Ferry Biedermann

A halal butcher’s shop in Amsterdam. The Dutch parliament may soon pass a law banning Jewish and Muslim traditions on the ritual slaughter of cows, sheep and chickens. Peter Dejong / AP Photo

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ROTTERDAM // Jewish and Muslim organisations in the Netherlands in a rare show of unity have condemned the adoption of a law in the Dutch parliament that would ban most ritual slaughter. Representatives of both religious groups have said that they hope to block the law in the senate or challenge its legality on the grounds of freedom of religion.

Many in the Muslim and Jewish communities regard the law, proposed by the small Dutch animal-rights party, as having been passed mainly on the back of growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe.

The animal rights party leader, Marianne Thieme, said after the vote: “I think the legal sphere still has to get used to the idea that the welfare of animals sometimes limit freedom of religion.”

In France, the former film star Brigitte Bardot launched a campaign to ban ritual slaughter in January, and Switzerland, which has a long-standing ban, is considering extending it to meat imports.

Mohammed Cheppih, a founder of the short-lived polder mosque that was aimed at reconciling Islam and Dutch society, said: “This would never have happened, were it not for the current political climate. It says that Muslims are in fact not welcome.”

The ban on ritual slaughter without prior stunning may not pose a problem for at least a part of the Muslim community, Mr Cheppih said. “In practical terms it does not mean much but it has symbolic importance.”

At least some Islamic groups in Europe accept a form of stunning before the ritual slaughter of animals, although most mainstream organisations reject it. But in orthodox Judaism the prohibition on stunning is absolute. While the ban appears to be primarily aimed at the country’s more than 1 million Muslims, it may come as more of a blow to the tiny Dutch orthodox Jewish community.

The Dutch chief rabbi, Binyomin Jacobs, said: “The very fact that there is a discussion about this is very painful for the Jewish community.” During the Second World War, Rabi Jacobs said, the Germans’ first measure upon occupying the Netherlands was to ban ritual slaughter.

In fact, the existing bans on ritual slaughter in European countries all appear to have been the result of anti-Jewish sentiment at the time. Switzerland passed its ban at the end of the 19th century, when its Jewish population had doubled in a short period, while Norway, Sweden and Luxemburg passed anti-ritual slaughter laws in the 1930s at a time of rising anti-Semitic sentiment.

The ban on ritual slaughter in the Netherlands garnered widespread support in parliament, including backing from left-wing parties. But the support of the extreme right-wing, anti-Islam, Party for Freedom, PVV, led by the controversial politician Geert Wilders, raised most eyebrows.

The PVV and Mr Wilders were seen as backing the ban as a measure against Islam in the Netherlands. At the same time, the party has a reputation as being extremely pro-Israel and pro-Jewish.

Several commentaries in the Dutch press remarked that the PVV’s support for the ban on ritual slaughter had “unmasked” its support for the Jewish community as being merely a function of its anti-Islam programme. “The PVV is not pro-Israel because it loves Jews, its fight against anti-Semitism is also based on its anti-Islam agenda,” wrote the historian Asher Ben Avraham in the Dutch daily de Volkskrant.

The ban on ritual slaughter comes amid renewed debate on immigrants and Islam in the Netherlands. Last week Mr Wilders was acquitted on charges of incitement to hatred in a trial that was started last year. The court’s main conclusion was that he targeted Islam, a religion, rather than Muslims as a group.

On Tuesday, as parliament passed the law against ritual slaughter, the leader of the mainstream Christian Democrats, one of the parties in the minority coalition that depends for its survival on the PVV, seemed to adopt many of Mr Wilders’s ideas.

In a speech to a conference on populism, the leader, Maxime Verhagen, called the Dutch concern over immigration “understandable” and “justified” although he said that he disagreed with Mr Wilders’s solutions.

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NASHVILLE — The Council on American-Islamic Relations has earned a fierce reputation for defending Muslim civil rights.

But the Washington, D.C.,-based group’s work is being threatened as it faces scrutiny for failing to file tax returns.

CAIR was among 275,000 nonprofits nationwide that the Internal Revenue Service stripped of tax-exempt status this month. None of the groups filed required tax returns, known as Form 990s, for three years, and any donations to them can be taxed, the IRS reported.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said his group filed accurate, on-time returns but lost its tax-exempt status over an incorrect filing from several years ago.

But employees couldn’t produce CAIR’s latest Form 990 this week, and critics suggest the charity avoided filing to hide financial dealings from the public.

Muslim leaders here said they were surprised to hear the news about CAIR’s problems with the IRS. CAIR lawyers helped oppose two companion bills in the state legislature that targeted some practices outlined in Shariah law, Islam’s code of conduct.

The legislation — described by sponsors as anti-terrorist, not anti-Islam — passed in May after being revised to remove all mention of religion.

Imam Mohamed Ahmed of the Islamic Center of Nashville said he’s taking a wait-and-see approach to the latest news about CAIR. He hopes that the national nonprofit can clear up the matter quickly.

“We don’t want to jump to a conclusion,” he said.

The IRS problem comes at a time when other Muslim groups are urging transparency to win Americans’ trust.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, Muslim Advocates in San Francisco and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy in Phoenix have filed their 990s on time. So have local chapters of CAIR in California, Florida, Minnesot a, Texas and other states. Their forms are available online at Guidestar.org, a clearinghouse for information on nonprofits.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, said her organization, partnering with the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, has trained more than 400 Muslim charities and mosques around the United States on good governance practices. Because of the current political climate, in which fears of terrorism run high, Muslim groups have to uphold high standards, she said.

“Charitable giving and charitable activities are not only a core Islamic value, but it’s also a core of who we are as Americans,” she said. “We also recognize that in a post-9/11 world, our charities — perhaps more than other faith groups’ charities — are under the microscope by the public and the government.”

Part of that scrutiny stems from the troubles of the Holy Land Foundation, a Dallas-based Muslim charity. In 2008, five of the charity’s leaders were convicted of channeling money to the terrorist group Hamas. A number of Muslim groups, including CAIR, were labeled as unindicted co-conspirators during the Holy Land Foundation trial.

Khera said that federal prosecutors erred when releasing the list of unindicted co-conspirators. Because they weren’t charged with a crime, they can’t defend themselves, she said.

“They don’t have the opportunity to address the allegations in the court of law. It’s in the court of public opinion,” she said.

Zudhi Jasser, executive director of the Islamic Forum for Democracy, has been critical of CAIR, which he says too often claims to speak for all Muslims in America.

“If there is one way we can build a trusting relationship and be part of the solution, it’s through transparency,” he said.

Hooper, CAIR’s spokesman, has insisted the group’s recent Form 990s exist.

“CAIR, along with 275,000 other nonprofit organizations nationwide, had a technical pape rwork issue related to past IRS filings — and like many other organizations, we were not notified in advance of the IRS’ action,” he said. “This issue is currently being dealt with in cooperation with the IRS and should be resolved shortly. It shouldn’t affect our work or the donations of our supporters.”

When asked to send copies of the charity’s most recent Form 990, Hooper said he did not have access to it.

A Gannett Washington bureau reporter visited CAIR’s offices Tuesday and requested the tax returns. According to the IRS, nonprofits must make their tax returns available to the public upon request, but the reporter was told that CAIR’s executive director was in a meeting, and she should come back the next day.

An IRS spokesman declined to comment on CAIR and pointed to a website that explains all on the list of 275,000 lost their tax-exempt status over failure to file returns for three consecutive years. Any charity on the list must reapply for tax-e xempt status.

Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of WorldNetDaily, a conservative website, is a longtime critic of CAIR. He said the charity is hiding financial data from the public, and he is not surprised that CAIR’s tax-exempt status was revoked.

“We know that they hadn’t filed tax returns,” Farah said. “This is the IRS you are dealing with. Eventually, they are going to get you.”

Farah’s organization and CAIR are locked in a legal feud over the book “Muslim Mafia,” which Farah’s organization published. The book is based on internal CAIR documents, copied from their files by Chris Gaubatz, who posed as a Muslim convert to gain an internship at CAIR.

Gaubatz has ties to the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Islam group whose leader, Frank Gaffney, testified in the lawsuit against a new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tenn., seeking to halt its construction.

CAIR sued Gaubatz and his father, David Gaubatz, over the book. Farah’s gro up is paying their legal bills. They’ve used the recent news about CAIR’s issues with the IRS to promote the book.

Contributing: Elizabeth Bewley, Gannett Washington Bureau

Posted

New study determines Islamic sharia law is utilized in courtrooms across the country – in violation of constitutional rights.

South Carolina is one of over a dozen states whose legislatures are considering a bill that would bar foreign laws – such as Islamic sharia law – from conflicting with U.S. and state laws. Opponents of the legislation claimed that such a bill is unnecessary as sharia law would never be used in violation of American laws and argued that such a law would be unconstitutional. They are wrong on both counts.

Previously, I exposed the attempts to label the bill unconstitutional as bogus.After all, how can a bill that clearly states that it will protect “constitutionally guaranteed” rights be unconstitutional?

For example, Senate Bill 444 reads (emphasis mine):

A court, arbitrator, administrative agency, or other adjudicative, mediation, or enforcement authority may not enforce a foreign law if it would violate a constitutionally guaranteed right of this State or of the United States.

It does not preclude Muslims from all sharia activities – such as praying – as the bill’s opponents want us to believe, it simply prevents sharia from overriding constitutionally-guaranteed rights when the legal systems conflict.

Now, a new study released by the Center for Security Policy, a non-partisan national security organization, finds that sharia law was in fact utilized in numerous states, including one relevant case in South Carolina.

Research was limited to published trial and appellate court documents on the Google Scholar website, so there are undoubtedly many more cases involving sharia than those detailed in the study.

After releasing the study results, CSP said in a statement, “The study evaluates 50 appellate court cases from 23 states that involve conflicts between Shariah (Islamic law) and American state law.  The analysis finds that Shariah has been applied or formally recognized in state court decisions, in conflict with the Constitution and state public policy.”

Opponents of these bills have repeatedly stated that sharia will never be applied when it conflicts with U.S. or state laws, but despite the limited availability of data, this study contains over two dozen cases where judges decided cases based on sharia law – even when Islamic law conflicted with our laws.

In one case, a New Jersey judge refused to grant a restraining order after an Islamic man sexually and physically abused his wife, stating that this was permissible under Islam. The judge determined that his religious belief negated any criminal behavior.

A judge from Michigan enforced an Islamic summary divorce obtained by the husband, known as talaq, which violates the woman’s right to equal protection. The wife had no prior knowledge of the divorce, was not allowed a hearing, and did not have an attorney. Sharia law states that the wife is only entitled to property that was in her name, contrary to Michigan policy.

Many cases involve child custody in which judges will defer to foreign sharia courts, which side against women and non-Muslims, without considering the best interests of the child.

At the forefront of the anti-sharia bill’s opposition is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported on Wednesday that the IRS removed CAIR and the CAIR Foundation from the list of tax-exempt organizations as the groups did not file their annual finance reports.

As of this writing, CAIR’s website still claims that donations are tax-deductible, despite losing their IRS status two weeks ago.

It also bears mentioning that CAIR remains an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2010 Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, where Muslim organizations conspired to send millions of U.S. dollars to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Members of CAIR’s leadership had been under investigation until the Justice Department scuttled their pending terror financing prosecutions.

Now that we can see that not only is this bill constitutional, but also that sharia is in fact applied in courtrooms across the country, nothing should stand in the way of the bill’s passage.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood attend a rally in Cairo’s Munib neighborhood (Photo: Nasser Nasser / AP)

Most Western observers see the Muslim Brotherhood as a homogenous group of hard-line Islamists, dedicated to overthrowing the secular Egyptian state and imposing a severe interpretation of Shari’a law on its people. In reality, the Islamist group has long been something of a “big tent,” gathering within it representatives of different political leanings, all united by oppression under the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

In conversations, some Brothers come across as old-fashioned leftists, dare I say even Marxists: their main focus seems to be workers’ rights. Others have an almost Thatcherite disdain for labor unions. Even among the true-green Islamists, there are at least two different groups: the followers of Hassan Banna and those of Syed Qutb. (I’ll save a discussion on the distinctions for another day.)

With the brutal oppression of Mubarak now gone, it’s only to be expected that some denizens of the big tent feel free to strike out on their own. Some slipped away quietly, casting their lot with liberals like Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa. Others, like Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, broke with more fanfare: after he defied the Brotherhood’s ban on any member’s standing for President, he was ejected from the party.

Now a group of prominent young Brothers have decided to go their own way, setting up the Egyptian Trend Party. (The Brotherhood, which has its own political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has said that those who join the new group will be expelled.)

This was to be expected: a couple of days before the announcement of the new party, Mohamed Kassas and Islam Lotfy told me they were disenchanted with the Brotherhood’s senior leadership. “The revolution exposed major differences between older and younger Brothers,” said Kassas. While the younger members were keen to join the uprising against Mubarak from the get-go, the older leadership were wary. Perhaps because they had suffered terribly for resisting the regime (most of the Brotherhood leadership endured long years in jail and brutal torture), the old guard hesitated for several days as the anti-Mubarak momentum built up in Tahrir Square.

The leadership eventually backed the revolution, but by then they had lost credibility among many young members. Those young Brothers who had already joined the crowds in the square found themselves — for the first time without “adult” supervision — having conversations about politics with non-Islamist peers. They discovered shared aspirations. “They wanted the same things we did, like freedom and the right to change the government,” Lotfy told me.

After Mubarak’s fall, the young Brothers were disappointed by their elders’ initial actions. The Brotherhood’s political party was created overnight, with little discussion; the youth wing would have preferred an internal election to determine the leadership of the new body. “There’s not enough distance between the Brotherhood and the party,” said Kassas. The dismissal of Aboul Fotouh was the last straw.

Launching their own party, Kassas and Lotfy have said they will uphold the aspirations of the Tahrir throngs. But while they are long on ambition, they’re short on specifics about how they would like the new Egypt to be governed. Their party will seek to build a new big tent, inviting liberals and leftists to join.

Guess who’s doing the same thing? Yes, the Brotherhood, too, wants to form a broad coalition ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall.

(Marianne Thieme, leader of the Dutch Animal Rights Party, at a goat farm in Amstelveen, the Netherlands, December 11, 2006/Koen van Weel )

The Dutch parliament voted on Tuesday to ban ritual slaughter of animals, a move strongly opposed by the country’s Muslim and Jewish minorities, but left a loophole that might let religious butchering continue. The bill by the small Animal Rights Party, the first such group in Europe to win seats in a national parliament, passed the lower house of parliament by 116 votes to 30. It must be approved by the upper house before becoming law. It stipulates that livestock must be stunned before being slaughtered, contrary to the Muslim halal and Jewish kosher laws that require animals to be fully conscious.

“This way of killing causes unnecessary pain to animals. Religious freedom cannot be unlimited,” said Marianne Thieme, head of the Animal Rights Party, said before the vote. “For us religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins.”

In a rare show of unity, the Netherlands’ Muslim and Jewish communities — numbering about 1 million and 40,000 respectively in a total population of 16 million — have condemned the proposed ban as a violation of their religious freedom. “The very fact that there is a discussion about this is very painful for the Jewish community,” Netherlands Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs told Reuters. “Those who survived the (second world) war remember the very first law made by the Germans in Holland was the banning of schechita or the Jewish way of slaughtering animals.”

Uca Octay of Rotterdam’s Islamic University said: “We will have to import halal meat from neighboring countries or find another way to meet the needs of the Muslim population. Becoming vegetarian could be an option as well.”

The law said religious groups could continue ritual slaughter if they proved it was no more painful than stunning, but it was not clear how to do this. The Jewish community has challenged a study on animal pain used to support the ban.

Chief Rabbi Jacobs said the exemption in the law stipulated “that we must prove the animal slaughtered the Jewish way suffers less or the same as with stunning, but this absolutely impossible to prove. You can’t ask the animal how it feels afterwards. Nobody can prove this.”   He said that he’s been getting calls from many people in his constituencey to ask what the ban could mean for them. “Old people are scared and young people who are just married are calling me to ask if they should stay here, today it is the schechita and tomorrow what, circumcision? People are afraid.”

“Holland is a sophisticated country and other countries look to Holland as an example, and we are afraid of the domino affect, that other countries will follow. This is the reason so many countries are watching the Netherlands today, ” he said.

“For us this is not acceptable. It puts us in the position which is not acceptable,” Ruben Vis, a director of the Jewish community in the Netherlands said.  “Firstly, we will have to find ways how to serve needs of members of our community in the Netherlands,” he said. “And secondly it’s a problem of freedom of religion, which is granted by the constitution. It feels like a separation between us, as the oldest religious group here, and Dutch society.”

(An Halal butcher shop in Paris during Ramadan August 12, 2010/Jacky Naegelen)

Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks visited the Netherlands last week to lobby against the law, arguing that pre-stunning failed in up to 10 percent of cases and that caused more pain than the swift cutting of the throat by a razor-sharp knife.

Philip Carmel, International Relations Director for the Conference of European Rabbis in Brussels, stressed the upper house of parliament could still reject the law.”We are totally opposed to this law. We’ve been campaigning heavily against it. We believe the Dutch parliament and people, who have a history of tolerance, will see sense and make the right decision,” he said.

Dutch Muslims, mostly of Turkish and Moroccan origin, have complained they felt stigmatized by the planned ban, debated amid growing support for anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders. A court cleared Wilders last week of charges of hate speech against Muslims. His Freedom Party has supported the ban.

“There was no reason for passing this law,” said Imam Mahmut of the El Tawheed mosque in Amsterdam. “This is a political decision. Who has the authority to determine whether the way of killing animals is good or not?  Their way of killing the animal is not good either. The killing takes longer and the animal suffers more.” He said Muslims in the Netherlands will turn to imported meat now. “It shouldn’t be the problem. The meat can be imported to the Netherlands from neighboring countries,” he said.

European Union regulations require animals to be stunned before killing but allow exceptions for ritual slaughter, which the European Court of Human Rights has ruled is a religious right. Animal rights activists insisit this is inhuman. Carmel said the European Parliament last week rejected a bid by animal rights advocates to have kosher and halal meat specially labeled as coming from unstunned animals. (See a similar European Jewish Congress report here)

Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland ban ritual slaughter. Swiss animal rights groups and far-right politicians have called for a ban on imported halal and kosher meat.

Of the 500 million animals slaughtered annually for food in the Netherlands, only 1.2 million animals are slaughtered according to Muslim or Jewish traditions, Dutch statistics show.

(A kosher McDonald’s restaurant in Tel Aviv March 2, 2006. The signs display the word “kosher”, both in Hebrew and English. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)

Rabbi Moshe Stiefel, rabbi of thecentral Dutch province of Flevoland, said after the vote:  “We are absolutely disappointed. It’s very unfortunate that the Dutch Governement doesn’t respect freedom of religion, and it’s not just the fact that we can’t have kosher slaughtering in this country, it goes deeper than that. Our freedom of religioun
isn’t being respected in the Netherlands. Where could this lead to in the future?”

“Theoretically speaking the law could still be blocked, since it still has to be passed by the upper house of parliament. Of course we hope this happens. If this law is
passed it won’t leave us any rooom for kosher slaughtering in the future.”

In France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish minority,  Richard Prasquier, head of the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish organisations, said Jewish ritual slaughter rules were “set up in such a way as to reduce the animal’s suffering to a minimum, with slaughtering done by professionals with years of experience. In this sense the Jewish community has largely anticipated the aims and desires of all the organisations seeking to reduce the suffering of animals.”

“It’s important to understand that if that possibility is not left open, observant Jews will no longer be able to live out their Judaism normally within their country and will have to find somewhere else to live,” he told Reuters. “This is not an adaptation that can be resolved by a sort of consensus among rabbis. It is part of very ancient
traditions which rabbis can only pass along. There is no adaptation possible. We should not be worrying only about ritual slaughtering when animal suffering exists in many other areas, from hunting to bull-fighting to intensive livestock farming.”

By Ivana Secularac, with additional reporting by Roberta Cowan, via Dutch vote to ban religious slaughter of animals | Reuters.

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