a company in which Donald Rumsfeld held many shares. 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.)

At a more demotic level, it is said that pigs are unclean because they even eat their own excrement. They are not the only creatures that will resort to this, but it is certainly their omnivorousness that makes them such an amazing trash patrol. Not to notice this about pigs is to miss the point of them. We might also observe that they have skin and organs that can be transplanted onto and into humans, that they have high intelligence and an impressive body weight to brain weight ratio, some family values, and other interesting traits. (It's no coincidence that, in all societies that do not inculcate prejudice against them, baby pigs are regarded in a cousinly light by the folklore of human children.) A city or society without pigs is barely imaginable: A world without pigs would be a world in which humans had destroyed some close kin and some very serviceable fellow creatures. Yet two of the great monotheisms are committed to irrational hatred and even fear of the pig. (Christianity is rather better on the point, if you omit the ghastly tale of the Gadarene swine infected with demons by Jesus himself. A canon of the Church of England, who had served as a missionary in New Guinea, where sheep were unknown, told me that the metaphor of the woolly flock and the shepherd had been replaced among the indigenous by Anglican preachers who appealed to the Lord to keep and safeguard his precious porkers.)

But no faith is immune to stupidity on this point. Centuries ago in Europe, cats were considered—especially the black ones among them—as the "familiars" of witches and put to death with revolting cruelty by Christians who were petrified of the evil one and his female envoys. The destruction of the feline led to the triumph of the rat, and to the flea that it bore on its back, and to the near collapse of European civilization. Now, the eradication of the porcine leads to the advance of the garbage mountain, in which it would be surprising if the rat and its vermin did not again find a few claw holds. Leave it to people of faith. Leave it to them if you dare ...

[CountDeMoney]

Centuries ago in Europe, cats were considered—especially the black ones among them—as the "familiars" of witches and put to death with revolting cruelty by Christians who were petrified of the evil one and his female envoys.

And to this day, they still suffer from it.

[MadImmortalMan]

Remember those guys before the war getting all uptight and offended about Americans and Euros suggesting that Egypt (and Iraq) had a lower standard of living than the West? 

[Razgovory]

Indeed Christian witch burning is responsible for the bubonic plague.  That's why it first came to Europe hundreds of years before the witch hysteria even began.  And why it hit China even harder.

[Queequeg]

But no faith is immune to stupidity on this point. Centuries ago in Europe, cats were considered—especially the black ones among them—as the "familiars" of witches and put to death with revolting cruelty by Christians who were petrified of the evil one and his female envoys. The destruction of the feline led to the triumph of the rat, and to the flea that it bore on its back, and to the near collapse of European civilization. Now, the eradication of the porcine leads to the advance of the garbage mountain, in which it would be surprising if the rat and its vermin did not again find a few claw holds. Leave it to people of faith. Leave it to them if you dare ...

I don't know where to begin.  How is this guy a public intellectual?  His thinking here is Glenn Beck-level.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Indeed Christian witch burning is responsible for the bubonic plague.  That's why it first came to Europe hundreds of years before the witch hysteria even began.  And why it hit China even harder.

Nonsense.  A rat a day keeps the plague away.

[CountDeMoney]

I don't know where to begin.  How is this guy a public intellectual?  His thinking here is Glenn Beck-level.

He's bashing moon-worshippers.  Let's not lose sight of the big picture here, folks. 

[Jaron]

Would it be accurate today that the struggle for world domination is moon worshippers vs. sun worshippers?

[Agelastus]

Indeed Christian witch burning is responsible for the bubonic plague.  That's why it first came to Europe hundreds of years before the witch hysteria even began.  And why it hit China even harder.

Sorry to correct you Raz, but witch hunts predate the Black Death (which it seems the article refers to.) Given my long term lack of access to reputable university libraries I am having to rely on unreliable sources such as Wikipedia for references for you, but -

"Saint Boniface declared in the 8th century that belief in the existence of witches was un-Christian. The emperor Charlemagne decreed that the burning of supposed witches was a pagan custom that would be punished by the death penalty. In 820 the Bishop of Lyon and others repudiated the belief that witches could make bad weather, fly in the night, and change their shape. This denial was accepted into Canon law until it was reversed in later centuries as the witch-hunt gained force. In 1307 the trial of the Knights Templar shows close parallels to accusations of witchcraft, maleficium, and sorcery and may have been the beginning of the great European witch-hunt.[33] Other rulers such as King Coloman of Hungary declared that witch-hunts should cease because witches (more specifically, strigas) do not exist."

and

"In 814, Louis the Pious upon his accession to the throne began to take very active measures against all sorcerers and necromancers, and it was owing to his influence and authority that the Council of Paris in 829 appealed to the secular courts to carry out any such sentences as the Bishops might pronounce. The consequence was that from this time forward the penalty of witchcraft was death, and there is evidence that if the constituted authority, either ecclesiastical or civil, seemed to slacken in their efforts the populace took the law into their own hands with far more fearful results."

and

"Among the laws attributed to King Kenneth I of Scotland (ruled 844 to 860), under whom the Scots of Dalriada and the Pictish peoples may be said to have been united in one kingdom, is an important statute which enacts that all sorcerers and witches, and such as invoke spirits, "and use to seek upon them for helpe, let them be burned to death." Even then this was obviously no new penalty, but the statutory confirmation of a long-established punishment. So the witches of Forres who attempted the life of King Duffus in the year 968 by the old bane of slowly melting a wax image, when discovered, were according to the law burned at the stake."

His argument is utterly specious however, since there is a growing body of evidence that the Black Death was not Bubonic Plague. For example, all of England was affected by the Plague, and yet before and after the plague, across the country dovecotes were constructed with no reference to protecting their inhabitants from rats, suggesting that they had not spread beyond the towns.

[Agelastus]

Indeed Christian witch burning is responsible for the bubonic plague.  That's why it first came to Europe hundreds of years before the witch hysteria even began.  And why it hit China even harder.

Nonsense.  A rat a day keeps the plague away.

Sings...

"Blackadder, Blackadder..."

[CountDeMoney]

You know what's a plague?  Animetardism.  That's a plague.

[Agelastus]

You know what's a plague?  Animetardism.  That's a plague.

One could argue that you are a plague of Languish, good sir! One that cannot be cured, but must be endured.:tips hat and bows:

[Razgovory]

Sorry to correct you Raz, but witch hunts predate the Black Death (which it seems the article refers to.) Given my long term lack of access to reputable university libraries I am having to rely on unreliable sources such as Wikipedia for references for you, but -

I said the Witch Hysteria which is from the 13th century to the 17th or so.  Witch hunting is as old as civilization.  The first code of laws known mentions trying and executing witches and sorcerers.

[sbr]

As a consequence of the pig massacre, the streets of Cairo have become almost unlivable, and the Christian garbage collectors, locally called the zabaleen, have been robbed of their livelihood. "They killed the pigs, let them clean the city," as one former garbage collector and pig man, Moussa Rateb, was quoted as saying of the Egyptian authorities.

How were the garbage collectors "robbed of their livelihood"?  It sounds like they just quit collecting garbage because they were Christian and liked the pigs, or have I missed something that is not in this article?

[Razgovory]

I don't know where to begin.  How is this guy a public intellectual?  His thinking here is Glenn Beck-level.

He's bashing moon-worshippers.  Let's not lose sight of the big picture here, folks.

Bashing Muslims is only part of his overall bashing of religions.  That's the big picture.  Fuckers a Red.