A French court has ordered schools in the town of Chalon-sur-Saône to provide pork-free meal options to Muslim and Jewish students, overturning a 2015 decision by the mayor to no longer provide alternative fare.
Explaining the decision, the judge in the case said that while he did not take religion into account, he believed that the lack of options had forced Jewish and Muslim to forego eating, constituting a violation of their human rights.
Preventing the serving of meals without pork was “not in keeping with the spirit of the international convention on the rights of children,” the judge explained.
The case had been brought by the Muslim Legal Defence League and was opposed by Gilles Platret, the town’s mayor and a member of the conservative Les Républicains party, who argued that he was defending the French principal of laïcité, or secularism.
According to The Guardian, Platret argued that he was combating discrimination and separation by making all the students eat the same meals together.
The French Jewish community was up in arms earlier this week after authorities in the Hauts-de-Seine district sent a warning to local farmers cautioning them to display “the utmost vigilance” due to the possibility of Jews and Muslims stealing their livestock.
A letter dispatched by the Department of Population Protection (DDPP) claimed that there was an increased risk of animal thefts prior to the Jewish and Muslim holidays of Yom Kippur and Eid al-Adha. “Ill-intentioned individuals could try to catch the animals in order to perform clandestine slaughters,” the DDPP warned. Those behind the the warning have stated that they did not claim to cause offense or stigmatize any particular religion, the Jewish community sees it differentlh.
Calling the letter “outrageous,” Francis Kalifat, President of the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) and a WJC vice president, stated that such warnings constituted a “slanderous amalgamation” that constituted an encouragement to discriminatory behavior on the grounds of religion.
“The amalgam between Jews and Muslims is systematically made by the political and media world” and has “become intolerable and unbearable,” he said, intimating that the inclusion of Jews in the statement was intended to provide cover for anti-Muslim discrimination.
“I was terrified to find out in the press of August 22 that I had suddenly and collectively, with all my co-religionists, a potential chicken thief,” Consistoire President Joel Mergui told La Croix in a similar statement.
“Why should the Jews systematically be invoked, compared, associated, amalgamated with any negative declaration not assumed in the direction of the Muslims,” he asked.
During Eid, Muslims traditionally slaughter sheep while Orthodox Jews take part in a ritual known as kapparot prior to Yom Kippur, in which a chicken in spun around the head as an act of atonement. The chicken is then slaughtered and donated to the poor. While animals have been stolen and subsequently sold for religious purposes, there is no evidence of Jewish or Muslim thefts related to the holidays.