The EU country’s Supreme Court has ban two rituals concept that are essential to Islamic and Jewish religious practices Halal & Kosher.
The Muslim and Jewish “barbarians” are allegedly at the gates – again – with their “ritual” slaughter knives.
Across Fortress Europe, the ramparts are being fortified against halal and kosher slaughter – now proscribed in at least 11 European states.
Last week, Greece’s highest administrative court ruled to forbid kosher and halal animal killing, by requiring stunning before slaughter. (Jewish and many Muslim legal scholars interpret stunning as incompatible with Biblical and Quranic stipulations that animals be uninjured at the time of death.)
the European Court of Justice permitting states to prohibit halal and kosher slaughter – although the killing of animals for sport or “cultural events” continues to be excluded from the stunning requirement.
Three times as many European countries have enacted bans on halal and kosher slaughter as have prohibited or pledged to prohibit maceration: the widespread practice of grinding up s live un-stunned male chicks, who are treated as extraneous “waste” in the production of eggs. Far from being generally illegal, maceration by an “apparatus [with] rapidly rotating mechanically operated killing blades” is prescribed as a standard procedure by EU regulations on the “protection of animals at the time of the the killing,” for “chicks up to 72 hours” old.
Europe’s enduring kosher and halal obsession is an exercise not simply in double standards, but in dissociation: externalizing onto Jewish and Muslim “others” the seething substratum of violence that sustains itself. As with other popular image-laundering tactics – pink-washing, green-washing – fur-washing portrays the victims of colonial modernity (in this case, non-human animals) as the beneficiaries of its “humanitarian” largesse.
