Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger has clashed with Dutch Freedom Party leader, Geert Wilders, over his party’s support for a ban on ritual animal slaughter.
The ban is largely directed at Muslims who practice the halal method which commands that all followers of that faith only consume meat that has come from an animal killed by having it’s throat ritually cut and then left to bleed to death while still fully conscious.
This practice, however, is almost identical to the way in which Jews slaughter their kosher meat so the ban is being portrayed as ‘anti-semitic’ by Jewish pressure groups.
The dispute has come as somewhat of a surprise as Wilders has in the past described himself as “Israel’s greatest friend” and gained much support from neo-con zionist groups at home and abroad.
Metzger wrote “It is obvious that one cannot be at the same time a friend of Israel and the Jewish people and on the other hand support an anti-Jewish law,” in a letter which was leaked to the Reuters news agency this week.
“By denying Jews to live according to the Torah you will eventually force them to leave the Netherlands where they enjoyed religious freedom for centuries.”
The bill was initially put forward in June last year but was rejected by the senate (equivalent to the British House of Lords) after being passed by the lower house of parliament (equivalent to the British House of Commons).
This second attempt comes just 2 weeks before a Dutch General election with pollsters predicting that Wilder’s party will win 15-19 seats out of 150 in parliament, slightly lower than the 24 that they won in 2010.
It is interesting to note that Estonia announced recently that it will soon change its law on the issue because religious slaughter “does not take new scientific knowledge into account”.
The change is being determined based on the 2010 DialRel report which says the Kosher slaughter causes higher risk, pain and suffering in animals than methods that involve stunning.
The DialRel report describes post-cut stunning as “intermediate” for pain and suffering while methods involving pre-stunning are described as “low”.
The report also served as the scientific basis for the Dutch bill which Wilders has supported.
Ade
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Jews and Muslims are supposed to be our guests, they have their own countries, while here, they should respect our laws and way of life.
s ducain
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What these Semitic groups should also respect is animal rights. They never will concede that ritual slaughter as in Shichita or Halal actually cause terror and pain to beef cattle especially. That is because both Moslems and Jews do not have a mental process that can actually recognise our idea of cruelty. It is absent from their genes.
Glasgow
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Absolutely, ritual slaughter is one of the ways to tell whether someone is white or not.