French Lawmaker Threatened for Anti-Kosher Stand

‘Slash Her Neck’ Message After Proposing Food Labels

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September 3, 2013

s-goy_chavent_sylvie08056b-1A French senator said she will complain to police over death threats she received after proposing special labels for halal and kosher meat.

Sylvie Goy-Chavent of the centrist UDI party will lodge a complaint with police over the threats and online “calls for civil war and a call for the Israeli government to attack France,” she told the France Info radio station over the weekend.

She did not say where the threats appeared but reader comments in an article by the Jewish French news site JSSNews about Goy-Chavent featured a call to “slash her neck and see how long it takes her to bleed.”

The threats followed a nonbinding proposal that Goy-Chavent submitted last month in her capacity as Senatorial rapporteur on the meat industry. In a report published last month she recommended that producers of meat originating from animals that were not stunned before slaughter be legally required to apply “special labeling, to be applied in a non-stigmatizing manner.”

Last year, Goy-Chavent signed a full-page ad in Le Parisian urging the French president to outlaw ritual slaughter in France.

Jewish and Muslims religious laws require animals be conscious when their necks are cut — a practice deemed cruel by some animal welfare activist.

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