Swine flu: Not kosher?
Oh no. When I heard on the radio that someone was complaining about swine flu being called swine flu because apparently reference to pigs is offensive to Jews and Muslims, I assumed it was some nutjob fundamentalist Muslim. You know … the same ones who complain about piglet figurines and The Three Little Pigs story?
My mistake.
It was the Israeli Health Minister, Yakov Litzman. Seriously. This is not a joke.
He’s decided to call it Mexican flu even though it occurs throughout the world and this outbreak just happened to start in Mexico. I guess he’s just a health minister, not a health expert. He doesn’t even seem to be much of a religious expert. Jews and Muslims aren’t supposed to eat pigs. That’s it. Too bad for them but dietary laws don’t detail proper disease naming techniques and there’s no such thing as a halal or kosher virus.
Do you think he realizes that we are all part piggy? Don’t believe me? Carbon atoms in your body have probably, at some point in the past, been part of a pig. Oxygen that you breathe has probably been inhaled by a pig and later exhaled by a pig as carbon dioxide. We’re all made of the same basic building blocks. Makes me smile.
