THE Dutch Parliament yesterday voted to ban ritual slaughter – and immediately incurred the wrath of observant Jews and Muslims.
The new ban requires livestock to be stunned before being killed, contrary to the Muslim and Jewish ritual slaughter customs that require animals to be fully conscious.
Binyomin Jacobs, the country’s Chief Rabbi, compared the ban to anti-Semitic laws enacted during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands that led to the death of 104,000 Dutch Jews in the Holocaust.
One of the first measures taken during the occupation was the closing of kosher abattoirs …Those who survived the war remember the very first law made by the Germans in Holland was the banning of the Jewish way of slaughtering animals.
And Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s Chief Rabbi, last week joined a campaign to stop the ban amid Jewish fears that pressure to ban ritual slaughter was growing across the EU.
We are worried that it could spread. There has been a non-stop campaign by animal welfare activists to have all forms of ritual slaughter banned. It has to be fought everywhere because if it’s lost anywhere it has a potential domino effect.
The legislation in Holland was tabled by the tiny Animal Rights Party but it quickly won cross-party support in a country where traditional religion, especially Islam, has been accused of being out of step with liberal Dutch values.
Said Marianne Thieme, the party’s leader:
This way of killing causes unnecessary pain to animals. Religious freedom cannot be unlimited. For us religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins.
Esther Ouwehand, another MP for the Dutch animal rights party, added:
By getting this modification in the law, we hope to inspire other countries.
Dutch Muslims have also complained they feel stigmatised, amid growing support for Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam populist, whose Freedom Party has supported the ban.
Said Imam Mahmut of the El Tawheed mosque:
There was no reason for passing this law. This is a political decision. Who has the authority to determine whether the way of killing animals is good or not?
Sweden, Luxembourg and non-EU members Norway and Switzerland have banned ritual slaughter but the EU, which bans the killing of non-stunned animals, does allows religious exemptions.
Following research carried out in New Zealand in 2009, which showed that ritual slaughter causes unnecessary pain, Adam Rutherford, an editor of Nature, wrote on the Guardian website:
It suggests that the anachronism of slaughter without stunning has no place in the modern world and should be outlawed. This special indulgence to religious practices should be replaced with the evidence-based approaches to which the rest of us are subject.
Hat tip: Bill Murray
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
June 29th, 2011 at 10:59 am
I call Godwin on the Dutch Chief Rabbit.
June 29th, 2011 at 10:59 am
About bloody time. Thank goodness another European country has seen the light. Alas the unelected EU commission are too influenced by the death cult to make this an EU standard; they won’t even allow Kosher/Halal meat to be marked as such. I don’t suppose for a minute that our dhimini(sic) Parliamentary representatives will follow suit. Ho Hum.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:02 am
We are worried that it could spread. There has been a non-stop campaign by animal welfare activists to… promote animal welfare.
It’s what they do! Note the use of the politically loaded term “activists”, as if that implies that only a minority of extremists are behind this, yet they scream and squawk when similar umbrella terminology is applied to the religious.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:11 am
Emm… the Dutch Parliament.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:19 am
There has been a non-stop campaign by animal welfare activists to have all forms of ritual slaughter banned.
Seems reasonable. The term ritual slaughter is the big give-away.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:23 am
Yes, preventing the unnecessary suffering of animals is exactly the same as genocidal murder of a religious group.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:35 am
Well done the Dutch, let’s hope the ritual ban will spread.
Notice how the jews bring up the holocaust every time they are told to obey the same laws as evryone else; and no doubt the muzzies will start their usual rioting!
June 29th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Another bloody load on nonsense that needs to stop is waving chickens in the air.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej13paGUQN8
June 29th, 2011 at 11:51 am
But it’s tradition, innit. Why do these progressive states always have to interfere with tradition, just because they want to make the a world a better place?
There’s no place for religion in a better world.
June 29th, 2011 at 11:52 am
Angela_K
Totally agree! They play the sympathy card over and over, trying to make any critics back off for fear of being accused of being nazis. There’s something quite sick about it really, using such horrendous suffering as part of a political ploy.
June 29th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Here’s something else that needs banning, despite the protestations of the author:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg.....-109-0.stm
June 29th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
This post in a nutshell :-
The people who want to put a stop to barbaric slaughter are being compared to people who committed a barbaric slaughter by people who wish to continue with barbaric slaughter.
Religion eh. Doncha just love it!
June 29th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Just shows you what religion is like. My parents were very compassionate, thus enabling me to be an Atheist..because of the awful man made laws in the name of the Jewish religion I was supposed to be a part of..
June 29th, 2011 at 12:34 pm
These people who support ritual slaughter are scum, the dregs of humanity, devoid of the imagination to understand what a sentient animal is suffering. And I note that Jonathan Sachs, star and frequent patroniser, on the boring Thought for the Day is against the ban. What is this man doing being given air-time? Has Rowan Williams anything to say about his fellow oecumenical animal abuser.
If any of the rest of us tortured animals, outside the aegis of the ritual bullshit, we would be arrested. When is the UK going to have the courage and compassion to follow Holland. What a feeble, creepy, posturing little country we have become. Only recently Cameron, and what a disaster he is, was refusing to support the ban on performing animals in circuses and trying to strong arm one of his own MPs to back off.
Religion and the religious? The more I hear about them the more contemptible they seem.
June 29th, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Their mutual founder, prophet or whatever – Abraham – set about to ritually sacrifice his own son. If they think they should have exemption from common sense measures because of their strange, stone-age beliefs, then are we to expect a rise in ritual sacrifice of the offspring of Jews and Muslims? Oh sorry, they’ve made that rather more symbolic these days …. they only slice bits off their children instead of killing them.
June 29th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
If I believed in god I would thank him every day that I am an atheist. The thought of being caught up in that stomach curdling, mind numbing bullshit that is the result of religious belief really scares me. They inflict pain and terror wherever they have any influence.
June 29th, 2011 at 1:44 pm
I have always maintained that the fact there are such things as carnivores in the world is all the proof anybody could ever need that there really is no such thing as god. I mean, why would any supremely intelligent being deliberately create creatures that were programmed to kill and then eat other beings? At its basest level it is such an horrific concept that no one with any degree of morality or conscience would ever dream of making it a reality. Surely if there really was a god he or she would have made us all herbivores (and this is someone who eats meat writing this).
Furthermore, if religion really is all about love, care and compassion, and if the religiots’ sky fairy really did make all the creatures that walk the earth, why do they think that inflicting unnecessary distress, pain and suffering on said creatures is a such a good and irreplaceable idea?
June 29th, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Can’t stop laughing because that holocaust claim reminds me of a very bad ‘alternative comedian’ I saw being severely heckled in the early 1980′s, whose petulant response was ‘The Nazis came for the clowns first, you know!’
To this day I don’t know if he was a brilliant improviser or a total cretin, but it got the biggest laugh of the night (and his only one).
June 29th, 2011 at 3:44 pm
@AgentCorman
I think he would make us all autotrophics.
June 29th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Suffering is a major preoccupation of these Bronze age religions. Death, carnage and blood-letting everywhere they are present.
June 29th, 2011 at 5:44 pm
AgentCormac: And how about bacteria and viruses, especially the more unpleasant ones? Of course, to the fundamentalists this is all the result of “sin” entering “God’s perfect creation”. The Bible also teaches that all animals were vegetarian before the Flood, but you tell me how any being can eat vegetation wihout consuming animal life as well, because that is an impossibility!
Some words of explanation from Ken Ham (no pun intended!):
http://www.answersingenesis.or.....imals-meat
June 29th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
“There was no reason for passing this law. This is a political decision. Who has the authority to determine whether the way of killing animals is good or not?”
This sort of confused response demonstrates the damage strict religious observance seems to do to the mental faculties. Clearly there was a reason for passing the law, to end the suffering of animals, but the speaker here cannot recognise the alternative point of view as ‘a reason’. Then it is a political decision, which on the surface it quite obviously is given that it was a decision come to by politicians in a political arena, but clearly this really is an inference that political enemies are to blame, and the speaker is being persecuted. Persecution is ‘a reason’ to do something, isn’t it, even if it isn’t a very good one. Finally the question is who as the authority to say whether killing animals is good or not, which is just profoundly stupid: the parliament obviously has said authority and just used it, but the question was never whether killing animals is good or not, the question was always whether or not animals should be stunned before slaughter so that they do not suffer needlessly.
The statement is an absolute mess, but is a goldmine for evidence of just what kind of warping religion does to someone’s perspective of a situation. This is not just a faith vs rationality type of argument, this is a case where slavish devotion to religiously inspired prescriptions has tied the speaker in knots literally trying to defend the indefensible. And that defence is pathetic, doing more harm than good to his own position.
June 30th, 2011 at 1:20 am
Yeah, but why do they have to be concious while their throats are cut?
June 30th, 2011 at 2:37 am
There is a creeping suspicion that most animals are today being slaughtered “ritually”-at least from what I read on the net, without being marked as such. Perhaps as a start they could commence labelling meat that has been prepared in the ritual manner so people with more than two lonely brain cells can choose that product over the meat killed in a blood thirsty stone age manner. That would be a start. If there was an impact on sales of ritually slaughtered meat, the market would dictate that it should cease. However, we are dealing deluded godbots who have surrendered, through their stone age beliefs, the right for their point of view to be considered.
June 30th, 2011 at 11:25 am
@robster
Both the UK government and the EU commission have refused outright to require labelling. Even though the new Association of Non-stun Abattoirs has called for it. Of course, if they were to catch a supermarket or takeaway selling thus labelled meat to a non-Muslim, they’d be duty bound to prosecute them and then all hell would break loose.
July 1st, 2011 at 1:41 am
Andy – your mention of Abraham and sacrifice gives me an excuse to post this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDfoJ29CR4E