Robert Spencer: Eid mubarak, Shelbyville! Union employees at Tyson Foods’ poultry processing plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee will enjoy a paid holiday this year on October 1, the date on which the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr falls this year. The RWDSU explained that the new contract “implements a new holiday to accommodate the…Muslim workers at the plant.”
Since this story has gained attention on Fox News and elsewhere, some observers have called for a boycott of Tyson Foods. But what’s the big deal? The popular blogger “Allahpundit” noted at Hot Air.com that “according to Tyson, fully 80 percent of the union’s 1,000 members agreed to the new holiday arrangement. If a workforce with a huge Muslim contingent wants to make a deal with management to have their biggest religious holiday off, who cares? And why are there rumblings about boycotting Tyson when it’s the union that’s driving this?…What am I missing? Is there an anti-Eid exception to freedom of contract?”
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However, the reason why anyone has any problem with this decision is not because Tyson is not free to negotiate an agreement with its union — an agreement that has apparently won the approval of the majority of plant employees. The problem is that the accommodation of Islamic holidays and practices abets, however unwittingly, an avowedly supremacist agenda that is directed toward supplanting American laws and mores and imposing Islamic law here.”
