Agriprocessors Kosher Slaughterhouse  www.goveg.com/feat/~

The kosher business claims that kosher slaughter is painless and instantaneous:

The Torah requires that meat and poultry be slaughtered in a prescribed manner known as shechita.  The trachea and esophagus of the animal are severed with a special razor-sharp, perfectly smooth blade, causing instantaneous death with no pain to the animal.  Only a trained kosher slaughterer (shochet), whose piety and expertise have been attested to by rabbinic authorities, is qualified to slaughter an animal for kosher consumption. Orthodox Union, How do I know it's kosher? An OU kosher primer,  www.ou.org/kosher/primer.html

Actually observing kosher slaughter, however, leads to opposite conclusions, as can be confirmed with the help of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) video at www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=agri_short or at www.ukar.org/kosher/agri_short.mpg, or with the help of its much longer unedited version at  www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=agri_long.

What the PETA video reveals is summarized in the explanatory-text screens which intersperse its short version:

Agriprocessors, Inc. Kosher Slaughterhouse Postville, Iowa Summer 2004

Cattle are shocked with electric prods in order to force them into a restraining device that turns them upside-down, exposing their necks.

Their throats are cut and tracheas ripped out while they are still fully conscious.

After being dismembered alive and dumped out of the device, they experience prolonged agony as they remain fully conscious.

The slaughterer kicks blood into the faces of the dying cattle.

In an exchange of views following release of the above video can be found a blaming of the Agriprocessors cruelty on the Orthodox Union (OU) kosher-certification business which monitored and approved what was happening:

Rabbi Edelstein told me that he�d never seen anything like it.  So did Drs. Grandin, Friedlander, and Cheever.  So did everyone else we could find. Sholom Rubashkin, on the other hand, says it is "the Shechita process in its full glory."  So it may be "not common," and it�s certainly "especially inhumane" (Rabbi Weinreb), but it also happened to every single animal at AgriProcessors for years and years � hundreds of thousands of animals had their tracheas and esophagi ripped out while they were still fully conscious, all on the OU�s watch. PETA undercover: Sacred and Federal laws violated at Iowa slaughterhouse  www.goveg.com/feat/agriprocessors/responseToOUStatement.asp

Your Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada, Irwin Cotler, whose erstwhile service as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress made him Canada's senior representative of the kosher business, might be in a position to advise you whether the above PETA video is representative of kosher slaughter generally, or whether alternative kosher procedures are able to produce the painless and instantaneous death that is claimed.

Until video documentation of painless and instantaneous kosher slaughter is made available, Canadians might lean toward the conclusion that the cruelty and suffering shown in the PETA video is representative of all Jewish ritual slaughter, and might be predisposed to ask your government to ban it, following the examples of at least � if Internet allegations can be trusted � Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland � Switzerland being credited with having banned Jewish ritual slaughter a hundred years ago.  Given that practitioners of Jewish ritual slaughter insist that the animal remain fully conscious during the ritual (rendering the animal unconscious by stunning is forbidden), it seems unlikely that a video of painless and instantaneous ritual death will ever make its appearance.

While Irwin Cotler input on this question may produce helpful information, everything he tells you must be regarded with a measure of skepticism.  This is because when Irwin Cotler talks about war criminals living in Canada, it is only to steer discussion away from the fact that they are predominantly not Ukrainian but Jewish.  When Irwin Cotler boasts of his collaboration with Steven Rambam, it is only to obscure the embarrassment that Rambam tape-recorded not fifty confessions of Nazi war criminality, but zero.  When Irwin Cotler addresses the question of trafficking of women, it is only to direct attention away from the fact that this is disproportionately the trafficking not of Jewish women by Ukrainian men, but of Ukrainian women by Jewish men.  When Irwin Cotler addresses the question of organized crime, no hint passes his lips that its strongest and most dangerous manifestation is the Israeli-based Mafiya, and that the money it has stolen is disproportionately Ukrainian money.  When Irwin Cotler pretends to apprehend a threat to national security, he may in reality merely be offended by a refutation of Kremlin-origin anti-Ukrainian and anti-German WW II hate propaganda.  When Irwin Cotler describes the urgency of controlling hate on the Internet, he is really thinking about the urgency of suppressing Ukrainian Archive documentation of Jewish-leadership misconduct.  And similarly when Irwin Cotler talks to you about animal cruelty, it will be with the sole purpose of denying the evident fact that its most concentrated locus is the kosher slaughterhouse.  Although Irwin Cotler is never lacking for fine words ("By increasing penalties and no longer classifying animal cruelty as property crimes, these amendments send a strong message that animal cruelty is about violence, and that is completely unacceptable" www.afac.ab.ca/lawsregs/crueltyanimals.htm), probing beneath their surface reveals that on the issue of animal cruelty, as on several other issues, he obtrudes himself only for the purpose of promoting his alien agenda.

The Jewish people, heretofore as uninformed of what transpires during ritual slaughter as non-Jews, can be expected to be as shocked as everybody else by the PETA video.  They might feel that they have too long allowed themselves to remain ignorant of what deeds were being performed behind closed doors in their name.  They might feel that a change of leadership will assist Judaism in casting off the cruelty of ritual slaughter with the same ease that Judaism cast off the cruelty of, for example, the Deuteronomy 21:18-21 imposition of the death penalty for filial disobedience or the Leviticus 20:13 imposition of the death penalty for homosexuality.  Casting off the cruelty of ritual slaughter should be easier than casting off such cruelties as have just been mentioned for the simple reason that scripture nowhere mandates that animals remain conscious during the interval of butchery and exsanguination which kills them, such stipulation having been read into scripture by a line of reasoning which is as fallacious as it is perverse.  The Jewish leadership implicated in ritual slaughter can be expected to deny all wrongdoing, blaming opposition to animal cruelty on the psychiatric malady of "anti-Semitism" with which it diagnoses every non-Jew to be afflicted to lesser or greater degree.

Also needing to be addressed is the allegation that only a fraction of ritually-slaughtered meat is identified as such at retail, the bulk of it being sold to the non-kosher market without being identified, a practice which denies consumers the choice of buying kosher-free meat and thereby withholding their support of both animal cruelty and religious fanaticism.




Lubomyr Prytulak

cc:

Irving ABELLA, National Honourary President, CJC, Department of History, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON  M3J 1P3
John J CHAMBERLIN, Manager Investigations, CHRC, 344 Slater Street, Ottawa ON  K1A 1E1
Hon. Irwin COTLER, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, 284 Wellington Street, Ottawa ON  K1A 0H8
Mary M GUSELLA, Chief Commissioner, CHRC, 344 Slater Street, Ottawa ON  K1A 1E1
Ed MORGAN, National President, Canadian Jewish Congress, 100 Sparks Street, Ottawa ON  K1P 5B7