Thanks to the British brilliant organisation Animal Aid (AA) which has secretly made the above film, the assertion that animals are pre-stunned in many halal abattoirs is exposed as a deception in graphically traumatising images.

The scene is Bowood Yorkshire Lamb halal slaughterhouse in Thirsk, in the north of England, the tenth abattoir in which Animal Aid’s hidden cameras have filmed undercover since the charity’s ongoing investigation into UK slaughter practices started in January 2009.

What is significant is that Bowood is also the first halal slaughterhouse filmed by AA, which – as always – didn’t know what it would find. It didn’t know, for example, that it was halal. And so, the first halal abattoir investigated happens by sheer chance to be one of the few – so it is claimed – that don’t stun animals before the killing.

The UK’s law, like many other Western countries’, requires slaughterhouses to stun animals before they are killed to minimise suffering, but it allows exemptions for Muslim and Jewish producers due to their religious prescriptions. For meat to be considered permissible, namely kosher under Jewish law or halal under Islamic law, the animal must be fully conscious when slaughtered.

Barbaric ritual slaughter is regrettably something else on the long list of what Judaism and Islam have in common.

So Muslims and Jews once again are united in cruelty, to defend their ancient (“primitive” would be better) practices against the Western civilising influence, which owes a lot to Christianity.

Modern ritual slaughter in Judaism and Islam is closely related to animal sacrifice.

Many religions practice animal sacrifice even today, including Hinduism. Christianity exceptionally doesn’t.

This is because, while in ancient times, as well as in many contemporary non-Western cultures, people believed that the death of a sacrificial (in some cases human) animal was necessary in order to approach God or the gods, Christians think differently. They believe that, since Jesus had shed his own blood and offered a perfect sacrifice, there is no more need of animal sacrifice, because the door is now open to access God. After Jesus’ sacrifice, Christians rejected animal sacrifices, and this has created in the Christian West a culture averse to them.

If we don’t associate the ending of animal sacrifices with Christianity, in the other parts of the globe they do.

On the subject of offerings of animals, Judaism and Christianity are so entirely different that we cannot even talk of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. There are two distinct traditions, going in opposite directions. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then it is highly significant that on animal sacrifices the Old Testament and the New have led to antithetical practices.

Today Jews and Muslims want to force advanced White countries to accept practices that our animal welfare laws, reflecting a more humane culture, forbid. And so far, with some exceptions (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark), they have generally succeeded.

A case of such capitulation has been the Netherlands in 2012, when the country’s Lower House of Parliament passed with 116 votes to 30 a bill banning all ritual slaughter, introduced by the Animal Rights Party. The bill had the support of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party.

Guess what happened next. Haaretz reported at the time:

Israel’s leading rabbi has warned Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders that his party’s support for a ban of ritual slaughter of animals in the Netherlands is “anti-Semitic” and could drive away the country’s Jewish community.

The Upper House of Parliament, the Senate, then rejected the bill. “Anti-Semitic” is the magic word to end all arguments.

What is particularly harrowing is that Western non-Muslims and non-Jews unknowingly eat meat and consume other products of such cruel methods of slaughter.

Going back to the video recently released by Animal Aid (which comes with the warning that it contains images some viewers may find distressing), among other things it shows slaughtermen hacking away and sawing at the throats of still-conscious sheep, belying the claims often made by ritual slaughter supporters, both Jewish and Muslim, that the animal doesn’t suffer because death is inflicted through “a single cut made with a surgically sharp knife”.

AA says:

With fly-on-the-wall cameras, it [Animal Aid] captured the horrifying yet routine abuse and taunting of thousands of sheep, and the shambolic set-up that guarantees animals will suffer… Additionally, many of the sheep in our film are not dispatched with a single clean cut but have their throats hacked at repeatedly with a knife that is either blunt or being used ineptly… In one instance it took five attempts to sever blood vessels. During the course of our investigation, we discovered a remarkable weakness in the application of the law that requires all animals to be stunned prior to being killed unless the meat is intended for Muslim or Jewish consumers. The regulatory body, the Food Standards Agency, acknowledged to Animal Aid that any slaughterhouse can practise non-stun slaughter without demonstrating that the meat is destined for religious communities. [Emphasis added]

Translation: if you eat meat in Britain or in any other country with a Muslim and/or Jewish community, you will very likely eat meat from animals slaughtered in the same way as in the video above, too horrific even to watch.

The British halal market may be worth as much as £2 billion a year, with more than 100 million animals killed in this way annually. It is calculated that the halal share of the meat market in the UK is about 5 times the percentage of Muslims in the country’s population, which means that kafirs are bound to buy halal or have it served on their plate.

Jewish and Muslim religious authorities assert that death by the shechita or halal methods, without pre-stunning, is instantaneous and painless. A body of evidence demonstrates that this is not a credible position, and our new footage removes any remaining doubt. Rather than animals being treated with compassion and being uninjured prior to the fatal cut, we see them routinely treated with gratuitous violence and contempt.

Halal is probably one of the most, if not the most, sensitive issue in many European countries, including Britain, which is capable of mobilising native Whites against Islamic invasion.

Due to the antagonistic pressure from a large and growing number of people, Muslim associations have started claiming that many halal abattoirs pre-stun animals. Whether this is true or not is difficult to say. A sure problem is that, even when stunning is applied, the stunning is light and ineffective, so as not to compromise the Islamic requirements of keeping the animal alive: for example, the voltage used in electric stunning may be too low.

In the UK, there has been a sharp 60% rise last year in the number of sheep and goats killed without stunning, due to stronger campaigning by Muslims who believe that stunning killed animals.

A revealing incident showed how little importance Muslim lobbies give to animal welfare when compared to protection of Islamic practices. Last summer, research was published indicating that many chickens are still conscious and suffer pain when they are slaughtered, but that higher levels of shock would guarantee they were insensible.

As a result, European Union laws were introduced forcing many abattoirs to use a more powerful electric shock.

In the UK, the implementation of such new rules was put on hold due to Muslim leaders’ complaints that the new levels could kill birds before they could be slaughtered, meaning they would no longer be halal.

British Veterinary Association president Robin Hargreaves said: “Failure to implement the new regulations risks a percentage of chickens being ineffectively stunned, thus compromising animal welfare.”

The video footage released by Animal Aid in early February and given wide publicity in the British press has increased pressure and intensified demands for a complete ban on ritual slaughter.

A petition championed by the British Veterinary Association demanding that slaughter without pre-stunning be outlawed has crossed the threshold of 100,000 signatures, which means that it had to be debated by the House of Commons. A debate took place on the 23 February, eagerly followed in the Israeli and Jewish media with the predictable accusations of anti-Semitism.

The British Veterinary Association (BVA), along with the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, are UK scientific bodies which have always maintained that ritual slaughter causes great unnecessary suffering to animals and must be banned.

The BVA has now warned ministers that they “simply cannot ignore the strength of public feeling” over this issue.

A concurrent petition organised by Animal Aid to make CCTV mandatory for all slaughterhouses has also passed the 100,000 mark.

No slaughter is cruelty free, and earlier films by AA at slaughterhouses that did use stunning had nevertheless shown animals being punched in the head, burnt with cigarettes, beaten with sticks, given electric shocks with stunning tongs, thrown and kicked.

Kate Fowler, AA’s head of campaigns, said:

All four conveyor operators we filmed over three days [at Bowood] abused animals to varying degrees, while the slaughterers looked on unmoved. This is the 10th slaughterhouse in which we have filmed undercover, and it is the ninth to be caught breaking animal welfare laws. None of the abuses we uncovered would have come to light without our cameras being in place, even though there is a Government-appointed vet at each slaughterhouse.

There is now in the UK a wide mobilisation against Muslim and Jewish methods of slaughter, with the British Veterinary Association (part of the Establishment, certainly not a fringe group) heading it.

Even the moderate Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – the world’s oldest animal welfare organisation, founded in the 19th century with the blessing of Queen Victoria – calls for an end to Muslim and Jewish slaughter methods.

The British Government repeatedly said it has no intention of banning religious slaughter as it wants to respect the rights of Jewish and Muslim communities to eat meat in accordance with their beliefs, a line that Prime Minister David Cameron maintained during a recent visit to Israel.

It’s not surprising that the Government doesn’t want to change the law, given the strength of the Jewish lobby in Britain. Indeed, a documentary made by the TV network Channel 4 a few years ago provided evidence of the extent of power over politicians and media held by this interest group, called in the film “the most effective lobby” in the country. You can see it here:

Enza Ferreri is an Italian-born, London-based Philosophy graduate, writer and journalist. She has been a London correspondent for several Italian magazines and newspapers, including Panorama, L’Espresso, La Repubblica.

She blogs at www.enzaferreri.blogspot.co.uk.