A municipality in suburban Paris warned farmers of an elevated risk of theft of sheep and fowl ahead of the Muslim and Jewish holidays of Eid al-Adha and Yom Kippur, respectively.
The warning, which provoked angry reactions on the part of communal leaders who saw it as discriminatory, came in a letter sent earlier this month by a branch of the police department of Hauts-de-Seine, an area comprising several suburbs east of the French capital, the Le Parisien Weekly reported last week.
The letter instructed farmers to practice “the highest degree of alertness” ahead of Eid al-Adha, which this year falls on Sept. 1, and Yom Kippur 28 days later because followers of those religions perform “unauthorized sacrifices” of sheep and chickens, respectively. (...)
“Ill-intentioned individuals could try to catch the animals in order to perform clandestine slaughters,” the circular also warned.
Joel Mergui, president of the Consistoire, the organization responsible for providing religious services to Jewish communities, said that after reading about the circular, he was “amazed to discover” that he “suddenly and collectively, with all the coreligionists of the Jewish faith, became a potential chicken thief,” he told the La Croix daily on Friday.
Following protests over the circular, a spokesman for the Public Security department of the region told Le Parisien “it was a matter of vigilance” that “was not intended to cause offense.” (...)
To Francis Kalifat, president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jews, the inclusion of the Jewish holiday in the police circular was one of many cases in which “Jews are equated, compared, amalgamated” with Muslims incorrectly as a tactic for deflecting accusation of Islamophobia.
“This systematic tendency by politicians and in the media, and this time by administrative authorities, has become intolerable and unacceptable,” he was quoted as saying by La Croix.
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