Brigitte Bardot’s Islamophobia and anti-Semitism

From AFP news agency in France:

Bardot rails against Muslim, Jewish animal slaughter

– Tue Jan 4 [2011], 10:49 am ET

PARIS – Former screen idol Brigitte Bardot and other animal rights activists on Tuesday launched a poster campaign in France to end Jewish and Islamic ritual slaughter of animals.

“I can no longer accept that in order to please a god animals have their throats slit like in the Middle Ages without being stunned beforehand, when we have modern methods to prevent animals suffering,” the 76-year-old Bardot told AFP.

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation and six other rights groups are planning to put up more than 2,000 posters across France sporting a picture of a cow’s head and a text denouncing ritual slaughter.

France is home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, estimated at between five and six million, and to the continent’s biggest Jewish community, believed to number up to 700,000.

What this AFP item does not mention is that Ms Bardot now is a supporter of the neo-fascist Front National.

Her campaign is based on hatred of Jews and Muslims rather than on genuine concern about animal welfare.

Already in the 1930s, anti-Semites hid their racist poison behind an “animal welfare” smokescreen. Their 21st century heirs have learned this trick, now not just against Jews, but against Muslims as well.

Jewish Swiss author Charles Lewinsky has noted that in the 1930s Swiss government anti-ritual slaughter policies were supposedly pro-animal welfare, but in fact anti-Semitic. The first anti-Semitic measure after Hitler’s nazis had invaded the Netherlands in 1940 was banning shechita slaughter.

Like anti-Semites use shechita as a pretext, Muslim bashers use Islamic halal slaughter (similar to kosher slaughter in many ways) as a pretext.

Singling out religious minorities like Jews or Muslims for supposedly being worse anti-animal than others does not help animals, but helps racists.

In France, like elsewhere in the world, millions of animals suffer in the commercial animal processing and animal transportation industries. The bosses in these industries are usually neither Muslim nor Jewish. And you don’t hear Ms Bardot about them.

Britain: Islamophobia has become “socially acceptable”, warns Warsi: here.

Roger Stockham, a 63-year-old Army veteran from California who was reportedly angry at the U.S. government, was arrested by police in Michigan and charged with allegedly threatening to blow up a Mosque in Dearborn: here.

Chris Hedges, Truthdig: “News personalities, politicians, self-appointed experts on the Muslim world, and law enforcement and intelligence officials, as well as the Christian right, have successfully demonized Muslims in the United States since the attacks of 2001. It is acceptable to say things openly about Muslims that could never be said about any other ethnic group. And as the economy continues to unravel, as we face the possibility of revenge attacks by Islamic extremists, perhaps on American soil, the plight of Muslims is beginning to mirror that of targeted ethnic minority groups on the eve of the war in the former Yugoslavia, or Jews in the dying days of the Weimar Republic”: here.

Sierra Leone: Muslim women fight against discrimination: here.

New Report on Islamophobia from the Council on American Islamic Relations: here.

The Right Wing’s Election-Year Islamophobia. John Feffer, TomDispatch: “Those who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim generally practice their furtive religion in obscure recesses of the Internet. Once in a while, they’ll surface in public to remind the news media that no amount of evidence can undermine their convictions”: here.

Muslim civil rights advocates and other civil liberties supporters denounced New York Mayor Bloomberg and police commissioner Kelly over an Islamophobic film shown to 1,500 police officers: here.

An officially commissioned study on Muslims has become the occasion for a renewed campaign against immigrant communities in Germany: here.

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