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Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts

Wednesday 15 September 2021

Environmentalism Is Not Always Protecting Animals

environmentalism not always protecting animals




There is a difference between wanting to protect the environment and being an environmentalist. 

One of the many problems with environmentalism is that, although there are environmental philosophies rooted in the idea that the environment and environmental objects have an ethical value in themselves, independently of their utility for human beings, often environmentalism is a selfish attitude, it stems from an egotistic concern for the human species: the environment needs to be protected not per se, not because of the inherent moral value of its (other than human) inhabitants, but only as a means to the ultimate ethical goal: the human species. 

This is a Kantian attitude: the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that animals should be given some moral consideration not for themselves but only as a means to human ends, because mistreating them and being cruel to them leads to a greater likelihood of being cruel to other humans. So the end, in this view, always remains man and man only. 

Environmentalism generally is still speciesist: it is still well inside speciesist limitations. 

This is the way anyway that environmentalism has historically developed; it doesn’t necessarily mean that it could not be different. 

An example of this conflict between environmentalism and anti-speciesism is when major, mainstream environmental organizations call for extensive animal-testing programs of pesticides or other chemicals, despite the fact that animal tests don't give any reliable information on the toxicity of these substances on human beings.

Famous environmental associations are responsible for REACH, the greatest animal testing programs ever. REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) is the European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use, and at least 9 million laboratory animals are estimated to be subject to the tests, although some estimates give as many as 54 million vertebrate animals. It entered into force on 1 June 2007, and was planned to be implemented over the next decade. 

Another example is the support for wind turbines as an illusory replacement for fossil fuels. Not only they cannot achieve the latter goal, but also wind turbines are killing a great number of birds and bats caused by collision and barotrauma—internal injuries, due to the animals' being exposed to too rapid pressure changes when they get close to the turbines' moving blades trailing edges.

Environmental issues need to be explored but with a difference: we do not take for granted any claims, including those of the environmentalist movement.

Everything must be backed up by sound scientific work for us to accept it.

Global warming, recycling, pesticides, every area is scrutinized and open to controversy.

The environment is connected to human health on one side and to animal ethics on the other.

We need to examine the cases in which the environmentalists take an approach which is at odds with animal ethics.


Saturday 18 May 2013

Halal Meat Is the First Giant Step of Our Islamization




A few days ago I got up determined to keep Islam and politics out of my mind - I tend to think about such subjects a lot these days - at least until I would turn my computer on and start working.

I went to the front door to check my mail and among the letters there was a leaflet with the menu of a local takeaway. I inspected it and found the dreaded word: "Halal".

There is no way you can keep Islam out of your life, even out of your thoughts for long, in today's Britain, even more so in today's London. The saying "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain" seems particularly appropriate under the circumstances. I did not want to figuratively go to Islam, but Islam came to me.

I threw in the dustbin the takeaway leaflet, but not before having phoned the place to let the people running it know that I was about to keep their leaflet, since the takeaway is convenient and close to us, but that when I saw they were selling halal meat I got rid of it - which is exactly the truth. I added that there are many other people like me in our area who don't want to eat halal meat and that the takeaway is going to lose business because of this issue.

The only thing I did not mention is that I am a vegetarian, which is the best, surest way not to be affected by halal if you live in Londonistan, although I was vegetarian long before the birth of this problem in the West: I recommend it to everybody, regardless of the halal question. Let's not delude ourselves: even in the best conditions, slaughter is always atrocious for the animals, it is in fact murder. But although a vegetarian, I would not buy anything from a halal-meat-peddling outlet.

People who haven't seen the light sometimes say to me during a discussion that the Islamization of Britain is never going to happen, a view, alas, shared by many.

The fact is that we do not even need to talk about the future, because it is already happening.

A clear case of Islamization already present is that of halal meat.

This subject is one of those that most antagonizes British and other European natives against Islam for two reasons.

The first is that lots of people care about animals and they do not want to see them unnecessarily suffer to satisfy the ritual requirements of a doctrine, Islam, which is alien to us and seems to disprove its ethical and therefore religious status exactly with precepts like these that instruct its believers to increase, rather than diminish, the suffering in the world.

It looks paradoxical that the improvements that our civilized society has introduced to at least alleviate, if not eliminate, the terrible agony of slaughter should be reversed on the whim of a group of people with a way of thinking stuck in the 7th century AD and who came to our countries with their hands stretched out asking to be helped to get out of the poverty and backwardnedss that Islam forces on them, only to practically replicate those conditions here.

The second reason why halal meat is so unpopular is that here we can see in practice, perhaps for the first time on a large scale, what Islamization is.

What many people strongly object to is that they have been compelled to live according to Sharia law against their will, and that is the very essence of Islam and its supremacism.

Many UK schools, hospitals, canteens, hundreds of restaurants and pubs have been routinely serving halal meat to non-Muslims who did not know that they were eating meat from ritually slaughtered animals. Famously, even sporting venues such as Wembley Stadium and Ascot, supermarkets including Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Somerfield and the Co-op, fast-food chains like McDonald’s, Subway and KFC, and pizza chains like Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut and Nando’s have been selling halal meat without letting their customers know.

Part of the reason for this is that not all meat produced from animals killed by halal methods of slaughter is suitable for Muslim consumption because it may still not meet other Islamic dietary requirements, and therefore may end up being sold to non-Muslims. Something similar happens with kosher meat for Jewish consumption, which may find its way to the wider community.

Even Easter eggs and cat food have been found to be halal in Australia, as denounced by the Aussie website Halal Choices, which is so popular that it has received more than 250,000 visits since the Christian activist Kirralie Smith created it two years ago.

And this is the good news. The movement against halal is global, developed in all Western countries with a Muslim population. Facebook alone pullulates with anti-halal pages, sometimes dedicated to the closure or the prevention of a local abattoir.

Only a couple of months ago a row erupted over a North-East London school's decision to start serving only halal meat to its pupils. Parents objected to these plans of the management at Larkswood Primary School in Chingford. These are people whom we should support. It was also discovered that halal is the only meat served in three-quarters of council-supported schools and academies (46 in total) in Waltham Forest Council.

The Daily Mail reporter who wrote the article about UK institutions and commercial outlets serving halal linked to above has managed to have access to a halal abattoir undercover. Here is what he witnessed:
They [Animals] are fully conscious as their throats are slit by a slaughterman as he utters prayers to Allah to ‘bless’ the animal. The ­creature then bleeds to death in a process that can take more than 30 seconds…

Though the deep incision to the neck cuts through the animal’s windpipe and main arteries, the creatures are still able to cry out.

During my two-hour visit, I watch as lamb after lamb has its throat sliced open while fully conscious. They make pitiful bleating and gurgling sounds as they choke on their own blood. It’s a chilling sound that, once heard, stays with you for days afterwards.

And then there’s the fact that the animals can witness each other being killed as they travel along the ­conveyor belt. Their hooves twitch wildly as they try to break fee.

One lamb cries out for more than 20 seconds before it flops off the end of the conveyor belt and on to a rotating table. From there, it is shackled by its hind legs and hauled up to the ceiling on a hook, where it is left with a dozen others to ‘bleed out’ — another ­important part of the halal process.

Of course, no slaughter of an animal is easy to watch. But it is hard to remain dispassionate as I watch ­dozens of still-conscious animals bleeding to death, the floor covered by an inch of warm, frothy blood.
The British law, which requires animals to be stunned and rendered unconscious before slaughter, should be changed so that it no longer makes exceptions for both halal and kosher, as the new counterjihad party (to which I belong) Liberty GB says in its manifesto. Sweden and Norway banned ritual slaughter in the 1930s. Switzerland, one of the most ancient countries to be based on popular consent and direct democracy, banned it as early as 1893.

It's worth explaining that, if we implement that, nobody will have to go against his or her religious beliefs or commandments.

Islam specifically exempts its faithful from the obligation to eat halal food if none is available:
He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful. Quran (002:173)
Neither Islam nor Judaism prescribes meat consumption. If a follower of either faith does not want to eat non-permitted meat, he can be a vegetarian, thus also doing a favour to his heart and decreasing his risk of cancer.

Interestingly, it's a major secular Jewish philosopher, Peter Singer, who has this recommendation for Muslims and his fellow Jews in his book Animal Liberation (Amazon UK) (Amazon USA) (page 155, The New York Review of Books, second edition):
Meanwhile, those who do not wish to eat meat slaughtered contrary to the current teachings of their religion have a simple alternative: not to eat meat at all. In making this suggestion, I am not asking more of religious believers than I ask of myself; it is only that the reasons for them to do it are stronger because of the additional suffering involved in producing the meat they eat.
Jewish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, also a vegetarian, said: "I am not a vegetarian for my own health, but for the health of the chickens" and "every day is Treblinka for the animals". He wrote a very poignant short story, The Slaughterer, in which a compassionate man, Yoineh Meir, is appointed the town's ritual slaughterer in the old country, and obediently performs his duties but his life is turned into a living hell of nightmares and obsessions of blood and slaughter, until madness and drowning himself in the river become his final escape:
The killing of every beast, great or small, caused him as much pain as though he were cutting his own throat. Of all the punishments that could have been visited upon him, slaughtering was the worst.
While we are waiting for the law to be changed to prohibit ritual slaughter, at the very least halal meat should not reach the non-Muslim market (and kosher the non-Jewish), and all meat from animals who were slaughtered when conscious should be clearly labelled as such. There is certainly a vast number of people who want clear labelling, knowledge and choice.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Anti-Halal-Meat Campaigns on Facebook



There is a new flurry of activity of mostly British anti-halal-meat campaigns on Facebook. I have liked, joined, friended, subscribed to all I found, signed petitions, encouraged them and posted on their walls.

I invite you to do the same if you like them. Here they are.

SAY NO TO HALAL MEAT

Say NO to Halal slaughter in Skegness - it collects signatures for a petition to the East Lindsey District Council (E.L.D.C.) to stop a new halal slaughterhouse from opening in in Skegness, Lincolnshire, England. The page started less than a month ago, on 27 July, and they have already collected 566 signatures; 434 are still needed.

E.L.D.C.: Stop the Halal slaughter house opening in Skegness - this is the petition page where to sign.

Say No To Skegness Halal Slaughter House!

Boycott Halal - liked by almost 7,000 people. It's the Facebook page of the website Boycott Halal, with the tagline "It's wrong for so many reasons", which is also the collaboration of Infidels United (United we stand in defense of freedom), Boycott Halal Cause, BOYCOTT HALAL in USA, Canada, NZ & Australia.

SAY NO to Halal MEAT at Toby Carvery - targets this restaurant chain.

Say No To Halal !

Say no to halal this is my country and thats not the way we do it

I'll update this list as new campaigns and groups are formed.

Wednesday 1 August 2012

Wake Up, Animal Rights People!

To see that the animal movement has left the initiative of fighting against the huge spread of halal meat in Britain to the BNP, who organized a protest in Sunderland against Subway sandwich shops selling it (and there many of them all over the country) is shocking and saddening.

I wrote in Islam in the UK, in my site Britain Gallery:

When I first arrived here, the word “halal” was unknown to everybody except the people involved in animal welfare, who knew that the Islamic method of slaughter was bad news indeed for the animals. Now you only have to take a 30-minute drive around London (any part) and you’ll see dozens of Halal signs in shops and restaurants.

It's true that animals should not be killed for food, as vegetarian nutrition is not only adequate but in fact much better for human health than meat eating. It's true that animals always suffer during the process of farming - especially industrial farming -, transport to the point of slaughter, and in the slaughterhouse due to terror and maltreatment. It's true that even so-called "humane" slaughter can sometimes go wrong and animals may be conscious when their throats are cut or they are otherwise killed.

But we can point out all these things and still be opposed to halal and kosher methods of slaughter.

Stunning animals before slaughter is certainly better than not doing that, whatever else is true about farm animals exploitation and suffering.

Sweden has banned ritual methods of slaughter, so this shows that it is a realistic objective in the UK as well.

To find out what ritual slaughter involves, read this post and watch the video.

There is a growing opposition to halal meat among the British people, based on both animal welfare and the just rebellion against being disposessed of the culture and ethics of one's own country.

We should be at the forefront of this protest, which can ony be good for animals because, among other things, will provide a model example of a widespread protest for animal welfare popular among the general public.

This is only one of many ways in which Islam is an obstacle to animal liberation and animal welfare. In the Netherlands, when Muslim politician Hasan Küçük, a Turkish-Dutch representative on The Hague city council for the Islam Democrats, called for a ban on dogs in The Hague, Holland's third-largest city, because dogs are "unclean" in the Islamic legal tradition, it was left to Paul ter Linden, representative of Geert Wilders' PVV on the city council, to reply: "In this country pet ownership is legal. Whoever disagrees with this should move to another country." The Dutch Party for the Animals, whose proposal to make The Hague a dog-friendlier city had prompted Küçük's call for banning dogs, was silent.

Since the number of Muslims in the UK and Europe is doubling faster than you can say "Ramadan", there will be many more times in the future when we'll face this choice: are we going to give in each time? In the long battle ahead are we going to choose political correctness or the animals?

Tuesday 31 July 2012

Halal Games and Anti-Jihad War Apparatus in Islamized London

HMS Ocean Moored in London for Olympic Games

Jihad Watch has just published my article Halal Games and Anti-Jihad War Apparatus in Islamized London, that I reproduce here:

by Enza Ferreri

London is the most Islamic city to have hosted the Olympic Games ever. There are at least 1 million Muslims thought to live in London, although the figure is likely to be higher.

And these Olympics will be dominated by Islam in more than one way.

London 2012 are the first Games to which every participating country has sent female athletes. Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Qatar had never sent women to the Olympics before. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), under pressure from human rights groups, wanted female athletes from Muslim countries to participate, and threatened Saudi Arabia with a ban in order to achieve that result.

However, the International and the London Olympic Committees had to make many concessions. Behind the conspicuous hijab-wearing women in the Opening Ceremony Athletes’ Parade, and the amazing IOC decision to allow a Saudi woman to compete in hijab against judo rules banning fighters from wearing a head covering on safety grounds, there is much more, hidden from public view.

After the UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission’s request to have Olympic dates changed so that they would not overlap with Ramadan was rejected, the organizers have bent over backwards to accommodate Muslims.

London will make Olympic history by having for the first time an Olympic Village with areas designated for Muslim prayers. A team of Muslim clerics is available to athletes and officials, and there are faith rooms at the rowing and canoe sprint village and the sailing village. All restaurants and dining facilities at the Athletes’ Village will be open 24 hours to allow Muslims to eat in the permitted hours during Ramadan.

Halal meat and meals are available at all times in the athletes’ dining facilities, and are very likely to be served to non-Muslims too outside the Olympic Village.

Ramadan and the Olympics overlapped before, but never once had the Committee changed anything to pander to Muslim participation. Even volunteers have been trained absolutely not to hurt Mohammedan sensitivities, albeit inadvertently, and to answer questions in Islamically correct ways.
Everyone is to be reminded that within the Olympic site food can be eaten before dawn and after dusk.

And, as The Daily Mail reports:
Ramadan is set to add to London’s Olympic traffic woes as thousands of Muslims squeeze into non-Games lanes to worship at the many mosques that surround the Olympic Park.

Every year during the month of August, vast crowds of worshippers descend on east London — one of the most concentrated Muslim communities in the country — for nightly prayer.

Local councillor Abdal Ullah said the influx of people to the area, between central London and Stratford, will play havoc with Games road links and traffic hotpsots.

The district surrounding the Olympic Park is home to more than 250,000 Muslims and almost 100 mosques.
The Olympic Park is in East London, an area which has had more Islamic terror suspects arrested in recent years than any similar-sized area not just in Britain, but in the whole of Europe.

The BBC reported that a senior security services official had told the TV channel that the biggest threat to the Olympics comes from British Muslim extremists, and intelligence services are taking the threat of “a homegrown terror attack” during the Olympics very seriously.

Adding to their concerns, the intelligence official continued, is that for the first time in many years the Games are taking place during Ramadan, so they have to be particularly “sensitive and effective.”

In a video interview, a former extremist explained to the BBC that Muslim terrorists may strike during the sacred month of Ramadan thinking that it will be an opportunity for going to heaven.

Foiling attacks has occupied the police and security services for months, the BBC said, and the threat is very real.

And this leads to another record: the most security-conscious, heavily guarded Olympics. The greatest mobilisation of military and security forces in the UK since the Second World War, with more troops deployed than in the war in Afghanistan, and the most heavily secured event in London”s history, are still more records.

Eleven miles of electric fencing charged with 5,000 volts of electricity and topped with razor wire separating the Olympic site from the rest of London; entrances to major venues guarded by soldiers, and surrounding streets patrolled by police heavily armed with automatic weapons, a rare sight in Britain; one of the Royal Navy’s largest warships docked on the river Thames as a staging post for military helicopters, some carrying snipers and special forces personnel ready to take out dangerous elements; another of the world’s most advanced warships also stationed on the river; 6 missile sites dedicated to intercepting hostile aircraft; surface-to-air missile systems, scanning the skies to down any airborne threats, installed on the roofs of residential buildings; advanced fighter jets patrolling the sky above London; 4 of the most advanced aircraft developed by the European Union enforcing a strict no-fly zone around the city; unmanned drones flying above London to provide surveillance for security forces; helicopters with powerful imaging equipment to identify faces, clothes, even the smallest detail on any suspect individuals; thousands of street cameras feeding data to face-recognition software to spot any known hostile person from the crowds.

Armed FBI, CIA and Interpol officers in their hundreds are in London to help Scotland Yard.
Londoners do not forget the tragic link between Islamic terrorism and these games: London won its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games on 6th July 2005, the day before the 7/7 bombings.

Welcome to the Halal, Ramadan, Jihad Games.


Photo by UK Ministry of Defence (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

P.S. 7W6XBCCTKP85 = is my unique Technorati code, every blog has a different unique code.