What could possibly go wrong?

On Tuesday, the all-Muslim city council of Hamtramck, Michigan voted to allow city residents to conduct animal sacrifices at home. Dawud Walid, the head of the Michigan branch of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), hastened to assure anyone who may have found this odd or alarming that it was really no big deal. “It’s not something new or novel,” Walid claimed. “This is when Muslims recognize Abraham sacrificing a sheep instead of having to sacrifice his son,” and Fox News added helpfully that this was “an apparent reference to the Quran and Old Testament passage.” See? It’s just like the Old Testament. Relax and accept it, or face charges of “bigotry” and “hate.”

In the same vein, the Detroit Free Press said supporters of the new law in Hamtramck asserted that “some in the Jewish community perform animal sacrifices during holidays, including a group of Orthodox Jews who travel to Hamtramck every year on the eve of Yom Kippur to slaughter chickens at a halal butcher run by Muslims.” The Free Press’ hopelessly biased and dishonest far-Left “journalist” Niraj Warikoo, however, failed to note that take chickens to a butcher is quite a different matter from slaughtering animals at home.

Yet animal slaughter at home is what the Hamtramck city council approved. So what’s coming? We got a hint back in August 2020, when Breitbart reported that “a Muslim resident of the southern French city of Nice recorded himself slaughtering a sheep in his bathtub for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday and posted the video on social media.” The legalization of animal sacrifice at home in Hamtramck opens up all sorts of possibilities as America descends further into the wonder world of multiculturalism.

Some people were apparently aware of some of the possible darker implications. Warikoo somehow summoned up the minimal decency to note that “some residents and animal rights advocates have expressed opposition to the ordinance changes, saying they will lead to animal cruelty and sanitation problems in Hamtramck, one of the most densely populated cities in Michigan. They said they worry about people being traumatized by seeing the throats of goats, lambs and cows being slit in backyards, with blood splattering and entrails falling out.”

Another possible problem comes from a news item in 2013 from, oddly enough, the far-Left Guardian: the animal sacrifices, the paper reported, “will also generate an extraordinary cash windfall for some of Pakistan’s most dangerous militant groups….‘For us it is second only to Ramadan for our income,’ says an official from the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF). FIF is the charitable wing of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), itself the reincarnation of one of south Asia’s most dangerous militant groups, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a banned organisation dedicated to fighting jihad against India.” Surely there won’t be any connection between jihad groups and the sacrifices in Hamtramck, right? Such a connection would be inconceivable!

None of that came up, of course, during the Hamtramck City Council meeting, where Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Mohammed Hassan said: “If somebody wants to do it, they have a right to do their practice,” and added reassuringly that the city would not “blow up with the nasty blood, contamination.” When the city council voted to approve the practice, Walid stated: “We welcome the Hamtramck City Council’s vote, which blocked those who sought to place undue burden on Muslim residents who uphold their sincerely held religious practice in conjunction with Eid al-Adha.”

Well, that’s just wonderful. We certainly don’t want to place an undue burden on anyone who upholds his or her sincerely held religious practice. But the false equivalence with Jewish practice was either based on sloppy reasoning or ignorance, or was deliberately misleading. Nonetheless, the measure has passed now. So what’s next? Will Hamtramck authorities, however, be vigilant regarding animal cruelty and hygienic issues? Will they enforce ordinances concerning those matters, or would that be “Islamophobic”? Will they be paying attention to where the Eid al-Adha money is going, or would that be “Islamophobic” as well? In “diverse” America, such questions will not even be asked of Hamtramck city council members, as they would be “Islamophobic” in themselves. So we’ll just all lock arms and march together into the glorious multicultural future.

Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer