What we risk giving up
From Alan Macfarlane's
report to the ESRC on the Earls Colne village history project:
"When gender is used as a major principle of organization, there is usually a very [great] opposition between the ideals and behaviour of the sexes, as in Hindu, Islamic or Mediterranean cultures. In the extreme cases the worlds of men and women overlap very little indeed and there is a very large emphasis on the threat and hostility between the genders and on the inferiority and subservience of women. This is related again to the 'honour and shame' complex; men have honour, women bring shame. Against such a background, what is striking at first glance from our parish records is the absence of a marked opposition. There is a striking similarity between men and women, a relaxed and friendly attitude, a mutual and affectionate sparring of almost equals, an absence of most of what is now known as male machismo, of female 'shame' of a stress on threats to female virginity. Women are not hidden away by dress or by buildings; they are not the vulnerable possessions of men. Though within the family, in relations of power, the man has the casting vote, it is meant to be a rule at the family level where both are 'under the law'. There are only hints of a gender opposition."
"Freedom of choice"
The HSA believes that religious laws were designed to improve hygiene in primitive conditions. Modern humane methods were not known and therefore not specifically required nor forbidden. However, there is emphasis in Jewish and Islamic teaching of the need for kindness and humane treatment of animals, and both faiths recognise that taking the life of an animal carries great responsibility. When humane mechanical stunning equipment was first developed in the 1920s, the Association campaigned strongly to have it adopted as the national standard. However in 1933 when the first law regarding slaughter came into force there were specific exemptions from stunning for Jewish and Muslim methods of slaughter. The Association campaigned again in support of two Private Members' Bills in 1956 and 1968, and Lord Somers' Bill in the House of Lords, which sought to remove these exemptions. These Bills were all defeated and the Slaughterhouses Act 1974 continued to allow religious slaughter without stunning. The HSA, at the request of the General Secretary of the Union of Muslim Organisations, UK and Eire carried out a practical demonstration of captive-bolt stunning in 1981 to show clearly that stunning did not kill but merely rendered animals unconscious. At the conclusion of the demonstration the Muslims all agreed that they had been convincingly shown that the animals were still alive after stunning, cutting and during bleeding out. They also remarked on the ease of handling a stunned animal. At about the same time the Society submitted its recommendations to the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) for its review on the welfare of livestock slaughtered by religious methods. The HSA strongly supported the main recommendations of the FAWC Report published in 1985. These included:
- Ministers should require both the Jewish and Muslim communities to review their methods of slaughter so as to develop alternatives which permit effective stunning;
- the law should be amended to ban the rotary casting pen and introduce the use of an upright pen which allows the animal to stand;
- that all carcases and cuts prepared from animals including poultry, slaughtered by religious methods and offered for sale, should be clearly labelled.
The upright pen replaced the rotary pen on 5th July 1992, but the other main recommendations were not accepted. Jewish and Muslim communities are still permitted to slaughter without stunning, and meat from animals slaughtered by religious methods is still sold on the retail market without being clearly labelled as such.
Edith Neville school in Somers Town was the second Camden primary after Argyle in King's Cross to introduce a halal-only canteen menu.
Although headteacher Sean O'Regan had to deal with parental concerns when the decision was taken in 2000 he says it was nothing like the protests at Kingsgate.
He said: "We had a big public meeting and invited the parents as well as representatives from the school dinner contractors and we cleared a few things up.
"There were some teething problems and parents did raise concerns. Some of it was caused by a lack of understanding and misconceptions about the slaughter of animals.
"It works just fine here now. When the meat is on the plate you cannot tell the difference.
Arguably it's a good thing for the non-muslim families to be forced to think more about where their food comes from and whether meat-eating can be justified at all - the schools all provide a vegetarian menu as the alternative to halal. However this situation clearly wasn't the intention of the original exemptions for religious slaughter. All of the reports in local media imply that the parents objecting to halal meat are either racist or dim and none of them give any inkling that there's actually a body of rational scientific evidence in favour of pre-stunning.
Cant terms or nicknames
"This artifice of affixing a name of reproach on those of an opposite party, in order indiscriminately to subject them to hatred or ridicule could hardly better be exposed [...] It is the artifice of the favourers of the catholic and of the prelatical party to call all who are sticklers for the constitution in church or state, or would square their actions by any rule, human or divine, Puritains.
[...]
it would not be so excusable if in this country we should suffer cant terms or nicknames to pass for reasoning or proof."
Memoirs of the Life of Colonel HutchinsonLabels: English Civil war, female authors, puritains
Such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out
1555 Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), who was elected as a Fellow of Clare in 1510, while still an undergraduate. Latimer was renowned for his blameless life, practical tact and trenchant oratory, and he soon rose to national prominence as a result of his preaching in favour of reform. He became royal chaplain to Henry VIII in 1534 (and to Anne Boleyn) and bishop of Worcester in 1535; he was one of the king’s advisers who supported the dissolution of the monasteries. At the time of the violent counter-reformation under Queen Mary (1553-8), Hugh Latimer refused to recant his protestant beliefs, and, together with Nicholas Ridley (sometime bishop of London), he was burned at the stake in Oxford on 16 October 1555.
2007 The editor of a Cambridge University college newspaper was in hiding last night after his attempt at religious satire backfired.
The 19-year-old aspiring journalist, who has not been named, is under investigation by the authorities at Clare College who described the issue of the student newspaper Clarefication as "abhorrent".
1557The beginning of the year
1557, was remarkable for the visit of Cardinal Pole to the University of Cambridge, which seemed to stand in need of much cleansing from heretical preachers and reformed doctrines.
February 6, the bodies, enclosed as they were in chests, were carried into the midst of the market place at Cambridge, accompanied by a vast concourse of people. A great post was set fast in the ground, to which the chests were affixed with a large iron chain, and bound round their centers, in the same manner as if the dead bodies had been alive. When the fire began to ascend, and caught the coffins, a number of condemned books were also launched into the flames, and burnt.
2007
Because of the publicity that has arisen, I strongly encourage you to return any copies of last week's Clareification so that I can destroy them. Please post them as soon as possible through the slot in the outer door of my room, E5.
The English - are different
Priorities firmly in the right place:
"Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed two skeletons thought to be 5,000 to 6,000 years old, locked in an embrace. The pair from the Neolithic period were discovered outside Mantua, about 40km (25 miles) south of Verona. The pair, almost certainly a man and a woman, are thought to have died young as their teeth were mostly intact, said chief archaeologist Elena Menotti."
"The discovery last month of a warrior buried with his horse in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at a US air base in Suffolk, which received wide publicity in the national press, has touched a nerve of public disquiet about the disinterment of the dead for archaeological research.
Writing to The Times, Elizabeth Dineley of Shaftesbury said it was ‘immeasurably touching’ to see a published photograph of the warrior and his horse, but that ‘to rend them apart’ in the name of science amounted to vandalism. ‘How short a time do we have to be buried, ’ she asked, ‘before it is permissible, even acceptable, for grinning archaeologists to dig out our bones, prod about among our teeth, disperse our possessions, take the head off our horse and lay us, not to rest, in boxes in museums?’ In the same newspaper, His Honour Judge Gabriel Hutton, of Dursley, Gloucestershire, wrote that if he intended to be buried with his horse, he would be ‘saddened’ to think that they might both be exhumed at some time in the future, to make way for a new dormitory at a US air base. ‘When does sanctity, afforded to graves, run out?’
In another letter to The Times last month, Anthony Maynard of the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project in Norfolk announced that his group had also excavated an East Anglian horse burial amid Anglo-Saxon skeletons this year. ‘We do, though, have our sensitivities, and intend ultimately to re-inter the skeletons at the site and erect a suitable memorial, ’ he wrote."
There's a picture of the warrior and his horse
here.
If we no longer have the right to laugh at terrorists, what arms are citizens left with?
Two French Muslim groups are suing Charlie Hebdo magazine for defamation over the cartoons, printed a year ago.
Mr Sarkozy's letter of support was read out in the Paris court hearing the case and prompted France's top Muslim body to call an urgent meeting in response.
Editor Philippe Val told the court the cartoons critiqued "ideas, not men".
Some corner of a foreign field
"There was a time when military manuals - advising on the conduct of what was called "low-intensity operations" - emphasised the importance of "denying urban guerrillas a hinterland" in which they could take refuge. The Boer commandos in South Africa and Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia (freedom fighters or terrorists according to taste) made sudden strikes against occupying forces and then disappeared into the country. It is important, the army used to say, to prevent the assassins who wait round the corner of city streets from finding safe haven in the homes of sympathetic families. Perhaps the army manuals still give the same advice. If so, it seems that nobody in the Home Office has read them."
The Home Office
may be under the misguided impression that they are English and that Birmingham is part of their homeland not anyone else's "hinterland". If Roy Hattersley really does see Birmingham as some kind of latter-day Danelaw I don't think he has the faintest idea how much
trouble we're in. Sutton Park might do nicely for the mass graves...
