What it means to eat halal food

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes at her blog, Camera Lucida:

I’ve observed many times that many of the tenants in this apartment complex in the suburbs of Toronto are Muslim. While going up the elevator this week end, I saw a sign up for a barbecue party with this: “Food will be strictly halal.” Not just halal, but strictly halal.

Slowly, incrementally, stealthily, our Muslim co-citizens are changing our landscape. “What’s wrong with eating halal food?” you may ask. Well, the animals which the meat for this delicious barbecue comes from are killed IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, i.e. HALAL. So, these friendly Muslim neighbors are in effect forcing us to acknowledge this Allah, and by extension Islam. There is no tolerance in Islam, contrary to the beliefs of our multi-culti elites. It is Islam (or death).

I’ve written in Our Changing Landscape that halal has become a weapon with which Muslims infiltrate Canadian society. Innocent bystanders (at McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, mainstream Italian restaurants, and even grocery stores) are force fed this halal meat, making them, at least unconsciously, part of the great Ummah.

The point couldn’t be clearer. Halal food is not just some innocent, ethnic food. If you eat halal meat, you are eating meat from animals killed in the name of Allah, the god who, on almost every page of his holy book, sadistically commands our subjugation, destruction, and eternal torture. Why would any sane Westerner (or any sane non-Muslim) want to do that? Why would we want to let ourselves be incorporated—unofficially but still materially and symbolically—into the Islamic “thing”? Muslims undoubtedly interpret such behavior on our part as submission, which only encourages them to keep extending the reach of the Islamic sharia further and further over us. The eating of halal food, the spread of it through our cities, our institutions, on our sidewalks, must be resisted in every possible way, at every possible level.

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Hannon writes:

I enjoy “Middle Eastern” food as do many Americans. It is almost an unavoidable venue nowadays. Usually the cuisine is Lebanese or some variant of it, with add-ons from other Mediterranean cultures, so the religious denomination (if any) of the proprietors is not easy to predict. The next time I am in such an establishment I will ask if the meat is halal. If the answer is affirmative, I will take my business elsewhere. Words are not needed to supplement an abrupt departure on hearing this answer.

July 30

B. Oseen writes:

I second your correspondent’s disgust with halal food. There are myriad ways in which Muslims are trying to take over our civilization, some open and others stealth. This definitely qualifies as one of the stealthiest tactics in their arsenal.

As one who puts a lot of thought into the food he buys, I’ve become much more informed about halal over the last two years; it’s something I never gave much thought to before. I never really sought it out, but it always seemed to find me. (To paraphrase one of your bon mots, you may not be interested in halal, but halal is interested in you!) Like so many other things, it is this indifference to food that Muslims count on to get their hooks into another segment of our lives.

If only it were so simple as avoiding those items labeled halal. Some items have the halal label, but unfortunately many do not. A few months ago I was in the local branch of one of the main supermarket chains where I live and thought of buying some boneless leg of lamb. When I asked the butcher if it was halal he had no idea, he did not even seem to know what halal is. I never did find out, but if I had to guess it’s more than 50-50 that it was halal.

In France and other nations an increasing percentage of the meat supply is halal. Large corporations find it more cost effective to make all their meat halal to placate the loud, obnoxious minority than the ignorant, apathetic masses. As the minority grows in number, the economic cost of not keeping them happy will increase.

Some people oppose halal because they say halal slaughter is cruel to animals. This isn’t my primary concern, but they may be right. I’ve read that Muslims believe meat tastes better if the animal suffered in death. I’ve also heard that killing the animal without stunning it first releases harmful toxins into the blood. Whether you boycott halal for ethical reasons, health reasons, taste reasons, or any other reasons matters not. Avoiding it is a good way to stick it to the enemy.

It pains me to say this, but I would advise readers to boycott New Zealand meat, particularly lamb. New Zealand is the world’s largest exporter of halal meat, where over 90 percent of exports are halal, and over 80 percent of its meat and poultry plants are supervised by the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand. In this small nation, 98 percent of lamb is halal, and well over half of the beef as well. Just as in France, their prison meat is halal even though only one percent of prisoners are Muslims. Economics is the explanation for New Zealand’s pro-halal stance: when their economy tanked in the 1980s, they needed to find new overseas markets, and the Middle East eats a lot of lamb.

If you aren’t yet boycotting halal, the best thing to do is start buying your meat from a local butcher, or an organic food market. The more locally grown, the better. In Canada, where I live, I frequent a neighbourhood butcher shop that caters to expatriates and they get their lamb direct from the producers who are Christians. If you can find a butcher shop like mine where the owners hate Islam and consider halal barbaric, all the better!

When I first started buying organic and then halal-free meat, I expected it would be too expensive, but the price difference isn’t too great. As a matter of fact, with the recent surge in commodity prices, the cost of lamb at my local chain supermarkets is now on par with the equivalent free-range, locally grown cuts.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 29, 2011 12:55 PM | Send