I commented below on Joe’s piece on the Swiss minaret ban; my take was that the ban is a bad idea and fundamentally wrong. It is not about controlling something that Muslims do – some criminal behavior, or even one that’s annoying (a call to prayer). It’s a lashing out at them for who they are.
David Blue and I have disagreed frequently and strongly on this site over whether is issue is Islam or Islamists; I flatly believe that the issue is not Islam – although we do have issues with Islam, just as we do with other cultures that were formerly ‘Third World’ because they are beginning to compete with the West for political and ideological dominance. But that competition is vastly different than the murderous acts of a small minority who want to remake Islam, and we do have immediate, serious and lethal issues with those Islamists.
The problem, as I see it (and as Dave Kopel over at Volokh saw it) is summed up by my comment:
1) Swiss Gov’t comes to accommodations with various Islamist groups for internal security reasons – do what you want here, but no attacks;
2) Islamist groups use Swiss facilities with increasing visibility;
3) Non-Islamist Muslim population grows;
4) Non-Muslim Swiss population (who are, like the French, stunningly racist by nature) is PO’ed at the government actions and at the increasing visibility of both the Islamist and benign Muslim populations and performs a gratuitous act of foot-stomping. Or, as Otter put it, “a really futile and stupid gesture…”
I’ve predicted in the past that Europe wasn’t at risk of becoming Islamic, but instead that there would be a right-wing xenophobic reaction that risked Europe going to something that looks a lot like fascism (violent, racist nationalism). I’m standing by that prediction, and I’ll suggest that’s as bad an outcome as any Eurabia.
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Not too much should be read into this vote. The people “speak” only when spoken to, they can only say “yes” or “no”, and they can be trumped,, the courts being the favorite trump of those whose class sentiments and interests coincide with those of judges. It isn’t clear what people want, whether it relates to Islam or the look of Swiss towns, and it’s not obvious what they will get, on this topic (after the international lawyers are done) or in relation to Islam.
The sentiments and doctrines exist (link) to choke off the right of the people to vote on matters of fundamental importance to the nation, and to make all such choices a matter of “human rights” as defined by courts – which when they have facilitated the spread and then the domination of Islam will ultimately be abolished by it, as Islam has no use for equal rights for non-Muslims.
At Volokh, Dave says:
A Swiss television station recently exposed a secret deal between the Geneva police and the Iranian government: The Iranians would not commit terror in Switzerland, while the Geneva police would turn a blind eye to Iranian terror bases in Geneva. In the United States, such a revelation would set off a frenzy of newspapers advancing the story with further investigation about a gigantic local police scandal..
No it wouldn’t. There are frequent news reports about our police and FBI working with Saudi/Muslim-Brotherhood sponsored organizations like CAIR and ISNA and the media shrugs their shoulders. Then there was the report by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, criticizing the Bush administration for covering up Saudi government involvement in 9/11. The left used that as a tool for beating up the Bush administration, but they didn’t bother investigating the involvement in detail. Now that Obama is in office, the Democrats are still bowing to the Sauds. They don’t kiss and hug, though.
It’s pretty obvious that most governments have made the same kind of deal as the Swiss have, and it’s also clear that this is the cause of most of our problems with Islam and terrorism. If the government made similar deals with drug dealers or mobsters, it would have the same effect – when the government is making deals with criminals, our leaders can’t be trusted. People are right to be enraged about this sort of thing.
The Islamists will always hate us and they will always want to destroy us, but our alliances with their supporters is the source of their current strength. Our alliances with them are also their greatest weakness, since we do (and always have had) the ability to destroy them, simply by refusing to support them and by using intelligence gathered against them.
But without significant pressure from voters on the right and the left, our governments will be content to keep the status quo, making profitable deals with the Islamists while sacrificing a few voters as soft targets. Right wing anti immigrant groups will continue to blame the leftist/mulicultural alliance for Islamist terrorism and the Left will continue to blame Islamist terrorism on right-wing imperialism and racism – and no one will do anything significant to change things.
My problem with this law is that it will cause Muslims to feel more and more outcast from general society.
Seclusion leads to mistrust. Mistrust leads to fear.
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. -Yoda
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
I think A.L.’s characterization is fundamentally wrong. The Swiss did not prohibit the construction of mosques, or impair the right to worship. They banned minarets, which are a tall structure based on a foreign architecture style, and are not in any way necessary for the exercise of faith.
Last I checked, a construction project is something one _does._
This is no different than saying you can’t put a cross above the roof of your church – and if a bunch of Odin worshippers in northern Norway wanted to pass that law that so that church architecture conformed to local standards, so what? It’s still a church, with lots of crosses inside, on the doors, whatever.
Respect your neighbours, avoid any hint of supremacism, be upstanding people who do good and help out around the community, and everyone will coexist nicely. The Mormons have taken a lot of flack over the years, but they’ve won with that formula. Give your neighbours the middle finger with a deliberately foreign architecture style designed to be imposing, on the other hand, and you might find laws passed prohibiting it. Continue to violate the formula – say, defend forced marriages as a community and insist of garb that makes women second class citizens in a free country – and problems with who you _are_ rather than what you _do_ will surface.
This referendum is not that test. The next one, however, will be.
A.L.:
“It is not about controlling something that Muslims do – some criminal behavior, or even one that’s annoying (a call to prayer). It’s a lashing out at them for who they are.”
Facial hair is a personal characteristic. A building’s chosen architecture is not.
Your example would be offensive if applied to any faith, or to no specific faith, because it isn’t any of the government’s business how anyone grows their hair, period. But restrictions on architecture happen all the time.
If an architectural style or feature is deemed foreign and undesirable, I have no issue with prohibiting it. And this feature is not integral to the Muslim faith.
Prohibiting the construction of mosques would be a very different debate. This isn’t that debate.
Joe,
_If an architectural style or feature is deemed foreign and undesirable, I have no issue with prohibiting it_
I haven’t read the text of the law, but from what I understand the ban is not against an architectural style or feature, but against a minaret, which is to say a particular _function_ and a particular symbol. Minarets don’t need to be of any particular style any more than a church bell tower needs to be of any particular style. All they really need to be is tall and somewhat near a mosque. A minaret could be designed in a Swiss style, similar, say to the guard posts on the bridge across Lake Lucerne.
A ban on tall buildings attached or adjacent to houses of worship from which occasionally issue noises audible for blocks around is one thing–this would also ban church bell towers–but a ban _only_ on minarets is absolutely a restriction of a particular religious symbol. It is the same as banning a cross or Star of David but not all religious ornaments on houses of worship.
There is generally an uproar when a Christmas creche or tree is banned from a public square, but can you imagine the uproar if they were banned from church property?
There is an interesting interview in the “Neue Zurcher Zeitung” “yesterday”:http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/schweiz/islam_in_der_schweiz_dossier/aktuelle_berichte/lukas_reimann_1.4096471.html/ with Lukas Reiman, an SVP member of government who was a key proponent of the anti-minaret initiative. He basically says that he’s o.k. with minorities practicing religious freedoms so long as they do not make the dominant culture uncomfortable. [Not the word he uses]
There is an interesting non sequitor: he says he knows a lot of young integrated Muslims who value Switzerland’s fundamental rights to freedom and equality and that they *therefore* also don’t want minarets. He says he tried unsucessfully to get some of them to say it on You Tube. He was unsucessful.
I think Armed liberal is correct that the idea of equal rights and equality before the law is absolutely inconsistent with the intiative because the initiative is a symbol of a dominant culture’s claim on pre-eminence.
It’s interesting that swiss law appears to have no constitutional basis to challenge such a thing and they have to look to the European treaty on human rights that Switzerland is signatory to.
In the U.S. we have the same tensions that get expressed in anti-immigrant measures from time to time. Some people want, and feel they have a right to preserve the dominant white European culture, but this runs counter to the fundamental values we hold dear as expressed in our Constitution. The melting pot metaphor implies that no one culture has a right to be dominant and laws may not be passed to bring this about.
The dominant cultural value in my view should be a commitment to equality under the law, equal opportunity, hard work, integrity, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. It is not about the preservatino of a dominant culture. But we do have the same tensions expressed by the Swiss vote on minarets.
“here”:http://www.planetware.com/picture/zurich-zurich-ch-ch093.htm/ is snapshot of the Zurich skyline. Clearly, the Swiss have nothing against tall religious spires as a form of architecture.
This is not a debate about architectural features.
Note the Stopp Ja (or Stop! Oui) “posters”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/27/ap/world/main5797130.shtml supporting the ban. They show a Swiss flag spiked with black minarets that look like sinister missiles, accompanied by a woman in black burkha.
Obviously this is not a matter of national aesthetic pride, or a defense of a Christianity that barely still exists in Europe. What they have in mind here is the “scent of Algeria” (said Hitchens) that has taken over places like Finsbury Park in Britain. It’s a political scent, not merely a religious or aesthetic one.
The contradictions in the West’s relationship to Islam can’t continue much longer, and if they can’t be rationally expressed they will find other expression – and that might be something everybody comes to regret.
The growing antagonism will cut straight across left and right. The CBS story above noted that somebody vandalized a Geneva mosque by throwing pink paint at it. What kind of people throw pink paint?
Joe, what makes your argument scary is that you’re presuming what is necessary and what is not, in matters of personal expression.
I really don’t have any faith that you would not some day decide that some of my expressions are not, strictly speaking, necessary, and vote to ban them accordingly.
If I am to be for my own freedom– and I am– I must also be for the freedom of others. So I am.
When Saudi Arabia permits the construction of churches and temples, then the Swiss should permit the construction of mosques with minarets.
This from the November 14 editon of the National Post.
“Alaa Al-Aswany describes the following quotation from the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as rhetorical: “The minarets are our lances, the dome our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our armies.”
I find his description ironic. A number of years ago, while the group with which I was travelling was being conducted to the Blue Mosque, our guide said, pointing to the minarets, “These are Turkey’s ballistic missiles.”
It was a strange statement coming from a guide leading Western tourists on their travels in his country and upon whom he depended for his livelihood. The comment took on an even stranger connotation when one considers that Turkey is one of the West’s allies in NATO. It appears that our guide had taken Mr. Erdogan’s rhetoric seriously.”
[ http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=2221749#ixzz0Z1z43lSU ]
This Jerusalem Post article (Apr 29, 2009 20:29 | Updated Apr 30, 2009 18:09) More than a coincidence: Minarets, geography and power discusses the placement of Mosques.
“…The America Colony Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah has a mosque next door to it. The Western Wall of Jerusalem has a mosque perched atop its northern end. The Mount of Olives Jewish graveyard has a mosque which adjoins it. Jeremiah’s Grotto in east Jerusalem, which was for a long time a pilgrimage site, now obscured by the east Jerusalem central bus station, also has a mosque at its entrance. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has a large mosque just across from it on Manger Square, constructed in a town which at the time was 80 percent Christian. A controversy over Muslim attempts to build a mosque next to the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth led to riots in 2002. In each of these cases the mosques were built after the non-Muslim building was constructed.
The building of mosques is not always an expression of power, but historically and today in mixed communities mosques are constructed with a view toward the non-Muslim other. This author is even familiar with a family of Palestinian communists in the West Bank where a mosque was, not coincidentally, constructed next door to their house.
It becomes blatantly obvious in a community like Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, where almost every other mosque is situated next to a Christian building or former holy site. The next time one sees a mosque, he should not take it for granted. Many of them have a history and geographical placement that is not coincidental and which serves as an expression of political Islam and its aspirations.”
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710820237&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull