Poultry extremist?
Via
Adam Serwer:
Anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller, one of the driving forces behind the Ground Zero mosque controversy, has set her sights on a new manifestation of the stealth jihad: Your Thanksgiving turkey. Geller is calling for a boycott of Butterball, accusing the company of selling "stealh halal" turkeys prepared in accordance with Muslim dietary laws:
What's that? A war on Thanksgiving is in the offing? And American Muslims have developed stealth meat technology? Everybody panic, right now! Aaaaaaahpassthegravyaaaaah!
All right, so what's the big deal? Well, according to her:
Across this great country, on Thanksgiving tables nationwide, infidel Americans are unwittingly going to be serving halal turkeys to their families this Thursday. Turkeys that are halal certified -- who wants that, especially on a day on which we are giving thanks to G-d for our freedom? I wouldn't knowingly buy a halal turkey -- would you? Halal turkey, slaughtered according to the rules of Islamic law, is just the opposite of what Thanksgiving represents: freedom and inclusiveness, neither of which are allowed for under that same Islamic law.
Well pack the kids and wake the luggage, this does sound like a crisis. I'm sure Geller, like most of the rest of America, has been happily eating kosher hot dogs for years (although that always confused me, because being "kosher" would imply hot dogs had meat in them, and ... well, never mind), and might very well have been eating kosher turkeys for years as well, and kosher and halal are very similar things, since they come from the same origins, but no matter. If you're a bigot, part of being a bigot is being convinced that Muslims are casting magical spells on your meat products.
So what harm comes from producing turkey meat that you can also sell to practicing Muslims? You don't actually prepare the turkey any differently from usual (as it turns out, the most common way to kill a turkey also happens to be the halal-approved way to do it), so it costs the company approximately nothing per bird: Where bigots see a devious plot, I see a convenient marketing gimmick, but according to Geller Thanksgiving is supposed to represent "freedom and inclusiveness," which we can't have unless we're excluding people. This makes perfect sense because bigots are almost universally idiots. So far nobody has been successful selling turkeys certified for idiots, but give it time. It's a huge market.
In this case, the only possible harm being done to the bigots (other than reminding them that American Muslims exist, which is pretty galling right there, I imagine) is if they adhere to the magic spell theory, figuring that kosher or halal products have been specially enhanced to drain the Jesus out of all those that eat them or something.
I suppose we could all sit here and make fun of these paranoid people who are peeved that a company is—gasp—catering to the free market just as John freaking Galt intended, so what the heck, let's do that. While we're doing it, we can also marvel at just how deeply committed to their own bigotries the far-right is. It's not enough for them to relay their paranoid fantasies among themselves; all of America has to also cater to their freaked-out prejudices, or they too become part of the imagined conspiracy.