Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Louie has mixed emotions over the whole thing. On the one pickled pig’s foot, he gets very nervous anytime the phrase “Pork Butcher” floats out into the atmosphere.

On the other pickled pig’s foot, he knows deep down inside he has nothing to worry about, because he’s still a dead pig.

Which leads to another emotion…being a dead pig means his living brethren, the jihadis of the world are still carrying on jihad without him, and he he is grateful to allah (piss be upon his head) that not all the piglets of the world are dead yet…

…physically, that is. Spiritually, they are more dead than even Louie is.

April 10 (Bloomberg) — Lazari Kozmaoglu, Istanbul’s last pork butcher, takes a break from a two-hour backgammon session to recall the days he spent slicing bacon instead of rolling dice.

Eight workers used to rush in and out of the cutting room, placing wrapped meat in refrigerators, Kozmaoglu, 63, recalls in his store in central Istanbul. Today the shop is down to its last two months of stock and attracts only a handful of customers.

Turkey’s Islamist-rooted government has clamped down on the pork industry since 2004, closing all but two of the country’s 25 pig farms and revoking slaughterhouse licenses. Kozmaoglu, unable to add to his meat supplies, spends most of his time shuffling paperwork as he seeks permission to reopen his abattoir.

“I don’t know what I can do if they don’t give it to me; this business is my life,” Kozmaoglu says as he watches a news bulletin on Greek television.

He’s one of about 2,000 ethnic Greeks remaining in Istanbul. Most Greeks left the city after Turkish mobs attacked their homes and workplaces in 1955. Others were expelled in 1964 after fighting between Greeks and Turks on Cyprus.

Before the 2004 crackdown, Kozmaoglu was one of four pork butchers in Istanbul. All of his competitors quit handling pigs after losing their slaughterhouse permits. The state granted Kozmaoglu temporary licenses to let him kill the swine on outlawed farms, but those have now been cut off, he says.

In 2004, the Agriculture Ministry assumed the power to issue livestock handling permits previously controlled by local authorities. The ministry has refused applications for pig facilities, citing a failure to meet sanitary or other standards.

A ministry spokeswoman declined to answer questions about pig farms and slaughterhouses.

Islam forbids its followers from eating pork, calling it unhygienic.

Louie takes offense to that, finding it hypocritical that jihadis consider pork unclean, when they themselves are piglet swine.

(Bloomberg)