The halal non story

Enough with the Daily Mail bashing, I hear you cry. Fine.

I can bash The Sun instead.

I see three headlines, a hat trick of offensiveness!

So The Sun is mad that there's a bunch of halal chicken being served in Pizza Express right now that nobody bothered to announce. And by a bunch, I mean all of the chicken is halal chicken. And by nobody bothered to announce, I mean it's all over their website, just not their menus and for some reason this is important.

Admittedly, I know the reason. But we'll get back to it.

So I paid attention to this story for about thirty seconds, long enough for every other newspaper to run a mini-story on it. My attention briefly flicked over if the chickens were stunned first, and thus humane, and they were, and I just stopped caring. Look, I don't care what you say over a dying chicken, unless your whispering at it how you're going to fuck it's new holes, it which case, damn, that is creepy. As most (like, 90% more most) of the meat is pre-stunned, and thus like every other piece of meat served to me, this means the only difference a halal chicken and a non-hahal chicken is the that little prayer the halal stuff gets. I'm an atheist. Praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monsters is equally valid to me, in that prayer is utterly invalid to me. Praying to the dead chicken makes no difference, it's like talking to plants - only that plants benefit from the carbon dioxide in your breath. If anything, praying is a sort of selfish action. It makes you feel better, but muggins over here stuck in hospital thinks you're just wasting your own time and mine.

Besides, if you're religious but not a Muslim, surely that prayer is as equally invalid? As every religion claims they're the only right one? ...yes, I don't know jack shit about religions, I kinda gave up of them a while ago.

As long as the animal was killed humanly with as minimized suffering as possible, I'm down with that. Look, abattoirs are gross. And you know what? If you're not cool with that, don't eat meat. I know plenty of people who've decided that, and good for them.

So the story went on to look at the multiple places that sold halal meat and whether they announced it, and you know what - they probably should. A lot of meat nowadays seems to be halal to hedge the bets that everyone is cool to eat it. But that's really where the story should of stopped. But it kept on.

So why then? I mean, it's all stunned humanly, and no one's talking about the animal welfare beyond the death - not one mention about mistreatment - so why's this going on? Well, I'll tell you.

It's because The Sun is fucking racist.

What? I said it. I know plenty of well meaning people who are obsessed that there is a secret Muslim conspiracy to overtake Britain and that my friends, is lunacy. Lunacy! We're a country run by rich white men, and we'll always be run by rich white men. Our pastimes are bacon butties and beer. It ain't happening.

Yet we get the hysteria about sharia law: they're running their own courts! Of course they are. Just like Jewish courts, or Sikh courts, we actively encourage people to set up their own courts to deal with financial bullshit because if someone wants to go through a court and be legally bound by that court whilst not going through our courts, thus not costing us any money, we're normally all for it. Because, you know, it's not costing us anything. And then we're got Muslims taking over our schools! So we lose our fucking minds and send in a counter terrorism expert - way to proportionally respond... to a likely hoax. Now they're sneaking in their halal food! Only that is wasn't snunk in, we invited it, and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH.

As this adds up to a nasty piece of xenophobic hate mongering. Whenever I see those bloody Facebook shares of someone crying about animal welfare... look at the group promoting them. One of those nasty, cruel, nationalist right winger groups, right? Because that's the first thing they do to try for legitimacy; they attempt to claim they're kind. They loves them some fluffy animals! Yeah. No, you don't care. You're just bashing, and your types always do this.

Enough.

Any Irish here? I need you to do me a personal favor.

I need you to be our terrorists again.

Look, it can't be the Jews, they're still getting shit. It can't be anyone remotely brown lookin' to the average Dulex paint range racist as they've already been lumped into the Muslim camp. It can't be the Welsh, as we don't belive they care at all about anything beyonf their borders. And we built a wall around the Scots, thus keeping us safe from them forever.

FOREVER.

Just phone up a couple of prank bomb calls, and let us make horrible potato based racist slurs for a bit until we all calm down. That's as far as we'll go - you're in the EU now, you're safe from us unless we... uh... leave. Hmm. Yeah.

Scratch that.

It'll have to be the Welsh. Sorry.