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| Europe | |
| French PM knocks halal, kosher laws as campaign heats up | |
| 2012-03-07 | |
France's prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters. Â Prime Minister Francois Fillon made the suggestion after Sarkozy called at the weekend for butchers to clearly label meat slaughtered according to religious laws and his allies warned immigrants might impose halal meat on French schoolchildren. Â Fillon and other conservative leaders linked this tough stand on ritually prepared meat to issues such as immigration and French identity that the far-right National Front uses to tap into resentment against Europe's largest Muslim minority. Â "Religions should think about keeping traditions that don't have much in common with today's state of science, technology and health problems," Fillon told Europe 1 radio while discussing the two-round presidential election ending May 6. Â The "ancestral traditions" of ritual slaughter were justified for hygienic reasons in the past but were now outdated, he said. "We live in a modern society." Â Mohammad Moussaoui, head of France's Muslim Council, said ritual slaughter was no more painful than modern methods and labelling meat as being prepared "without stunning" would feed resentment against the two minority religions using it. Â "It will stigmatize Muslims and Jews as people who don't respect the interests of animals," he said. "That will raise tensions in society." Â National Front leader Martine Le Pen launched the debate last month saying abattoirs around Paris only slaughtered meat the Muslim way. It turned out they mostly supplied local Muslim butchers and most meat sold in Paris came from further away. Â The issue caught hold and Sarkozy's campaign countered with ever tougher statements on immigration and ringing defenses of French civilization and secularism - code words implying some of the five million Muslims here did not share these values. Â Interior Minister Claude Gueant warned last week that giving immigrants the right to vote in municipal elections, as the Socialist want, would lead to Muslims forming majorities on local councils and imposing halal meat in school canteens. Â "This is quite possible, given the proportion of foreigners in some areas," he said when challenged on RTL radio on Monday. Â Fillon seconded this view but Sarkozy campaign spokeswoman Natalie Kosciusko-Morizet declined to support it. Â Sarkozy's former Justice Minister Rachida Dati, a Muslim, told the daily Le Figaro such comments "mix up French Muslims and foreigners. French Muslims are citizens like any other." Â Hollande's spokesman Pierre Moscovici said Sarkozy "is branding French Muslims in a sly way and echoing the National Front's issues." Â The debate has also highlighted little-known aspects of the meat industry in France, where producers are mostly opposed to efforts by consumer groups to divulge their slaughter methods. Â Halal and kosher slaughter demand that cattle are conscious before their throats are slit and blood drained. Non-religious butchers stun the animal first, saying this lessens pain. Â Abattoir operators say killing cattle by both methods in the same slaughterhouse is too costly, so some use only the halal method because they can sell the meat to both Muslim butchers and supermarket chains for the general public. Â Clearly labelling meat as "stunned" or "not stunned" would reveal how much religiously prepared food is being sold. Â "Every time shoppers go to the meat counter, they'll see meat described as 'not stunned'," Moussaoui said. "That will look as if there was cruelty towards these animals." Â If shoppers shun this meat, kosher beef could become very expensive because butchers for the Jewish minority -- at 600,000 the largest in Europe -- offset some of their costs by selling the expensive hind cuts of beef to non-kosher distributors. Â Kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, bans meat that touches the sciatic nerve along the back, buttocks and thighs of mammals. If kosher butchers cannot sell sirloin and filet mignon steaks to non-kosher shops, they will lose a key part of their business. | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #6 Sarko is reviving an old Anglo-Saxon strategy. It used be called "divide and conqueor". |
| Posted by: Scooter McGruder 2012-03-07 20:11 |
| #5 We're going to see agitation for this in the United States Laws against kosher slaughter have passed in quite a few Western European countries, Eric. Now they are going for laws banning the import of kosher meat slaughtered elsewhere. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2012-03-07 19:24 |
| #4 Hebrew National hot dogs (Costco) are the only ones I buy anymore. Superior |
| Posted by: Frank G 2012-03-07 17:04 |
| #3 Anonymoose, I remember legal disputes over Eruvim, those Sabbath zones you mentioned. Thanks for reminding me. For the uninitiated, the Talmudic rules about how far one may travel and how much one can carry on the Sabbath had always been different for towns versus walled cities. An Eruv is an ancient legal fiction where the authorities can encircle a populated area with a cord, and do a ritual wherever the cord has to be broken to turn that street into a 'gate', to turn that area into the religious equivalent of a walled city. Shall we rework Martin Niemöller's quotation? |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2012-03-07 08:35 |
| #2 The situation is far worse than it sounds because the US has long recognized a whole bunch of Jewish religious-legal practices, which it was able to do because they were not offensive or oppressive as far as the rest of society is concerned. This includes things such as recognizing Jewish law courts just for Jews; special what could be called "Sabbath zones" marked by publicly placed boundaries, in which Jews could perform *some* mild labor during their Sabbath (by religious exemption), and many other courtesies. And yet today, even within Judaism there is a huge brawl by animal-rights and vegan Jews against religious animal slaughter. Yet all of this is contrasted with Muslim and other religious practices, such as Santeria and Voodoo, which other Americans find deeply offensive. They argue in court that religions have to be treated the same, even if the practices of one religion are deeply offensive to the public. "Either we can be offensive, or the Jews can't have any special exemptions." |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2012-03-07 08:26 |
| #1 We're going to see agitation for this in the United States. After all, San Francisco already tried to ban the B'rit Milah, and the Federal Government has claimed the power to force religious institutions and religious people to act against their religions' doctrines. First the Catholics, then the Jews. |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2012-03-07 06:35 |