America Gives Butterball the Bird Over Halal Turkey Cover-Up
During Thanksgiving week, Americans were treated to a notable example of the effort by Muslims to assert Islamic law and practices over their American counterparts, when it was revealed that Butterball, the most popular supplier of Thanksgiving turkeys in the nation, was certifying all its turkeys halal—that is, slaughtered according to Islamic ritual requirements. And as in most cases where American businesses kowtow to Islamic supremacist demands, instead of owning up to what it was doing, under pressure Butterball obfuscated, denied, equivocated, and did its best to cover its tracks. This is how the stealth jihad advances.
It all began when my colleague Pamela Geller published an article on American Thinker titled “Happy Halal Thanksgiving,” in which she quoted a Butterball representative stating that not just some, but all whole Butterball turkeys were certified halal. Butterball was not offering consumers a choice. All were halal.
After Geller’s article appeared, however, Butterball began to be inundated with inquiries and complaints. Many were told that it was indeed true: All Butterball whole turkeys were halal. However, as the complaints continued to pour in, Butterball shifted its tactics, and the great halal turkey cover-up began. A Butterball representative told "The Rachel Maddow Show" that the whole controversy was based on false pretenses, and that its turkeys, at least for domestic consumption, were not certified halal after all. The inconvenient section of the Butterball website saying that their turkeys were indeed certified halal was hastily scrubbed not only from the main page but from the Google cache—a tricky procedure and a sure indication of a guilty conscience.
Butterball had every reason to be red-faced. While the mainstream media, with its characteristic leftist indulgence of all things Islamic supremacist, ridiculed Geller and portrayed the controversy as motivated by “anti-Muslim hate” or a hysterical fear of “jihad turkeys,” the substance of the controversy was actually not over the fact that Butterball offered halal turkeys, but that it offered only halal turkeys. The Islamic supremacist agenda that I dubbed the “stealth jihad” in my 2008 book of that name is not a terrorist initiative, but a cultural one. It centers upon the endeavor to bring Islamic law to the United States by nonviolent means, and to assert in every possible way the primacy of Islamic law and practice.
A captured internal document of the Muslim Brotherhood, detailing its strategy and goals for the United States, summarized that initiative as an attempt at “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house … so that Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions.” That may seem worlds apart from halal turkeys, but it is by means of such small advances that this attempt at elimination, destruction and sabotage proceeds. Whether it be the establishment of Muslim prayer rooms in public schools (from which Christian prayer was driven out decades ago), or the granting of special break times, which are unavailable to non-Muslim employees, for Muslim factory workers, or demands that businesses alter their long-standing dress codes for Muslims, even if those codes were established for health and safety reasons, the goal is the same: establishment of the precedent that American customs and mores must always give way to Islamic ones, and that Muslims must always be granted a special status that accords them rights and privileges that non-Muslims do not enjoy.
The goal is to establish Islamic law, Sharia, in America and the West—including its provisions that deny basic rights to non-Muslims, and that establish Muslims as precisely the special, protected class with special rights that these small initiatives grant them in various ways already.
And so in the Butterball turkey case, those who may not wish to eat halal food may take their business elsewhere, but Butterball has no accommodation for them. It is too busy accommodating Muslims. If the company had simply establish a halal line, and had other options available, there would have been no problem, but in all stealth jihad initiatives, the goal is not so much to win reasonable accommodation for Muslims, but to bring non-Muslim practices into conformity with Islamic law.
Butterball’s behavior when exposed shows that it knows it was not acting ethically. Americans were right to put pressure on the company, and should put pressure on all businesses that act in the same way. For ultimately, a great deal more is at stake than the Thanksgiving turkey.
Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, Stealth Jihad and The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran (all from Regnery-a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).
by Robert Spencer (more by this author)
Posted 11/29/2011 ET Advertise | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions
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