French "racisme"?

As if we needed more proof that no good deed ever goes unpunished, France tries to outdo everyone else in political correctness. Such absurdity could only happen when government wants to monopolize charity.

Pork Soup Becomes Political in France

PARIS - Pig's tail, pig's feet and other pig parts, all tossed into a pot with turnips, carrots and onions. Perfumed with smoked bacon and served steaming hot. Delicious!

But there's trouble brewing in this broth.

Small groups linked to the extreme right are ladling pork soup to France's homeless. Critics and some officials denounce the charity as discriminatory: because it contains pork, the soup is off-limits for Muslims.

Critics view the stew dubbed "identity soup" by its cooks as a cynical far-right ploy to penetrate the most vulnerable level of society while masking their intentions as humanitarian.

The associations offering the soup are satellites of Bloc Identitaire, a small, extreme-right movement that defends the European identity and, as its leader Fabrice Robert said, "the rights of the little whites." ...

The associations deny any ties to the far-right National Front party, which opposes Muslim immigration and built its reputation around the theme of "French first." ...

Still, the National Front salutes the pork soup project.

"One has the right to be charitable toward whom one wants," said Bruno Gollnisch, the party's No. 2. Moves to forbid soup kitchens offering pork reveal authorities' "alienation" from the French people, he said....

Pork soup is an age-old staple of the rural heartland from which all the French, at least in the national imagination, are said to spring.

The groups dishing up the soup say their victuals are no more than traditional French cuisine and deny they are serving up a message of racial hatred a crime in France or that they would refuse soup to a hungry Muslim or Jew.

In Strasbourg, pork soup was banned this month after officials deemed it could disrupt public order.

"Schemes with racial subtexts must be denounced," said a statement by Strasbourg Mayor Fabienne Keller.

More than a dozen police surrounded volunteers at a recent soup distribution at Paris' Montparnasse train station. Once police determined there was pork in the broth, they ordered the 10-gallon container sealed because the group had no permit.

There has been no outright ban on pork soup giveaways in Paris, but police have been using the permit issue as a way to shut down the kitchens and avert racial tensions....

A leading anti-racism group has urged Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to ban pork soup giveaways throughout France.

For Bernadette Hatier, vice president of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, the real motive of the soup servers is to drum up far-right votes ahead of 2007 presidential elections....

I wonder if Ms. Hatier ever deigned to dirty her hands by feeding the homeless, or if she calls upon the state to take from people and give to others.

What has a society come to when a not insignificant number of its people, and the government too, question feeding traditional food to the hungry? What does it say about the society's stability when it's afraid that charities' food selection might be enough to offend and incite a minority population to violence?

Notice that the Paris police used the "You don't have a permit" excuse only after they found the volunteers were serving pork soup. Apparently they would not have stopped them from serving, for example, chicken soup. So much for the rule of law.