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France’s halal market, now estimated at 5.5 billion euros with about 10 percent annual growth, became a political issue in recent weeks as President Nicolas Sarkozy used it in an unabashed pitch for votes from the anti-immigrant far-right.

The raw facts about halal butchering became a top issue on the election campaign trail, to the point that Sarkozy’s prime minister, Francois Fillon, said halal and kosher slaughter were outdated “ancestral traditions” that should be scrapped.

That hit a raw nerve in France’s Muslim and Jewish communities – both the largest of their kind in Europe – whose leaders complained openly. The issue has since mostly faded from the campaign for the two-round presidential election, which ends on May 6.

“It was a lot of noise for nothing,” said Aissa Osmane, who sells sharia-compliant spaghetti sauces with halal beef in the bolognese and smoked poultry cubes for bacon in the carbonara.

The halal market can only grow as the 5-million strong Muslim community further integrates into French life, said the businessman from the Paris suburb of Villetaneuse.

“Muslims live in today’s world like everybody else, they’re busy and want ready-made foods,” he said.

“The politicians are just looking for votes,” said Rached Abssi, sales director for the Kenza Halal processed meat company in the same northern Paris suburb. “We’re just an excuse for them not to talk about the financial crisis.”

POLITICAL POLEMICS

Marine Le Pen, head of the anti-immigrant National Front party, launched the verbal food fight in February when she said all meat sold in the Paris region was halal, and accused Sarkozy of bowing to Muslim pressure to allow this.

While this was an exaggeration, the debate revealed that abattoirs in the Paris region slaughtered animals exclusively the halal way – without stunning them before slitting their throats – but didn’t always mark meat as halal if it were sold to non-Muslim shops.

Slaughterhouses said it was too costly to operate two methods of slaughter. Sarkozy suggested clearly marking the slaughter method on all meat, but backed down after industry leaders impressed on him that this would increase costs.

Several producers at the fair said Muslims in Europe had long had fresh halal meat from Islamic butchers, but used to have nowhere near as many prepared foods as now.

“The market is playing catch-up to the demand,” said Dawood Ali, director of Gem Foods in Coventry, England. “It’s getting bigger because people are now trying to meet that demand.”

Asked when supply would meet demand, Ali said: “We’re halfway there.” Abssi gave the same estimate.

A quick tour around the few dozen stands at one end of a larger food industry fair here showed foreign producers saw France as a major market.

Halal foods on display included Dutch, Danish and Turkish meats, Belgian yoghurt, British baby food, Indonesian nasi goreng, Malaysian sweet and sour sauce, alcohol-free champagne from Belgium and Austria, and a whisky-flavoured malt drink from the United States.

FRENCH MUSLIMS WITH FRENCH TASTES

“There’s more variety and openness to new foods here,” said Ali, who displayed everything from ready-made dinners to baby food and chocolate-covered dates. “French Muslims are very into cuisine and see it as an art. In the U.K., they’re more closed.”

The taste for local cuisine among French Muslims, many of whom were born here and eat more sandwiches and pasta than couscous or tajine, has also prompted some French producers of non-meat products to get halal certification for them.

Gilles Amand, a caterer from Morlaix in Brittany, displayed a variety of fish-and-vegetable terrines that he had been selling for several years before getting a halal certificate to reassure Muslim clients.

All fish are halal, or permissible, by nature, but Muslims here shy away from unmarked fish terrines because there could be gelatin made from pork in it. Amand said the certificate proved his terrines only had vegetable-based gelatin in them.

“This reassures them about the quality,” he said.

Source: Reuters

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On a recent evening, Les Enfants Terribles, a Paris restaurant that serves French cuisine cooked with halal meat, was brimming with customers.

Like many French Muslims, Kamil Saidi, who owns the restaurant, says he was disgusted by the recent political kerfuffle over halal, triggered by far right candidate Marine Le Pen’s charge that non-Muslims in Paris were unwittingly eating animals slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law.

Saidi says the debate wasn’t really about meat, but about the far right trying to attract votes in advance of the election in April and May.

He prefers to instead massage cultural tensions the quiet way: by serving an excellent blend of French and Muslim gastronomic traditions.

Even though France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, Saidi says he and his brother — the other enfant terrible — seem to have been the first ones to make French-Halal fusion cuisine official. “It’s astonishing,” he says.

“Growing up I was always frustrated because I love French cuisine, but like all practicing Muslims I had to eat only fish or vegetarian when I went to a restaurant,” says Saidi. “I always wanted to eat my fill of duck and lamb,” but it wasn’t halal.

Now, Saidi can serve all the duck and lamb he wants because he can guarantee it’s halal. Tonight there is fois gras with confit, onions and red berries; Magret de canard, or duck breast in quince sauce; and roasted leg of lamb — all halal, bien sur.

Saidi’s parents emigrated to France from Algeria, and he was born and raised in the Paris suburbs. He says life is good for Muslims in France. When I ask him if there is discrimination, he says, “yes, a kind of gustatory discrimination.” And that’s what his restaurant is setting out to change.

Saidi says he doesn’t advertise his restaurant as halal. “I don’t want to cater to one type of community because then people will put a label on me,” he says.

Word has spread among the young Muslim crowd of Les Enfants Terribles’ delectable fare. Next to me are Karim Nait and Laila Ayb. Nait, who is a chef at another French restaurant, says he doesn’t keep halal, but Ayb does. They say they come here often because the food is delicious and refined.

Saidi also has a large non-Muslim clientele. Many diners walk in off the street not knowing it’s halal, “or that alcohol isn’t served,” Saidi says. “Some diners say, ‘okay, we won’t drink tonight.’ But others leave when they find out they can’t have wine with dinner.”

Tonight, one table of non-Muslim diners certainly didn’t mind going dry. “It’s fabulous,” they tell me. “The meat is really flavorful and it’s just a good French restaurant.”

Halal meat butchers usually have a reputation for quality in France. And with an estimated 6 million Muslims now living here, halal products are becoming increasingly popular. Grocery stores offer halal meats and prepared dishes in their frozen sections and even a fast food chain, Quick, offers halal hamburgers.

The French have also embraced and adopted many dishes from North Africa.

Couscous, the North African dish with a chick pea and vegetable sauce served over semoul, has practically become a French food. And spicy merguez sausages from the Maghreb are now standard fare at any French barbeque.

I’m even told that the Couscous Royal — a dish that features beef, chicken and merguez — is another form of French-Halal fusion. “In Algeria you only eat couscous with one meat, never all three,” says Nait, the diner. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Source: KOSU News

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THE fast-growing halal meat market in France has become one of the contentious issues in the campaigns of two presidential candidates.

Incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy, who is finding his re-election too difficult, is deliberately using extreme-right rhetoric to regain ground by attacking what he calls ‘the expanding distribution of halal meat in France’.

The halal row began last month when Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National (FN) who is running on an anti-immigration platform, announced that 100 per cent of all meat in the Paris region was halal and ‘ncroaching on the French way of life’. Later, she called for a ‘ban on the slaughtering of animals for consumption without stunning’ or Islamic way of slaughtering. However, meat industry representatives said her figure was incorrect. Sarkozy also initially called the fact wrong.

He said most of the meat consumed in Paris originates in slaughterhouses located in other parts of France that do not necessarily follow halal procedures.

But later, in a desperate bid to woo right-wing voters, he again attacked halal food, saying that halal meat options should not
be available in state school canteens. But his tactics to steal Le Pen’s votes seem to have backfired. Some newspaper columnists were of the view that Sarkozy had tried to ‘push fears of a supposed secret Islamisation of the dinner plate’.

Le Pen had in fact based her anti-Muslim tirade on facts played up in a France2 television documentary which said that much of the slaughtered meat known as halal is not labeled as such and is entering the general food chain, where it is being unknowingly consumed by the non-Muslim population.This accusation sparked a political controversy and the question of Muslim
immigration suddenly became a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Leaders of both Muslims and Jewish communities in France have expressed anger over bringing religion into the election campaign. Mohammed Moussaoui, a key leader of the Muslim community in France, said exploiting halal meat as a campaign issue was a matter for great concern to the Muslims because ‘it creates tensions in the society.’ He said he could not accept that ‘Muslims serve as scapegoats in this campaign.’

The grand rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, said: “As we are in a period of crisis, how can the issue of kosher meat and halal meat be a major problem?”

Halal products have a big market in France, which has the largest Muslim population in the European Union, estimated at between four million and six million. The halal food market in France has more than doubled over the past five years and is now valued at $7 billion.

The sector is now more than twice as large as that for organic foods and the industry experts expect the demand for halal to grow at more than 20 per cent annually.

This has annoyed many elements who are not comfortable with fast-growing halal market.

They are calling it the ‘stealth Islamisation’ of the French food chain. Similarly, when the large fast-food chain Quick removed bacon burgers from its menu and replaced them with a version using halal beef and a slice of smoked turkey, the socialist mayor of the northern French city of Roubaix, called it ‘discrimination against non-Muslim customers’.

About 85 per cent of the halal market in France consists of fresh meat sold by halal butchers. But in recent years, the fastest-growing niche in France’s halal food sector has been halal-certified cold cuts, sauces, soups, ready-made dishes, baby foods and other processed food products.

Halal meat is also proliferating on menus of schools, hospitals and company cafeterias across the country.

France is among the countries, mostly non-Muslim, which are exporting halal products. They include Brazil, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and India. In 2010, India exported halal brand products worth $21 billion.

It is interesting to note that awareness about what is halal is much more in those countries where Muslims are in a
minority.

Halal products are not for Muslims only whose population at present is 1.5 billion, but also for non-Muslims who are getting attracted to them because they find them safe, hygienic, wholesome, of high quality and trustworthy.

The global value for trade of halal foods and non-food products is estimated at $2.1 trillion annually while global halal trade is approximately $80 billion which is five per cent of total trade of agri-food products.

Being a Muslim country, Pakistan is in an advantageous position to secure a significant share in the halal market. But unfortunately, it has hardly any presence as yet in the global halal market, even in countries and cities where big clusters of Pakistanis are located. They can be accessed without any hassles by Pakistani firms. In fact, these firms will be welcomed there.

But Pakistan’s private sector and commerce ministry have miserably failed to capture even a small share of the global halal market because of indifference, lethargy, poor business vision and short-sightedness. Ironically, to an average Pakistani businessman halal still means slaughtering of chicken and animals and nothing more.

He is still unaware of the fact that there exists a lucrative market abroad in the name of halal and which has almost been overtaken by western food firms.

It is interesting to note that in an effort to promote halal industry in the country an organisation called the Pakistan Halal Product Development Board (PHPDB) was established or its establishment was announced on December 5, 2009 by the then minister for science and technology Azam Khan Swati. But it never saw light of the day.

On January 10, 2012, the new minister for science and technology Mir Changez Khan Jamali said, “some technical issues are delaying the issuance of a notification for establishing PHPDB.”

The board, to be linked to the Organisation of Islamic Conference and attached to the ministry of science and technology, was to help Pakistani entrepreneurs get recognition in the global halal market.

The board’s key objectives are to assist and facilitate the development of halal industry in the country, and develop halal standards for food and non-food items.

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PARIS—The French butcher who cuts and tresses your meat with care, and serves as city dwellers’ link to the land, is falling on hard times, unable to find new blood to keep his iconic image alive—as supermarkets and Arab butchers selling halal meat at cheaper prices thrive.

The changes in this age-old industry reflect profound economic and societal shifts gnawing at France’s core, and have catapulted the butcher shop into the debate before presidential elections in April and May.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has lamented the decline of the traditional French butcher and now wants all meat clearly marked—halal, kosher or French—while Prime Minister Francois Fillon has suggested the ritual slaughter of animals by Muslims and Jews is out of sync with modern times.

The conservative leaders awoke to the topic after extreme-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen contended that Muslims have a stranglehold on butcher shops—and on the French way of life. With polls suggesting Sarkozy will lose to Socialist rival Francois Hollande, the president is racing after third-place Le Pen’s voters to bolster his chances at a second term.

Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire released data making clear that Le Pen was wrong when she said last month that all meat sold in the Paris region is halal. However, halal butcher shops run by Muslims have long been on the rise in the country with Western Europe’s largest Muslim population—while traditional butcher shops are in decline.

So worrisome is that downturn that one such butcher, who specializes in top quality meats, poses nude for calendars to make the profession more sexy to the young. For his 2012 calendar, Yves-Marie Le Bourdennec is seen sitting on a stool, his back drawn with cuts like a cow—with a saucy but stern school marm wielding a pointer at his side.

In a civilizational contrast, Muslim butchers, most with origins in former French colonies in North Africa, may play recordings of the Quran on Friday, Islam’s holy day—when they remain open—or display a Hadith, a saying of the prophet, pinned to a shop wall.

Muslim butchers, like their Jewish counterparts’ kosher version, sell meat and poultry from animals drained of blood after being “sacrificed” without being stunned.

“Commercially and economically, (halal) is something that counts … It weighs and it will weigh more and more,” said Dominique Unger, head of the French Confederation of Butcher Shops, Charcuterie and Caterers, founded in 1894.

The traditional corner butcher, meanwhile, is getting harder to find.

There were 40,000 butchers in France after World War II but only 20,000 in the past decade, Unger said, even as France’s population has grown by millions. Despite unemployment of nearly 10 percent—a major campaign topic—there are 4,000 unfilled job offers in the industry today, he said.

“There’s no competition,” even with Muslim butchers who set up shop in heavily immigrant neighborhoods—and fill a need.

The butchers’ confederation has published a book, “Louchebem,” meaning butcher in French slang, proclaiming the virtues of the French butcher with pieces by writers, designers and others.

The explosion of supermarkets around France has eaten into the butchers’ profession, but that has now stabilized, Unger said, pointing to another problem: The butcher shop business has a “retrograde image,” that of “old France,” and today’s youth just aren’t seduced.

“They’re too spoiled,” said Gerard Provost, a butcher for the past 50 years who started at the age of 15 in his native Normandy. Like others, Provost, who works with his wife in a Left Bank neighborhood of Paris with few immigrants, stresses the long hours and sometimes physically demanding work that being a butcher entails.

Muslim butchers agree.

Non-Muslim youth “want easy money, luxuries, chateaux,” said Youssef Ait-Ben Ali, 49, an employee of Moroccan origin in a halal shop in a heavily immigrant working class neighborhood of northern Paris.

“People prefer to dream with a magic wand,” he said. “But those days are over. You have to work more now.”

In low-income neighborhoods, Muslim butchers fill the void, buying out shops from retiring traditional French butchers. They are willing to work the long hours over six days, often in a family arrangement which allows them to divide up the work, said Farid Nahim, who owns the Boucherie Nouvelle du Marche (New Market Butcher).

In his refrigerated room, clearly bloodless carcasses of calves and lamb hanging from hooks are stamped to show they have been slaughtered ritually.

Unger, of the butchers’ confederation, said no figures for the number of Muslim butchers are available because they aren’t organized.

The Agriculture Ministry has said that 14 percent of the total tonnage of animals killed in France are slaughtered ritually.

“We’re here because there’s a demand,” Nahim said, stressing that non-Muslims are loyal customers, too.

Muslim butchers contend their meat is tastier with less risk of contamination because there can be no blood toxins. They also point out their lower prices.

Ait-Ben Ali says that at his shop, simply called the Muslim Butcher Shop, a cote de boeuf sells for about (EURO)16 per kilogram (about $9.50 a pound), compared to up to (EURO)34 ($44.59) per kilogram (around $20 a pound) at a traditional French butcher.

By becoming small entrepreneurs, like butchers, Muslims are able to avoid the discrimination many face in job searches, said Patrick Simon, a sociologist with the National Institute for Demographic Studies.

“It’s a solution to avoid discrimination in the job market and fulfills an important function,” he said. As butchers, they are dependent on no one and work with other Muslims.

“Muslims are increasingly becoming entrepreneurs,” Simon said, noting their corner on the market of small neighborhood grocery stores in big French cities, bought up in the 1950s and 1960s. If you live in Paris and you need last-minute milk, eggs or a bottle of wine, you “go to the Arabs,” an expression that has entered the French vernacular.

Will halal butchers make equal inroads?

That’s the question that has roused presidential candidates on the right. In French elections it is standard procedure for the mainstream right to ogle far-right voters, often allowing the far-right to set the tone.

Le Pen, who claims that French civilization is under the sway of a conquering Islam, lashed out at what she said was the omnipresence of halal meat in the Paris region, and the cruelty of ritual slaughter.

Fillon, the prime minister, suggested that French Jews and Muslims reflect on “ancestral traditions” which “don’t have much to do with the state of science, technology and health issues today.” His remarks drew such shock that he ended up apologizing personally to leaders of both religions in France.

Sarkozy, after his remarks caused concern, ultimately asked that butcher products be labeled halal or kosher on a voluntary instead of mandatory basis. He didn’t say there was anything wrong with halal meat, just that it should be clearly labeled.

For butcher Ait-Ben Ali, there is an easier solution: “They shouldn’t be mixing politics and meat. They should find the real problems.”

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Sarkozy met the mosque’s rector and the French Muslim Council leader and said he told them “he did not want, in this electoral period, some of our compatriots to feel hurt by controversies that have no place here”.

“I wanted to say… to our compatriots of the Muslim religion that they naturally have the right to follow their faith as any other citizen has the right to follow his religion,” he told reporters.

Sarkozy also inaugurated at the mosque a memorial to Muslim soldiers who died fighting for France.

Sarkozy has been accused of tacking to the right in the run-up to the April 22 first round of the presidential election in order to recruit voters tempted by anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen’s platform.

Last week the issue of Muslim immigration and in particular Islamic and Jewish dietary practice surged to the fore in the election debate, upsetting religious leaders.

Jews and Muslims came together to complain they were being used as pawns in the election, after first Le Pen then Sarkozy and finally his prime minister Francois Fillon criticised the production of halal and kosher meat.

France is home to western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, officially estimated at least four million, and its largest Jewish community, estimated at up to 700,000.

The country has for years been debating how far it is willing to go to accommodate Islam, now France’s second religion, and Sarkozy and Le Pen have both made the matter a central issue in their campaigns.

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PARIS — In a bitterly divisive presidential election campaign, France is once again torn by an uncomfortable struggle over the place of Muslims in a society pledged to secularism but deeply rooted in Christianity.

After a disputed law to ban full-face Muslim veils, the latest chapter in the long-running drama has flared over non-Muslims who might unknowingly eat halal meat, or meat from animals slaughtered according to Islamic tradition. As with the veil debate, the concern over slaughtering practices reflects a widely shared irritation against the growing number of Muslims who defy France’s traditional majority by insisting on their own customs and dress codes.

The confrontation between traditional Muslim ways and Europe’s Christian heritage has erupted in several European countries as the number of Muslims increases across the continent because of continuing immigration and the customary large families of Muslim immigrants.

But it is particularly raw in France. This is true in part because it has emerged as an issue in the election campaign. But it is also because, with Europe’s largest Muslim population, France has a number of urban and suburban areas where Muslims are a majority and find it easy to live according to their traditions without seeking to integrate into French society.

The number of Muslims in France has never been established scientifically because it is illegal here to ask people to identify themselves by race or religion. The Interior Ministry, backed by academic researchers, estimates the number of those born into Muslim families at more than 5 million. But some Muslim leaders have suggested that illegal immigrants are undercounted and the real tally is closer to 6 million, although many of them do not practice their faith.

Tension on the table

The spark for the latest round of invective was a claim by Marine Le Pen, presidential candidate of the far-right National Front, that all the meat consumed by Parisians is halal and that millions of French people are consuming halal meat without knowing it.

President Nicolas Sarkozy at first dismissed the claim as nonsense, and butchers agreed. But sensing a campaign issue worth hammering on, he then called Saturday for labels on all meat describing how the animals were slaughtered. A recent poll said halal meat was the No. 1 worry of the French people, he told reporters while explaining his shift.

Sarkozy’s main adversary, Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party, accused the president of banging on Muslims to gain National Front votes and called for “restraint.” Hollande said the only real concern should be that animals are slaughtered in humane and sanitary conditions and promised to make sure that is the case “in cooperation with the professionals.”

Against that background, Interior Minister Claude Gueant, a key Sarkozy lieutenant, declared that non-French Muslim residents, if they are allowed to vote in local elections as proposed by Hollande, could gain a majority in town councils and impose halal meat in school cafeterias. His warning, repeated several times, was denounced as a scare tactic by Hollande’s campaign and repudiated even by some Sarkozy supporters.

“I have already said that the clash of civilizations is not my cup of tea,” said Foreign Minister Alain Juppe. “I think the halal meat problem is in reality a false problem.”

Mohammed Moussaoui, who heads the French Council of the Muslim Religion, said he was concerned to see the question of halal meat enter the campaign because “it creates tensions in the society.” But he avoided confronting the issue head-on, following a long-standing policy of keeping a low profile.

France’s Jewish leaders, whose kosher tradition requires similar slaughtering techniques, also expressed concern. Rabbi Bruno Fiszon, a specialist in the issue, said labeling meat only by the way it was slaughtered “would lead to stigmatization.”

Prime Minister Francois Fillon intensified the storm with a suggestion that Muslims and Jews alike should think about abandoning their slaughtering traditions, which he said “no longer have much to do with today’s state of science, with the state of technology, with health problems.”

The main difference between modern slaughtering practices and those for meat deemed halal or kosher is that the latter call for the animal to be put to death by having its throat slit in a prescribed manner. Fillon’s suggestion was that the Muslim and Jewish traditions responded to sanitary concerns that are no longer imperative.

The head of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, Richard Prasquier, responded that he was “shocked” by Fillon’s proposal, leading Fillon to invite Jewish and Muslim community leaders in for a talk to smooth things over.

Echoes of the veil ban

The halal dispute ended nearly a year of relative calm since enactment of the law last spring banning full-face veils in public places. The law, supported by Hollande’s Socialists as well as Sarkozy’s conservative majority, was denounced by Muslim groups as stigmatization of their traditions but widely applauded in opinion polls.

More than 280 women were accosted by police for wearing full-face veils in violation of the law between its enactment in April and the end of 2011, according to the Interior Ministry. Of those, 237 were cited with summons similar to tickets handed out for driving violations, producing only six convictions and one fine.

For a Muslim couple in Lyon, however, the law was taken a step too far. They sued the city for $65,000 for what they called a “humiliation at the so precious moment of celebrating a marriage” and “an attack on the fundamental liberty of religion.”

The woman, identified as Nassima, showed up with her groom last June to be married in Lyon’s Ninth District. The judge, they alleged in their suit, refused to perform the ceremony until Nassima took off the veil covering her hair, a garment that was not prohibited by the April law and that was not so different from the white veils worn at traditional Christian weddings.

The judge defended her action as “defense of women’s liberties.” She was identified as Fatiha Benahmed.

Source: Edward Cody, Published: March 6, Washington Post

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Francois Fillon’s call for religions to “reflect” upon what he called outdated traditions has fed a hyper-charged political atmosphere. His boss, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, has openly courted far right voters in hopes of boosting his lagging chances of re-election, with digs at Muslim practices and calls to shrink immigration.

But for many, Fillon’s comments went too far. He hosted Jewish leaders Wednesday and was expected to meet with Muslim leaders Thursday in what appeared to be an attempt to ease concerns about his comments on French radio this week.

The Jewish leaders he met with Wednesday said Fillon assured them that Judaism wasn’t targeted, but insisted they would keep an eye on government policy. France also has a large Jewish community, estimated at about half a million.

Most French are Roman Catholic by heritage, and many French holidays and traditions are linked to Christianity. But for a century the government has professed allegiance to a strict separation of church and state.

It was in the name of this official secularism that Sarkozy — and many French people — backed a 2010 law banning the face-covering Islamic veil such as the niqab or burqa in all public space in France. France also bans the Islamic headscarf and other obvious religious symbols from public schools.

Polls suggest Sarkozy is facing an uphill battle against front-runner Socialist Francois Hollande for the elections, to be conducted in two rounds April 22 and May 6.

Sarkozy has been upfront about trying to lure votes from the far right National Front’s candidate Marine Le Pen, who shows in a strong third place in polls and whose father made it into the 2002 presidential election runoff.

Sarkozy hit a nationalist note with his first big campaign rally last month and has continued the theme since. On Saturday, he criticized special indulgences for halal meat in schools or separate swimming hours for Muslim women in public pools.

“There is no place in the republic for xenophobia, there is no place for racism. … There is no place for pools with hours for men and hours for women,” Sarkozy told a rally in Bordeaux.

On Tuesday he called for halving the number of immigrants who come to France each year. Many immigrants are from largely Muslim former French colonies in Africa.

“I think that in order to relaunch integration under favorable circumstances, we need to divide by two the number of people that we welcome (to France). So to go from 180,000 to 100,000,” he said.

Hollande has proposed more generous measures toward immigrants, including allowing all foreigners residing in France legally for five years to have the right to vote in local elections.

Ritual slaughter according to Jewish and Muslim traditions has caused political debate elsewhere in Europe as well.

In the Netherlands, the lower house of parliament approved a ban last year on the traditional method of cutting the animal’s throat without stunning it first. Animal rights groups and a large anti-Islam political party — and a majority of Dutch voters — supported the bill. But after an outcry that the ban would violate religious freedoms, support evaporated when the bill was sent to the upper house.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Prime Minister Francois Fillon made the suggestion after Sarkozy called at the weekend for butchers to clearly label meat slaughtered according to religious laws. Jewish and Muslim leaders criticised the government for stoking the debate.
Fillon and other conservative leaders linked their tough stand on ritually prepared meat to issues such as immigration and French identity that the far-right National Front uses to tap into resentment against Europe’s largest Muslim minority.

“Religions should think about keeping traditions that don’t have much in common with today’s state of science, technology and health problems,” Fillon told Europe 1 radio while discussing the two-round presidential election ending May 6.

The “ancestral traditions” of ritual slaughter were justified for hygienic reasons in the past but were now outdated, he said. “We live in a modern society.”

“I am astonished by this statement by the prime minister,” said Richard Prasquier, head of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish organisations. “The government has no place giving advice about religious traditions.”

Mohammad Moussaoui, head of France’s Muslim Council, said ritual slaughter was no more painful than modern methods and labelling meat as being prepared “without stunning” would feed resentment against the two minority religions using it.

“It will stigmatise Muslims and Jews as people who don’t respect the interests of animals,” he said. “That will raise tensions in society.”

DIVISIVE DEBATE

National Front leader Martine Le Pen launched the debate last month saying abattoirs around Paris only slaughtered meat the Muslim way. It turned out they mostly supplied local Muslim butchers and most meat sold in Paris came from further away.

The issue caught hold and Sarkozy’s campaign countered with ever tougher statements on immigration and ringing defences of French civilisation and secularism — code words implying some of the five million Muslims here did not share these values.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant warned last week that giving immigrants the right to vote in municipal elections, as the Socialist want, would lead to Muslims forming majorities on local councils and imposing halal meat in school canteens.

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“This is quite possible, given the proportion of foreigners in some areas,” he said when challenged on RTL radio on Monday.

Fillon seconded this view but Sarkozy campaign spokeswoman Natalie Kosciusko-Morizet declined to support it.

Sarkozy’s former Justice Minister Rachida Dati, a Muslim, told the daily Le Figaro such comments “mix up French Muslims and foreigners. French Muslims are citizens like any other.”

Hollande’s spokesman Pierre Moscovici said Sarkozy “is branding French Muslims in a sly way and echoing the National Front’s issues.”

MORE ABOUT MEAT

The debate has also highlighted little-known aspects of the meat industry in France, where producers are mostly opposed to efforts by consumer groups to divulge their slaughter methods.

Halal and kosher slaughter demand that cattle are conscious before their throats are slit and blood drained. Non-religious butchers stun the animal first, saying this lessens pain.

Abattoir operators say killing cattle by both methods in the same slaughterhouse is too costly, so some use only the halal method because they can sell the meat to both Muslim butchers and supermarket chains for the general public.

Clearly labelling meat as “stunned” or “not stunned” would reveal how much religiously prepared food is being sold.

“Every time shoppers go to the meat counter, they’ll see meat described as ‘not stunned’,” Moussaoui said. “That will look as if there was cruelty towards these animals.”

If shoppers shun this meat, kosher beef could become very expensive because butchers for the Jewish minority — at 600,000 the largest in Europe — offset some of their costs by selling the expensive hind cuts of beef to non-kosher distributors.

Kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, bans meat that touches the sciatic nerve along the back, buttocks and thighs of mammals. If kosher butchers cannot sell sirloin and filet mignon steaks to non-kosher shops, they will lose a key part of their business.

– Reuters

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