A French senator said she will complain to police over death threats she received after proposing special labels for halal and kosher meat.
Sylvie Goy-Chavent of the centrist UDI party will lodge a complaint with police over the threats and online “calls for civil war and a call for the Israeli government to attack France,” she told the France Info radio station over the weekend.
She did not say where the threats appeared, but reader comments in an article by the Jewish French news site JSSNews about Goy-Chavent featured a call to “slash her neck and see how long it takes her to bleed.”
The threats followed a non-binding proposal that Goy-Chavent submitted last month in her capacity as senatorial rapporteur on the meat industry. In a report published last month, she recommended that producers of meat originating from animals that were not stunned before slaughter be legally required to apply “special labeling, to be applied in a non-stigmatizing manner.”
Last year, Goy-Chavent signed a full-page ad in Le Parisian urging the French president to outlaw ritual slaughter in France. She also has expressed support for labeling products from areas that came under Israeli control after 1967, according to the online news magazine Mediapart.
Reacting to Goy-Chavent’s proposal, Joel Mergui of the Consistoire — the French Jewish community’s body responsible for religious services — said “it risks reaffirming preconceptions that Jews are cruel.”