This past month, in an attempt to suppress a new coronavirus mutation, Denmark killed all 17 million of its mink. I thought about this episode over the weekend, after Europe’s highest court opted to uphold several Belgian regional bans on kosher and halal animal slaughter, cutting off the only local source of meat for observant members of two faiths.

You see, six years ago, Denmark also banned kosher and halal slaughter for being cruel to animals—while continuing to be the world’s largest fur producer. That’s why they had all those mink in the first place. In this way, Denmark is emblematic of how “animal rights” is used as cover by Europe’s culturally Christian majority to persecute Muslim and Jewish minorities. The country was happy to express its deep and abiding concern for animal welfare, just as long as the price was paid by despised religious sects with no political or economic clout, and not by the rest of the population.

Belgium does not export mink, but it does engage in factory farming of everything from chickens to turkeys. These are actual industries that service the entire country. By contrast, there are only 30,000 Jews in Belgium’s population of 11.5 million, and approximately 570,000 Muslims. In other words, in practice, the country’s kosher and halal bans will not substantially protect the rights of animals so much as suppress the rights of Muslims and Jews. The policy asks nothing of the general population and will have no impact on their lives or food consumption. It just sends an ugly message insinuating that Jews and Muslims are uniquely depraved when it comes to animal rights, when in reality, they are just easy targets. While defenders of such efforts would like the debate to be about animal rights, even a cursory glance shows that it’s really about something else.

This is how anti-Semitism, among other bigotries, has often operated: as cost-free virtue signaling that enables the majority to claim that it cares about a moral problem, while scapegoating minorities for it and never sacrificing anything themselves.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/european-court-kosher-butchery

Cross posting this here.

https://twitter.com/worldbirds32/status/1243940886494564352

https://twitter.com/LepapillonBlu/status/1338930549235257347

One of the songs my toddler listens to as part of the endless loop of nursery rhymes that permeates our home these days starts like this:

'Do you like broccoli?/ Yes, I do, yes, I do/ Do you like ice cream?/ Yes, I do, yes, I do/ Do you like broccoli ice cream?/ No, I don't, yucky!'

This unflinching lesson in the art and discipline of food combinations is now more important than ever.

Not content with the extent of the calamity that is the year 2020, vandals have taken to the dark corners of the web in recent months, wielding an axe to a cherished symbol of many – the spartan but kingly hummus.

https://amp.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/we-need-to-talk-about-what-foodies-are-doing-to-hummus-1.1125628

It all started with white bean hummus, which is not hummus.

https://twitter.com/LepapillonBlu/status/1334555085540630530

- big snip -

On Aug. 22, a young Jewish group member saw a sign hanging over the heavily trafficked 405 freeway in LA that read, “The Jews want a Race War.” It upset her, and she asked in a GNO (Girls night out FB group) post what others thought about it. A member suggested some Jewish representation was also needed in the group, after noticing some “fishy anti-Semitic stuff.” At first, the comments responding to this suggestion were positive.

Then, on Aug. 29, a member posted: “I feel that the Jewish admin who is appointed must also acknowledge the occupation of Palestine.”

And all hell broke loose.

Within hours, every Jewish member who had tried to explain why a litmus test for a “good Jew” was anti-Semitic was thrown out. Every Jewish member who asked why an American Jew should have an opinion on a foreign matter (however incoherently phrased) was expelled. Anyone who made a comment supporting Israel, explaining the history of Israel, or who “liked” such a comment, disappeared. Said one Jewish member who was not expelled, “It was all over so fast that if I hadn’t personally known one of the girls who was thrown out, I wouldn’t have known anything had happened. And the 29,990 other people have no idea those women have been kicked out.”

One of the members who was severed from the group, a Korean American Jewish woman named Skylar Cutler, was so incensed that she contacted Tablet with her story. “The swiftness with which the Jewish women were kicked out without any explanation,” she wrote, “was shocking and a moment of realization that anti-Semitism is now mainstream. Even though the Jewish women who spoke out were ethnic Korean (not white), Mizrahi (not white), Sephardi (not white), and Ashkenazi (not white), we were collectively dismissed and branded as ‘white racist bad Jews’ who were in support of oppressing the ‘brown and Black’ Palestinians.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/litmus-test-online-facebook-group-expels-jewish-members

https://twitter.com/MeredithFrost/status/1333566670552649728