KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 6 — Just a day after warning that McDonald’s halal-only cake policy could lead to a boycott in Sarawak, the Sarawak chief minister’s aide has claimed that the fast food chain’s outlets there have been told to remove such notices.
Michael Tiang, a political secretary of Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem, said that the McDonald’s outlets in Miri were, to his knowledge, the only ones in the state to have put up the notices informing customers that only halal-certified cakes were allowed into its premises.
“However, today (yesterday) they had received an instruction from their headquarters to take down the notice to complement the tolerant spirit in Sarawak,” he was quoted saying by local daily The Borneo Post in a report published today.
Tiang said that McDonald’s’ quick action was a wise and positive response to Sarawakians’ protests against its policy barring cakes that have not been certified as halal from its premises.
“It is always Sarawak Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Adenan Satem’s stand that racial or religious extremism has no place in Sarawak as Sarawak practises a culture of tolerance, moderation and mutual understanding towards all races and religions,” he also said.
According to The Borneo Post, a McDonald’s outlet at Permaijaya, Miri told the paper that it had never displayed such a notice and two other outlets similarly said so.
The paper said that a McDonald’s outlet in Sibu, Sarawak had taken down the notice after displaying it briefly.
Yesterday, The Borneo Post reported that Tiang had urged McDonald’s Malaysia not to extend its halal birthday cake policy to its outlets in Sarawak, as such a policy is “totally incompatible with Sarawak’s multicultural and religious society”.
“If McDonald’s Malaysia were to implement the same policy at its fast food outlets in Sarawak, I believe that non-Muslim consumers might resort to boycotting the fast food chain,” he was quoted saying in a statement.
On Monday, The Borneo Post reported consumer group Consumer Voice of Sarawak (Covas) president Michael Tiong as proposing that customers make McDonald’s “the last place to go for birthday celebrations” if it extended its halal cake policy to Sarawak.
Tiong had pointed out that halal certification was merely for convenient identification of whether a product is halal, but is not a determination of whether it is halal, citing scenarios such as home-made cakes by Muslims.
“We believe that the current move by McDonald is pure nonsense. If the cakes were produced by Muslims but if they were not certified halal, the cake is, therefore, immediately or automatically non-halal?” he had then questioned.
Last week, McDonald’s Malaysia confirmed that it has enforced a policy barring customers from bringing cakes without halal certification into its premises, explaining that this was to fulfill the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia’s (Jakim) requirements for halal certification.
