Sunday, December 27, 2009
Tintin in Helvetii, by Joseph Facal
When the media-political tribe is unanimous, I instinctively distrust. After verification, the reality is always more complicated.
The pollsters did not see it coming: In a referendum, 57.5% of Swiss have voted for the ban on building new minarets.
A minaret is the tower top which called on Muslims to prayer five times a day. There is no requirement that a mosque has one.
Outside Switzerland, the reactions were immediately fuse: a vote "hateful," "shameful", a "return of fascism." Nothing less.
Switzerland seems indeed very ill. There are only four minarets on mosques 200. A municipal regulation would probably have sufficed. The placards equating the minarets of the missiles were profoundly dishonest. The Muslims have reason to feel unfairly targeted? Yes.
The minarets were obviously a pretext. The referendum has expressed discomfort with a majority that sees a religious community grew exponentially strongly assert the public square. Similarly, in Quebec, the reasonable accommodation crisis was not really about women in pantyhose doing gymnastics.
For the Swiss political scientist Michael Hermann, a high score also means that voting xenophobic right wing added a vote secular feminist left. The Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan has also given a tremendous impetus to the camp's ban Assuming that the minaret was an affirmation of identity and political and not a religious requirement.
Switzerland has only 7.8 million inhabitants, like Quebec. In 1970, there were 16 000 Muslims in Switzerland. In 1980 the number had increased to 57 000. Today is 400 000. The question arises: can we integrate such volume so quickly, without a small company feel hustled?
No, precisely because it incorporates more. Therefore, the cycle is unemployment, poverty, exclusion, discrimination, anger, crime. The Washington Post on April 29, 2008 reported that in France, for example, between 60 and 70% of the prison population is Muslim, composed mostly of children of immigrants.
Turkey is a Muslim country that has most harshly criticized Switzerland. Did you know that until 2003 it was forbidden to build places of worship for non-Muslims? As Turkey now wants to join the European Union, it has repealed the ban and it has become more subtle.
In Ankara, the municipal regulation now requires that places of worship have a minimum area of 2500 square meters. In a country 99% Muslim, other religions are necessarily poor. They have therefore not afford to build so large or if they have, the city told them that there is not enough space for such big projects.
The Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, has already written that the minarets were the "bayonets" of Islam. It's reassuring.
In all Western societies, the poor integration of immigrants and the fatal multiculturalist ideology fueling a real identity problem. To deny or reduce it to an indictment against the majority, ensuring that when this unease is expressed, it will come out all wrong.
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Labels: Arab World, Islam, Joseph Facal, Religion and fanaticism, Switzerland, Turkey
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 10:49 PM 
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