On New Year’s Day, one part of Europe reached new heights in animal welfare and religious intolerance: A law took effect in northern Belgium banning kosher and halal slaughter.
The government of Flanders now requires that animals must be completely desensitized to pain before slaughter, which is often achieved through the use of stunning the animal with an electric rod or knocking the animal out with gas. Both kosher and halal slaughter practices require that an animal be in perfect health, and stunning the animal invalidates the procedure.
In both Judaism and Islam, a proper slaughter entails a violent but swift death, a single slash through the throat that severs the jugular veins, the carotid artery, trachea, and esophagus. Less aesthetically pleasing perhaps than sleeping gas, but just as humane, if not more so, the defenders of Muslim and Jewish practices argue.
If Muslims and Jews are strange bedfellows on the same side of a religious debate, the other side is just as odd. Exemplifying the “horseshoe theory” of politics — that the political spectrum is linear but Left and Right extremes approach one another — the far-left and far-right made this ban a reality. For the Left, this is a step toward eradicating the consumption of meat. For the Right, it’s a way to marginalize religious minorities. (Of course, hatred of Jews and Muslims is not limited to, or even mostly found, on the Right.)
Members of both faiths will have to import kosher and halal meat and end up spending more of their income to abide by this new law.
Belgium, home to 30,000 Jews and 500,000 Muslims, suffers from rising anti-Semitism and growing violence perpetuated by and against Muslims.
While Belgium is extreme, even for continental Europe, in its inability to handle pluralism, it’s hard not to wonder how long it will be before militant secularism, combined with political extremism, crosses the Atlantic and manifests itself here in ways that go beyond wedding cakes, prayer in school, and tendentious cable spots fretting about “theocracy” and “creeping sharia.”
