England, UK – The European Parliament has voted in favor of a new regulation which will see kosher meat labeled as “meat from slaughter without stunning” in a move which Jewish bodies fear is “discriminatory”.
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The decision was made today as part of a proposal for a regulation on the provision of food information to consumers.
Around 70 per cent of an animal killed by shechita is consumed by the non-kosher market and Henry Grunwald QC, chairman of Shechita UK, the lobby organisation which defends religious slaughter, said the decision will have a serious impact on the kosher meat industry.
He said: “This ill-conceived amendment discriminates against kosher food and will have a significant impact on the kosher meat industry across Europe.
“The Jewish community is fully supportive of providing consumers with information about the origins of their food and we urged MEPs that if they wanted to label meat and meat products, labels should include those killed by electrocution, shooting, gassing or clubbing as well as the many millions of animals that are mis-stunned during the stunning process.
“To pick on one method is suspicious, troubling and discriminatory.”
It’s scary it’s 1930’s all over again. Slowly maturely they are labeling us with yellow stars.
They shouldn’t single out one method and not other methods. This needs to be brought to the European High Court.
If people like Rubashkin and that slaughterhouse in Uruguay weren’t going around committing chillul HaShem and making shechita look bad then things like this would be much less likely to happen.
Why do they care if we do shchitah? I smell discrimanation.
This rule will make kosher food more expensive. It will become much more difficult to sell (to non-kosher meat companies) animals found to be treifos after shechita. Now that meat, even if it is not kosher, will probably have to be labeled as meat from a slaughterhouse where that does not use stunning.
You would think that more people would by Kosher because the DON’T Stun the animal
The Europeans want to drive the Jews out of Europe. Silly Europeans, life for them will be very bad once the Muslims become the majority, which is happening very quickly.
I know how important eating meat is to most of us. The motivation against shechita is usually antisemitism. However, we would have the last laugh if we became vegetarians and lived longer and healthier than our adversaries.
not everyone can do with out meat,organic is best,even in maco diet some people need meat, l know from myself
This isn’t a threat to Shechita.
Anyone who cares about it already knows that the animal is not stunned.
What it is a threat to is the marketing of Kosher meat to non-Jews or heterodox Jews.
I’m sure, given a choice, the New Zealand community would much rather have this than the ban that was just imposed. Conflating the two weakens your argument.
Maybe we should start debating the Atkins diet here? Whether a vegetarian diet is healthier is really up for debate.
But even if it is, we don’t want the government to force it on us. Any method of animal killing is still killing and not for the faint of heart to watch.
According to the little research I did online, Muslims, although it may be controversial, do allow stunning — which somebody mentioned this labeling law is probably aimed at. Which really leaves us Jews as the targets. The methods mentioned by Mr. Grunwald in the article seem pretty cruel to me, so the law definitely seems discriminatory, or at least misinformed about animal suffering.
So the question remains, why is the EU singling out shechita, or better yet, why are the so called animal lovers and liberals always against sheciata & Bris Milah?
In the U.S., unfortunately, self-hating Jews that know very little about our religion are
usually behind it, but in Europe it does reek of anti-semitiism.
At last. Payday is finally coming to those hechsherim villians and criminals who in the last 50 years have been blackmailing the tzibbur with their monoply hold on the kosher market with any product with their hechsher costs 4 or 5 times as mucn as the same product without a hechsher. I hope shechita becomes illegal in Europe as soon as possible. We will then be able to import kosher meat from the US or South America and immediately the price will come down by a mnimum of 50%.
Never understood how they measure these things, do the ask the cows if they prefer shecita or electrocution? Who knows what is officially more distressing for the animal?
I wonder if they have any thoughts on meat derived from a Spanish method of slaughter called “bullfighting.” Will that be labelled as well?
Let them label the cemetires and mass graves with “slaughtered without cause” or “slaughtered without stunning” or something like that. All of a sudden they’re very worried about how they tried animals. How a bou of those European animals worry about how they treat humans.
Stunning the animal is not like morphine. The animal goes through much more pain than shehita which Hashem in his wisdom decreed. They just think that because the animal is paralyzed it is in less pain than the animal that quivers. But they are dead wrong. Ultimately Hashem will teach them a lesson. Perhaps they will be paralyzed one day and the doctor will think they are not feeling pain.