| Saturday, January 31, 2004 |
00:31 - Train wreck of a nation
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=38880&d=31&m=1&y=2004
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What must it be like to live in France?
Where Nazi slogans appear on WWI cemeteries and Jewish schools are firebombed, and there's always empathy for the perpetrators above action against it? Where capitulation is the prescribed treatment for any social or cultural disagreement-- where it becomes forbidden to sell pork in major chain supermarkets, while McDonald's outlets become gang-occupied strongholds in street warfare that outguns the police?
Where a Muslim immigrant population that makes up a third of France's under-18 demographic harasses and rapes women in the walled suburban projects, but the government thinks it's a useful gesture to try to ban headscarves in public schools?
And where slaughterhouses televise mass butchery because of a "right" demanded as part of a religious ritual?
The Paris suburb of Evry, which has one of France’s largest Muslim populations, has decided to install video screens to enable the local faithful to watch some 3,300 sheep being slaughtered for Eid this year.
The televised ritual slaughter which will take place in a large mobile abattoir is the idea of a local meat wholesaler.
“If the idea succeeds this year then it’s likely to become a permanent fixture of Eids in future,” a local municipal spokesman said.
Meanwhile, at Le Mans, west of Paris, the local authorities have decided to build a “hard” structure in which the sheep belonging to local Muslims can be killed.
“If this works out,” says an official for the prefecture which is overseeing the development, “then it’s an idea that will probably be tried elsewhere in France.”
The new approach to the slaughter of the Eid sheep comes after years of difficulties for French Muslims who, having bought a sheep for Eid, thought it was their right to see them killed in a local slaughterhouse.
What must it be like inside the average French person's brain? Behind what must be a mask of a fixed, quivering, teary-eyed grin? Happy, happy, happy! ... But what will PETA think? But non! We must do everything to make all cultures happy! But... the animals! But-- freedom of religion! But... secular society! But... France's traditional valu--aaaauurrghhh! POP!
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Brian Tiemann
