European Hypocrisy Laid Bare in Kosher-Slaughter Legal Judgement

JNS.org – Final time I checked, the French have been even now planning their famed foie gras delicacy using the approach of “gavage.” This requires force-feeding a duck or a goose with grain handed by a tube in excess of a period of time of quite a few times so that its liver swells to close to 600% of its standard size. The stage is, if you really don’t put the bird by this plainly ghastly experience, you can’t create the abundant flavor and buttery texture that would make foie gras so prized amongst gastronomes.

Numerous individuals refuse to take in foie gras specifically simply because of the cruelty included in its output, but similarly, numerous extra people today evidently are not bothered by it at all, as revenues internationally operate into the hundreds of millions of bucks every calendar year. Its sale has been banned by area officers in a handful of places, which include New York starting off in 2022, but that is not going to halt French, as perfectly as Spanish, Hungarian, Belgian, and Bulgarian farmers from generating foie gras with the only system offered to them. Indeed, any initiative to shut down the field would will need to arrive from the European Union, and there is cherished minimal signal of that happening.

To be distinct, I’m not advocating a renewed European Union lawful crackdown on foie gras frankly, it is not an concern on which I have solid emotions both way. I elevate the concern in buy to illustrate a evident double typical that has, in the final 7 days, remaining both of those Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe feeling like rank and unwelcome outsiders.

Last Thursday, the Luxembourg-based mostly European Union Court of Justice (ECJ), which is the last arbiter of EU regulation, drew a line amongst the “civilized” and the “uncivilized” in terms of how farm animals that are slaughtered for human usage are handled by diverse spiritual teams in Europe.

On the “civilized” side of the line are those carnivores whose meat is surprised ahead of it is slaughtered, which the ECJ deems to be humane. On the “uncivilized” side are those — overwhelmingly Muslims and Jews — whose religious commandments strictly forbid the spectacular of animals before they are slaughtered, which the ECJ deems to be inhumane.

Of program, that does not transform the reality that meat that has been slaughtered with a pre-beautiful system is not deemed kosher or halal, nor can it be.

The ECJ’s perseverance was portion of a ruling that turned down an attraction brought by the Belgian Federation of Jewish Communities versus a ban on kosher and halal slaughter in the Wallonia location imposed by the regional authorities in 2017. By upholding the ban, the ECJ has efficiently accredited other states and locations within the EU to outlaw ritual slaughter — or the sale of kosher and halal products — with no the risk of mass discrimination lawsuits.

Unusually, the court’s choice eschewed the feeling of a single of its 11 Advocate Generals, Gerard Hogan, who said final September that the member states of the EU “are obliged to regard the deeply held spiritual beliefs of adherents to the Muslim and Jewish faiths by allowing for for the ritual slaughter of animals.”

For the judges of the ECJ, evidently, there had been no such basic stakes involved. From their point of view, the ruling did not outlaw ritual slaughter itself, but basically “one part of the unique ritual act of slaughter.” It added that the legislation authorized for a “fair balance” involving animal welfare and the “freedom of Jewish and Muslim believers to manifest their faith.”

No these types of “fair balance” in between animal welfare and human traditions is on exhibit when it will come to the once-a-year output of 17,000 tons of foie gras. The stench of hypocrisy, the nagging feeling that the superior-minded secular humanists who run European institutions are just bullying observant Jewish and Muslim communities with this hottest edict, is unmistakable. Main Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt of the Conference of European Rabbis elegantly summarized each the insult and the absurdity of the ECJ’s ruling thus: “We are informed by European leaders that they want Jewish communities to dwell and be profitable in Europe, but they offer no safeguards for our way of everyday living.”

Although there are lots of much more Muslims than there are Jews in Europe these times, the roots of this enmity towards ritual slaughter lie in the anti-Judaic and antisemitic traditions that have persisted and so generally flourished all over the continent’s record. Europe, immediately after all, is the continent of the so-referred to as “Judensau” — grotesque carvings on medieval church buildings that mocked the Jewish prohibition on pork by showing Jews in obscene acts with pigs. The system of shechita (kosher slaughter) has been twisted and distorted by antisemites for many tales of blood libel and theologically mandated cruelty allegedly practiced by Jews down the ages. And lest we neglect, one particular of the initially legislative steps carried out by the Nazi routine in Germany was a ban on kosher slaughter, which was depicted in formal propaganda as an ugly, alien, and totally un-German practice.

The ECJ is earning much the identical declaration in 2020, albeit in language that avoids the demonic ravings of Nazi formal rhetoric. Its judges are absolutely conscious that the rules of shechita are not adaptable thus, any element of Europe that helps prevent the sale of meat that has not been pre-stunned is effectively telling observant Jews that they are unwelcome as people.

Not only that. If kosher slaughter is a legitimate goal for the ECJ, then why not incorporate male infant circumcision as perfectly — one more requirement of the Jewish and Muslim faiths that has been faced with lawful and political challenges throughout Europe in nevertheless a person extra demonstration of how generations of antisemitism have reappeared dressed in humanist concerns.

Instructively, the ECJ’s ruling arrived just weeks just after the EU Council, the bloc’s principal coordinating human body, issued a solemn six-web page declaration in opposition to antisemitism.

The declaration said that antisemitism “in any type, is and ought to continue to be unacceptable and all actions must be taken to counteract it, which includes, in which required, via lawful steps at European degree.” It went on to underline that “the member states of the European Union assistance policy initiatives at European level that intention to fight incitement to antisemitic hatred and acts of violence, as effectively as the dissemination of antisemitic conspiracy myths online.”

I beg your pardon? By telling European publics, as the ECJ is doing, that Jewish approaches for slaughtering kosher meat are inherently suspect? By stoking fears among Jews that their main spiritual beliefs and rituals are underneath legal assault? No issue how quite a few words the EU expends on the evils of antisemitism, no matter how numerous definitions of antisemitism it adopts, any limits on the supply or sale of kosher solutions will render all of individuals attempts meaningless.

I say once more: meaningless.

Ben Cohen is a New York Metropolis-dependent journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and intercontinental affairs for JNS.