I was never a great Brigitte Bardot fan and I’m not exactly known for being on the cutting edge of “animal rights” issues. But, if you happen to believe that Muslim slaughtering practices (for sheep, that is, not infidels) are unacceptably cruel, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be allowed to say so. But apparently not in France:

A Paris prosecutor yesterday called for French film legend Brigitte Bardot to receive a two-month suspended prison sentence and a £12,000 fine for inciting racial hatred in a letter. In December 2006, Miss Bardot, 73, now an animal rights activist, wrote to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, then the interior minister, criticising the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep without first stunning them. In the letter published by the magazine Info-Journal and handed out to members of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, she wrote: “We’re fed up with being led by the nose by this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts”. Several French anti-racism groups filed for charges of “inciting discrimination and racial hatred” against Muslims.

Aside from sheep-slaughtering, Mlle Bardot is also opposed to Canadian seal-culling. But when she denounces seal-clubbing, nobody prosecutes her for racism. Islam is everything but a race. It’s a religion, an ideology, a politico-legal system, a set of cultural practices – and there’s something disquieting about the zeal with which the French state is pursuing her under the catch-all of “racism”. In the last decade, she’s been convicted and fined on four occasions for “inciting racial hatred”. The first was for some remarks about the number of mosques in France, and the most recent was for some observations about “the Islamization of France”. She is not a lady of moderate disposition, but it would hardly seem to be in the public interest to give the impression that these subjects are now beyond discussion.

Via the Hyacinth Girl, who yokes Bardot’s name to mine to a degree that would boggle Roger Vadim. Who would have thought the quintessential Euro-sex kitten would end her days as the Mark Steyn of France? Although I guess that makes me the Brigitte Bardot of Canada.