Thursday, April 12, 2018

Locals Resisting Halal Invasion Of Maine By Muslims

 (Articles from The MAINEBIZ, PRESS HERALD, & CENTRAL MAINE in April 2018.)

Halal meat business leverages new market opportunities: Businesses in Gardiner and Hallowell see new opportunities in the immigrant Muslim population for growing the halal meat business. 

Iraqi immigrant Khalid Zamat, who owns two Mainly Groceries stores, one in Augusta and another that opened recently in Hallowell, sells halal meat, which he gets from out of state.

Joel Davis and his business partner Bill Lovely operate a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse at Central Maine Meats in Gardiner. Now Central Maine Meats has received USDA authorization to bring in a halal butcher to ramp up that segment, the Kennebec Journal reported.

Davis said Central Maine Meats is talking to food distribution companies it has contracts with to supply halal meat to their clients. "We are in the infancy with this," Davis told the paper. "We think there are bigger opportunities in state and out of state as well." Zamat said he was on the verge of striking a deal with other halal markets in the state to provide meat.

Two Maine businesses work together to supply halal meat  

(Hallowell) For Joel Davis and Khalid Zamat, a chance encounter several months ago has launched new opportunities for both their businesses. And that business relationship opened the door for Central Maine Meats to reach out to a new group of potential employees.

Davis is managing director of Central Maine Meats in Gardiner, and Zamat owns two Mainly Groceries stores, including one that opened just last week on Water Street in Hallowell. Through those stores, Zamat sells halal meat, which he gets from out of state.

At Central Maine Meats, Davis and his business partner, Bill Lovely, are operating a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse that’s helping to build the local food economy in central Maine. They work with Maine producers to process meat that otherwise would be sent out of state and to sell it to a wide range of customers. Because of its USDA designation, it can sell across state lines.

The meeting with Zamat showed him a new opportunity among Maine’s growing population of Muslims. A Somali community has settled in Lewiston, and several hundred Muslim families from a number of countries have settled in the Portland area. Augusta has an established Iraqi community, and families from Afghanistan and Syria have recently moved to the area.

Davis met Zemat and an American-Iraqi Halal butchery was born.
“One of the things we recognized with the new immigrants is that they have special dietary habits, and we were approached by several places that wanted to provide for halal processed food,” Davis said.

“Halal” is the Arabic word for permissible, and it refers to anything that is permitted under Islamic law. When it comes to meat, it describes the process used to slaughter animals. First, the animals are blessed and then are killed by hand by a Muslim butcher.

(Muslims cut the animal’s throat without out stunning first, but do not cut the spinal cord or stun the animal unconscious, which means the animal dies in agonizing pain which can take a few minutes depending on the size of the animal. Muslims believe that the longer the animal suffers before he dies releases hormones which they believe makes the meat taste better.)

Davis said he asked Zamat to find him a halal butcher, which Zamat did, but that was only the start of the process. “As a USDA facility, we had to be authorized to bring in a non-employee to do the processing,” Davis said. The company applied for a special certification license, and received authorization last month.

Now Central Maine Meats is producing halal meat and it’s being distributed in Maine. It’s a new opportunity for Zamat, who owns and operates Mainly Groceries in Augusta and Hallowell. Zamat had been getting his halal meat from distributors in Boston and Minnesota because he could find none locally. In addition to providing halal meat, Central Maine Meats has hired four Somalis to work in the company’s flash-freeze facility, packaging meat for freezing.
Somali-Muslim butchers are brought in to torture the animals according to the Koran.
CAIR Forcing Sheriff To Investigate So-called Islamophobic Attack

TROY — A national Muslim advocacy group is calling on Maine law enforcement officials to investigate whether Islamophobia played a role in an alleged shooting of a newly built sign that took place Sunday at a Muslim family’s halal butchery business.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, sent a report Wednesday to the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office after being contacted by the owners of Five Pillars Butchery, Hussam Alrawi and Kathryn Piper, asking that during their probe they try to determine whether the person acted with bias when shooting at the sign.

After shots were fired at the sign advertising the butchery that Hussam Alrawi and his wife, Kathryn Piper, operate in Troy, they are worried about the safety of their family, which includes their son, Mohammad-Noor, 3, and daughter, AlThurayya, 15 months.

After shots were fired at the sign advertising the butchery that Hussam Alrawi and his wife, Kathryn Piper, operate in Troy, they are worried about the safety of their family, which includes their son, Mohammad-Noor, 3, and daughter, AlThurayya, 15 months. Contributed photo

(A sign outside the Five Pillars Butchery farm on the Detroit Road in Troy, seen Wednesday, has been repaired. Someone shot and damaged the sign Sunday, but Hussam Alrawi fixed it after police investigated, saying he wants to send a message that he and his family are in Troy to stay.)

“My family is terrified,” Alrawi said in an interview over the phone Wednesday afternoon. “My kids and my wife, we don’t know what’s going on.” Alrawi, who is originally from Baghdad, Iraq, and is now a permanent resident of the United States, said that he built the sign himself, using lumber he had on hand and cutting letters out of insulation material.

He had been waiting for several weeks for the snow to melt to put up the sign and decided Sunday was the right time. He worked on the project for most of the day. About an hour after Alrawi went into his home, where his business is located, and as he was sitting with his wife, Piper, and their two children, they heard a loud, strange noise outside. At the time they thought someone was setting off fireworks.

It wasn’t until Monday morning that Alrawi saw the eight holes in the sign from apparent gunshots. “We’re not certain it was motivated by bias, but the timing is strange,” Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director, said over the phone Wednesday.

“The wife wears an Islamic head scarf. I’m not aware of any other Muslim families in the area. It happened just an hour after he finished putting up the sign. All these things lead to the need to at least investigate the possibility that there was a bias motive.”

Hooper added that he thinks this could be representative of what CAIR sees as an overall rise in Islamophobia nationwide since President Donald Trump began his 2016 campaign for the presidency.

A representative from the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office was not available Wednesday evening to answer questions about the incident. Alrawi said he called the police Monday when he discovered the bullet holes in the sign and that officers spent two hours at his home, taking pictures and talking with the family.

Hooper said he had not yet received a response from the sheriff’s office Wednesday evening. Alrawi said he is not sure whether he was targeted because of his faith, but if that is the case, this incident is the first time he has experienced Islamophobia directed at him and his family since he moved to the United States nearly two years ago.

The couple met and were married about five years ago while Piper was teaching English abroad. Piper, who converted to Islam eight years ago, said her father’s family is from Maine and she spent summers here, swimming and rafting in the Kennebec River. For their first year in Maine, the couple and their children lived with her parents in Searsport before moving to Troy.


Prior to that, the couple visited the U.S. frequently but found it difficult to find halal — permissible — meat of quality in the area. According to BuzzFeed News, in order for meat to be permissible in Islamic tradition, before an animal is slaughtered, God’s name should be pronounced over it as a show of appreciation. Then the animal is killed with a swift cut to its throat to ensure its blood is drained from its body.

(Muslims cut the animal’s throat without out stunning first, but do not cut the spinal cord or stun the animal unconscious which means the animal dies in agonizing pain which can take a few minutes depending on the size of the animal. Muslims believe that the longer the animal suffers before he dies releases hormones which they believe makes the meat taste better.)

About one year ago, Alrawi opened Five Pillars Butchery — a name that refers to the five pillars of Islam: faith, prayer, charity, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca, the basic mandatory acts for those who practice the religion. Alrawi wanted to offer a quality product for the Muslim community and that any Mainer would be happy to put on the dinner table.

But now Alrawi said he is worried about his family’s safety in their community. “It’s not like a hate message that they sent; it was an actual shooting,” he said. “What would the next thing be? Maybe if I was out by the side of the road I would have been shot.”

Piper said in an email that the incident “breaks her heart” because it is not the Maine she knows, and she doesn’t want that image she holds of the state “to be tarnished by someone who has more hate and fear in their heart than they do love for their neighbors.”

“I want to stress that it wasn’t just an attack on our business sign. It was an attack on our home, a home with 2 children 3 years old and under. Almost every day my 3-year-old son says to me ‘nice house mama.’ I want him to always feel that way about our house, our community and our country,” she said.

Alwari said that the family hopes to speak with others in the community so that they can get to know them better and understand their culture. And despite the fear and anxiety that the incident has caused, the family of four will be sticking around.

“After a couple hours (after the police left Sunday), I called the police and asked if I could fix (the sign) so I could send a message to the shooter that we are here and we’re staying.”


Muslims are going nowhere but staying put in Maine till every one is eating Halal meat.