On December 17, an EU high court upheld a Belgian law that effectively prohibits the kosher and halal slaughter of animals. The ordinance in question requires that animals be stunned before being killed, and the court defended it on the sophistical grounds that it only forbids “one aspect of the specific ritual act of slaughter.” Ben Cohen comments:

[T]he Luxembourg-based European Union Court of Justice (ECJ), which is the final arbiter of EU law, drew a line between the “civilized” and the “uncivilized” in terms of how farm animals that are slaughtered for human consumption are treated by different religious groups in Europe. On the “civilized” side of the line are those carnivores whose meat is stunned before slaughter, which the ECJ deems to be humane. On the “uncivilized” side are those—overwhelmingly Muslims and Jews—whose religious commandments strictly forbid the stunning of animals before they are slaughtered.

While there are many more Muslims than there are Jews in Europe these days, the roots of this enmity towards ritual slaughter lie in the anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic traditions that have persisted and so often flourished throughout the continent’s history. . . . The method of sh’ḥitah (kosher slaughter) has been twisted and distorted by anti-Semites in various libels involving ritual murder and theologically mandated cruelty allegedly practiced by Jews down the ages. And lest we forget, one of the first legislative actions undertaken by the Nazi regime in Germany was a ban on kosher slaughter, which was depicted in official propaganda as an ugly, alien, and thoroughly un-German practice.

Instructively, the ECJ’s ruling came just weeks after the EU Council, the bloc’s main coordinating body, issued a solemn six-page declaration against anti-Semitism.

No matter how many words the EU expends on the evils of anti-Semitism, no matter how many definitions of anti-Semitism it adopts, any restrictions on the supply or sale of kosher products will render all of those efforts meaningless.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.