Sunday, 17 October 2010
Secret Selling of Halal Meat in the U.S.
Many people have written to me saying that they simply won’t eat halal meat, as they object to the methods used to slaughter the animal. And I agree. The Sharia term for halal slaughter is dhakat. Dhakat is to slaughter an animal by cutting the trachea, the esophagus, and the jugular vein, letting the blood drain out while saying “Bismillah allahu akbar”—in the name of Allah the greatest.
Many Christians, Hindus or Sikhs and Jews find it offensive to eat meat slaughtered according to Islamic ritual (although Jews are less likely to be exposed to such meat, because they eat kosher). The issue for many Christians is that in halal slaughter, an imam offers the animal up as a sacrifice to Allah which makes it meat sacrificed to idols.
70% of New Zealand lamb imported into the United Kingdom is halal. It is not labeled as such, so people are eating halal without even knowing it. But people there are fighting back: When halal food was imposed on public schools in the United Kingdom in 2007, parents were in an uproar. And last March, Stop Islamization of Europe (SIOE), the sister organization to my group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), called for the cessation of mandatory consumption of halal meat on the continent.
As halal slaughter becomes more common in the U.S., the likelihood of non-Muslims who object to halal meat for whatever reason unknowingly buying it also increases.
I wanted to know if this Islamic supremacism in being imposed on U.S. meat processors as well. Imagine my surprise at many of the findings. After asking lots of questions of people inside the meat-packing industry, I discovered that only two plants in the U.S. that perform halal slaughter keep the halal meat separated from the non-halal meat, and they only do so because plant managers thought it was right to do so. At other meat-packing plants, animals are slaughtered following halal requirements, but then only a small bit of the meat is actually labeled halal.
This is because neither the United States nor Britain requires that halal meat be labeled as such. Nor do government regulations require that halal meat and non-halal meat be kept separate.
Yet there are existing labeling laws requiring that meat be labeled in a truthful and not misleading way. These labeling laws could be and should be used to make sure that all halal meat is clearly sold as such, so that those who want to avoid it for whatever reason can do so.
But the way it looks right now, most of the beef sold in the United States comes from meat-packing plants that engage in at least some halal slaughter—and don’t always tell the public that they’ve slaughtered the animal according to halal rules. There’s no easy way to tell exactly how much of this is occurring, but I am still investigating.
One thing appears clear now: some of this halal meat is going to public school lunch programs.
Why are meat-packing plants in the U.S. and Great Britain engaging in any halal slaughter at all? Because they export a great deal of meat to Muslim countries. That’s fine. But non-Muslims in America and Europe don’t deserve to have halal meat forced upon them in this way, without their knowledge or consent.
It’s Islamic supremacism on the march, yet again.
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