Wed, Feb 22, 2012 page7

• French in frenzy over halal slaughter

  • Reuters, PARIS
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  A TV documentary’s revelation that slaughterhouses around Paris have switched meat production entirely to halal methods has stirred a political storm in France, where attitudes to Europe’s largest Muslim minority are a subtext in a presidential election campaign.

  The France 2 documentary last week said all of the abattoirs in the greater Paris region were producing only halal-style meat, selling some without labeling it as such to avoid the cost of running separate lines for halal and non-halal customers.

  Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen — who is hoping to win voters away from center-right French President Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of the two-round election in April and May — has seized on the issue.

  

  Franch President Nicolas Sarkozy, front left, speaks with butchers as he visits the Rungis wholesale market near Paris yesterday.

  Photo: Reuters

  “All the abattoirs of the Paris region have succumbed to the rules of a minority. We have reason to be disgusted,” Le Pen told a rally in Lille on Saturday, pledging to file a legal complaint.

  In a country known for its obsession with the provenance of its cuisine, the issue could play with a wider audience than the far right, including animal rights groups, consumer advocates and food industry professionals.

  Some European animal rights campaigners say that the Islamic halal and Jewish kosher rules for ritual slaughter are less humane than standard European practice, because they ban the practice of stunning animals before they are killed.

  “This polemic requires us to call for more transparency,” Frederic Freund, director of a group called Aid to Animals in Abattoirs, told RTL radio during a call-in program.

  Halal meat, slaughtered according to Islamic norms, is a booming market in France and growing demand for it on school, hospital and company canteen menus has already caused tension and misunderstandings between Muslims and non-Muslims.

  Officials say most of the meat consumed in and around Paris is slaughtered outside the region and much of it still comes from slaughterhouses that use non-halal methods.

  The French state is strictly secular and politicians have intervened against the spread of some Muslim traditions in ways that critics say is populist and xenophobic.

  Sarkozy and his predecessor Jacques Chirac both won support among right-wing voters for banning Muslim full-face veils in public and headscarves in school.

  Like kosher slaughter, the halal rite requires the butcher to kill the animal by swiftly slitting its throat. Stunning it first to lessen its pain, as recommended in an EU directive, is not allowed.

  France’s large Muslim and tiny Jewish minorities make up only about 10 percent of the population and not all of them eat only meat slaughtered according to their religious traditions.

  However, eating halal has become an identity marker, especially among younger members of the 5 million-strong Muslim minority. The halal market is now twice as large as that for organic foods and is estimated to grow at 20 percent annually.

  “This explosion of halal is one of the most significant phenomena in the transformation and identity affirmation of Islam in France in the first decade of the 21st century,” Islam expert Gilles Kepel wrote in a new study of Muslim life in the suburbs of northern Paris.
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