Publication:The Columbus Dispatch; Date:Dec 9, 2009; Section:Opinion; Page Number:A11
Swiss have their reason for minaret ban
Georgie Anne Geyer writes for Universal Press Syndicate.
Oh, the poor Swiss! Usually they’re in deep water — though many of them live upward of 10,000 feet in the air — because they won’t reveal some poor Kuwaiti’s or Saudi’s wealth stashed away in a Swiss bank account. Other times, they’re the object of jealousy for their prosperity and their self-righteous, Calvinist ways.
But this time, it’s so very different. This time, large parts of the world, including voices from the United Nations, are criticizing the 7.6 million Swiss, 57.5 percent of whose voters just had the unfashionable temerity to vote into law a constitutional ban on the construction of Muslim minarets on sacred Swiss territory.
Voters responded with remarkable agreement to the nationalist Swiss People’s Party labeling of the minarets as the forerunners of a feared Islamic takeover of the state.
It’s all quite terrible, isn’t it? But let’s think for a moment. For in fact, the Swiss are simply behaving in their usual way, being cautious about liberally embracing trends that are gnawing at all of Europe — and that have already transformed the continent, not for the better.
In fact, the Swiss are taking the fall for trying to get out ahead of a feared “Islamization” of Europe that has the French banning Muslim headscarves, the Dutch forcing would-be Muslim immigrants to watch movies showing Dutch men kissing Dutch men and, on the geopolitical scale, Turkey having all but lost out on its long-held hope of joining the European Union.
In reality, the Swiss are only trying to stop Muslim religious expansion before it becomes radicalized and transforms their peaceable little state into something nobody wants — often called “Eurabia.”
In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and The West, an excellent book on the larger European subject, Christopher Caldwell pauses to recall how it all began. After World War II, the European states, forced to adopt certain liberal assumptions about human nature such as the idea that all cultures were basically equal, opened their doors.
Immigrants would be few in number and would assimilate. “That they would retain the habits and cultures of southern villages, clans, marketplaces and mosques was a thought too bizarre to entertain,” he writes.
And today? “Europe is now, for the first time in modern history, a continent of migrants. Of the 375 million people in Western Europe, 40 million are living outside their countries of birth. In almost all Western European countries, the population of immigrants and their children approaches or surpasses 20 percent.”
Most important, instead of assimilating and becoming “good” Parisians or Amsterdammers, too many of the Muslim immigrants often only were grabbing onto the European welfare state. Worse, they began to insist that Islam be recognized as equal to Christianity, or even as superior. The next step was terrorism from within “European Islam,” as has happened in Britain and Holland and elsewhere.
Caldwell points out, for instance, that two-thirds of French imams are on welfare; that mosque-building began to become “particularly alarming to Europeans” in the last decade because it was a “declaration that people intended . . . to live henceforth as they had in the old country from time immemorial”; that the riots in the Paris suburbs were Muslim youth-inspired; and that the bloody street murder of a prominent Muslim critic in The Netherlands means that “for the first time in centuries, Europeans are living in a world they did not, for the most part, shape.”
What Europeans did not understand, he goes on, was that immigration “means importing not just factors of production but factors of social change.”
Meanwhile, for those who doubt that all of this is really very serious, consider the story of Marseille. “Ah, oui,” you say. “Marseille, that great French city on the Mediterranean, with its Notre Dame de la Garde, the elegant Roman Catholic basilica that has watched over the French fishermen with such tenderness and concern for 150 years. I remember it well.”
You do? Well, then you will know that the church is about to be outranked in size and influence by a $30 million Grand Mosque of Marseille, to spiritually guide the 200,000 Muslims of the metropolitan region. You will surely know that, only this November, young men of North African origin twice bombarded the streets, some destroying cars and boats, letting out their feelings about Algeria’s loss and later its victory in the World Cup soccer games. They were totally uninterested in the French team.
But to get back to the oftenlabeled “self-righteous” Swiss, they can hardly be blamed, because they have acted to protect their culture and their principles. There is everything wrong with prejudice and hatred. But there is also something very wrong with not being permitted to defend what you have against those who would not join it but change it.
GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
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