1. We Muslims should be appalled by the sale of halal meat by stealth
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‘This is covert religious extremism and creeping Islamic fundamentalism making its way into Britain by the back door. It is completely wrong that the food sensitivities of Britain’s Muslims — who amount to just 4.8 per cent of the population — should take precedence over the other 95 per cent.’
‘But if the Koran does not insist on what have become the customary halal methods, why are they now so prevalent in Britain? One reason is that religious zealots and theological ideologues are deliberately promoting confusion about halal to sow discord and resentment.
‘Three of the main fundamentalist Muslim sects — the Wahhabi fanatics in Saudi Arabia, the Salafi extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the Deobandi zealots from India-Pakistan — are foisting their fabricated notions about it down our collective throats.
‘It is high time the white, liberal, Guardian-reading classes stopped behaving like apologists and woke up. There is a fundamentalist Trojan horse in our midst, and we must take corrective action.’
‘Antiquated customs like the insistence exclusively on the Hadith version of halal meat only serve to entrench that fundamentalism. They should be rooted out and consigned to the dustbin of history. They have no place in a modern British society, where Muslims wish to be fully integrated and part of the UK mainstream.’
2. Which restaurant chains have gone halal – and why?
‘That sounds bad. But banner headlines about "ritually slaughtered meat" conceal the fact that, according to a 2012 Food Standards Agency report cited by the RSPCA, 97% of cattle, 96% of poultry and 90% of sheep slaughtered using the halal method in UK abattoirs are stunned before being killed – a procedure that makes them insensible to pain and distress.’
‘That, of course, means that up to 10% of British halal meat may come from animals that have not been slaughtered in a way animal welfare experts consider humane: some stricter Muslims insist stunning is not halal, and some halal authentication bodies – of which there are five in the UK alone – deem it an offence against Qur'anic law and tradition. But the halal meat served by KFC, Nando's, Pizza Express and Subway is certified by bodies that do permit pre-stunning. These chains stress that their suppliers are "contractually obliged" to provide only pre-stunned meat, that all EU and UK legislation has been met, and, in the words of KFC, that "none of our welfare standards have been compromised".’
3. Pork is the latest front in Europe's culture wars
‘Following its significant gains in last month's local elections, the French Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, swiftly announced that school cafeterias would no longer serve non-pork substitution meals to children living in towns won by FN candidates. Targeting Muslims for another ritual round of public humiliation, while also excluding Jewish children, Le Pen declared: "There is no reason for religion to enter the public sphere."’
‘As recently as 2011, Le Pen was threatened with prosecution for describing Muslims praying in the streets as comparable to the Nazi occupation of France, rather than opting to oppose it as an assault on the neutrality of public space. Her subsequent cultivation of a rightwing defence of secularism is based on the realisation that the supposedly universal values of the republic can be appropriated as a productive front in the struggle for national identity.
The prime reason for this conversion, of course, is that it provides a fertile opportunity for consistently reproducing public controversies regarding the "Muslim problem" and its threat to national identity.’
‘The Danish People's party, fully invested in a culture war over Danish values, was an early adopter of animal welfare in order to campaign against halal meat and has long sought to politicise the provision of halal options in nurseries as the "forced adoption" of Muslim tradition.’
‘Yet, they are never cost-free for those racialised as the problem. It is, for instance, in this context that a sinister genre of direct action has developed around symbolically and physically imposing pork products on Muslims. The French "anti-white racism" group Bloc Identitaire has occupied mosques and tried to organise a march to kick back against the "racist refusal" of Muslims to eat pork.’
‘Pork has become a racist meme, endlessly adapted through practices of harassment: mosques in Europe have had pig's heads nailed to their doors, pork-filled envelopes sent in the mail,slices of ham rubbed on door handles, bacon slices slipped in the shoes of worshippers as they prayed.’
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