Paris police distributed its recommendations in Eastern Paris to animal farmers living in the area to keep an eye out for the increased risk of stolen goats and chickens before Yom Kippur and the Muslim holiday ‘Eid Al-Adha’. The warning states that people should watch out for these thefts because “religious people from both Jews and Muslims do illegal sacrifices of sheep and chickens.”
The report added an explanation to animal growers that “on the eve of Yom Kippur, Jews torture the chickens as they spin them around and they abuse them and after that they slaughter them”.
The Jewish communities that live in the area found these letters and were shocked by the twisted lies they read in the official police memos. Joel Margi, the president of the Consistoire, the official umbrella organization of Jewish congregations and religious services in France said: “I was astounded to learn from reading these notices that I and my fellow Jewish co-religionists were turned into potential chicken thieves.”
Francis Kalifat the president of the CRIF the European Jewish Congress for the French Jewish Community called the letter “outrageous, full of insulting words, and a slanderous grouping together of Jews and Muslims. This grouping together of Jews and Muslims is a warped tactic to remove the accusation of Islamophobia. This tendency of the political and media world and this time by the authorities too, has become intolerable and is unacceptable”.