Swine Flu, Mexican Flu, Middle East Flu: What is in a Name? Babe in Arabia. What Would Jesus Do?
The US administration does not want to call it the “swine” flu because it might damage the “swine” industry. No, not the banking or hedge fund industry, the other less harmful swine industry. They have a point there, and proof is in the Middle East where Arab regimes have declared a crusade, oops, a jihad, oops, a holy war, oops a pogrom against the filthy ugly little animals, Babe notwithstanding.Egypt has mobilized her mighty army, mostly entrusted with the task of keeping the regime in power, to battle pig farmers even though the pigs do not pose a threat to the regime. This has a sectarian angle, since many of the angry pig farmers are Christian Copts (Ka Ptah in ancient Egyptian). Parliament passed a measure to execute all swine, and the government went through the motions. But the wheels of the Egyptian bureaucracy have not gotten any faster in the past 4,000 years.
The Israelis have objected to the term “swine” because it is not kosher. I guess this means the “swine flu” is also not kosher. But how do you make a flu kosher? Does a rabbi have to do or say something over it?
Muslims have been more open-minded for once in modern history: they did not object to the name, even though the pig is not kosher to them either. So what gives? Maybe Netanyahu was pandering to his fundamentalist allies in the cabinet, even though any sane person can see that he is at best agnostic.
Regardless of the name, and not to be outdone, the governments of the Persian Gulf states started their own pogroms (let’s not call it crusades or jihads). Disregarding the calls of the World Health Organization and of science that the swine are not carriers, they set out with a vengeance to kill, banish, and keep out the suspects. Saudi Arabia was probably the one country that did not look silly, and that is because they have no four-legged swine in the country. I am not sure what the Iranians did about the whole affair: Ahmadinejad has been oddly silent about it.
Which led me to pose a question during the avant le souper hour at home. Since Jesus was a Jew, and since all his early followers were Jewish, and his faith was initially a sect of the Jewish religion, then how did the pig slip in as kosher good eats to the later Christians? I concluded that it was the northern and western European priests and monks who snuck the pigs in. Jesus probably did not even conceive of the pig as something worth mentioning, it was beneath contempt. He took it for granted that it would always be banned to his Jewish followers (he did not count on the goyim to mess things up). Had he thought that his later followers would be eating it he would have said something about banning it. He never dreamed of those wild Europeans to the north of Rome and Greece joining his faith.
Cheers
mhg
m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com
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