The Symbolic Message of the Swiss Minarets Ban

A minaret and a church steeple in
Wangen bei Olten, Switzerland

Real Clear Politics had an article up today on the minaret ban in Switzerland, written by Mathieu von Rohr in Spiegel Online. Despite its clearly disapproving tone, reading between the lines of this piece brings out some interesting points.

Firstly, von Rohr calls this popular ban of minaret-building a "symbolic vote" by the "organizers of the campaign [who] managed to turn the dispute over minarets into a symbolic referendum on the influence of Islam," where "they did not speak much about minarets. Instead, they talked about Sharia law, burqas and the oppression of women in the Islamic world."

Von Rohr quotes Ulrich Schlüer of the Swiss People's Party (SVP):

Minarets are "symbols of power" of a foreign religion, argued politician Ulrich Schlüer, who belongs to the SVP's right wing. The ban, he said, represents a clear statement against their spread.

Well, of course, the ban of minarets is a huge symbolic message for the refusal of other Islamic influences on the country.

But, here is the real surprising bit of information. Von Rohr writes:

The debate was largely divorced from the reality of Switzerland. Although around 22 percent of the population is of foreign origin, the country has so far had relatively few problems with its roughly 400,000 Muslims. Most of them are liberally minded Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Turks and their approximately 160 mosques are practically invisible. Burqas are seldom seen on Swiss streets and there have never been serious calls for the introduction of Sharia law.

Switzerland, rather than wait like many other European countries for Muslims to ingrain themselves into the fabric of the society, made a decisive and symbolic move to cut off Islam as close to its bud as possible.

Actually, it is the Swiss people who made this decision. If it had been left to the elites and politicians, sacrosanct words and phrases like "tolerance" and "freedom of religious expression" would have got tangled up in the rhetoric. Instead, ordinary people, who based their vote on their real-life experiences of frightening changes taking place in their own backyards, were able to take matters into their own hands.

That is why I say that ordinary people are ready for true, unafraid leaders. They - we - are the ones that directly suffer the consequences of these changes: in our streets, our shops, our jobs and our neigborhoods. Wilders knows this, and certainly the leaders of the Swiss SVP party know this.

Ezra Levant Awarded Prize For Which He Isn't Eligible

Ezra Levant has been awarded the blogosphere honor of Best Overall Canadian Infidel Blogger. But he has never written extensively about Muslims and their collective contribution to the Mohammed Cartoons censorship, which led to his three-year ordeal with the Human Rights Commissions. (Here is one brief article where he is much more direct, but I've never come across similar articles before or after this one). Sure, he blamed individual Muslims for this disruption to his life and to freedom of the press. But his whole battle was focused on the Human Rights Commissions' censorship agenda, rather than on the Muslims' strategic moves to change Canadian society to fit their sharia-based Islamic worldview.

Making such unequivocal connections between Muslims and the Mohammed Cartoon censorship case would of course lead to a drastically different direction in his battle against censorship. It would make him question the multicultural system that allows Muslims to openly declare their religion and mode of governance within a non-Muslim country like Canada. It would also require him to at least think about what to do with these specific culprits. As I've written many times on this blog, after (if) the HRCs are shut down, then what? Muslims will still be here. They will follow their Koranic mandate to instil a Muslim-based society. They have found many ways to infiltrate Canadian culture without the aid of quasi-illegitimate agencies like the HRCs. They may have used the HRCs to dissuade Canadians from satirizing Mohammed, but they can use a myriad of other strategies, including suing people like Levant in real Canadian courts, whenever they feel their religion and culture is being diminished.

This is the future Levant can look forward to, and until he consciously and deliberately connects these dots, his fight against the HRCs will have been in vain.

Who, What, Where, When and How

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs (about whom I have posted here) has an article on American Thinker and writes about the sharia take-over of America. She says:

By and large, the conservatives have dropped the ball on Islamic jihad. This has been made painfully clear by the lack of a leader on the right who speaks to and takes up the fight against the sweeping Islamization of America. America has no Geert Wilders.

Geller, along with Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and Daniel Pipes is one of the more realistic of the conservatives writing on Islam. But she has never advocated before for a national leader to combat the Islamic take-over. Could she be reading this blog?

But, more to the point, these writers spend almost every day (sometimes several times a day) writing about jihad, sharia, honor killings and the myriad of horrors that Islam is bringing to the West. Geller says she's been doing this since 2005. What made her wait so long to make this recommendation? I have been writing my side-blog Our Changing Landscape since last September, and I almost immediately realized that writing about, or more precisely describing, the problem wasn't enough.

Perhaps that is the curse of writers. It takes so much energy for them to forumlate the words on paper, that they are unable to pull the meanings out and act on them in concrete ways.

Of course, in my short post a couple of days ago titled "What to do about it," I presented concrete ideas and my own humble plan of action. Geller, a seasoned writer, who should be able to come up with the who, what, where, when and how, was unable to do this.

Just words, again. Just words.