The so called controversy about minarets has come to a close in Switzerland. 53,5% of the Swiss went and voted and of those 57,5% voted to ban new minarets from being built. In other words, less than 31% of all Swiss that could vote, are for the ban.
I’m ashamed to be Swiss right now. This bigotry smacks of something that should not be happening in a modern country, especially one with such a direct democracy that we have here.
What exactly is it about? Freely translated: “It’s forbidden to build new minarets.”
Yes that’s all. There is nothing about Islam, nothing about the sharia, about scarfs, or anything else for that matter. Yet that is what the people who are for the ban made it about. The main concern I got from everyone was “I don’t want some guy screaming down at me from a turret”. Now that is ignorance squared. This practice was created to help people remember their prayers. In the time of digital watches, cell phones (you can get prayer SMS notifications), PDA’s and all that, this practice has outlived it’s purpose in most modern areas and is not practiced in Switzerland, at all.
On the same note, I get rung out of bed every Saturday and Sunday morning by not one but two church towers close by, that chime for minutes on end. And you hear those babies in the whole town for certain.
Either ban all building of new church towers and the use of their bells (or sometimes just speakers these days) or allow the building of minarets. Everything else is narrow minded and plain offensive.
So with that, I vote for an initiative to ban building new church towers and all the chiming of the church bells in all of Switzerland, no exceptions. No matter if it’s a minaret or a catholic church, everyone gets treated the same. Or allow both sides to do as they please.
Why did they win? It’s the oldest trick: fear, uncertainty and doubt, short FUD. Just make them afraid enough and they do whatever you want. And best of all, they think it was their own idea and best for them too. The opposition did do nothing effective to simply negate all those fears with facts. Sure you can die in a plane crash and when one happens it’s terrible, but you are ten times more likely to die in a car accident and 5 times more likely to be killed while being on foot anywhere. Air travel is still, to date, the safest method of traveling. And just because there are extremists doesn’t mean that we should deny a group that is peaceful at it’s core and vast majority their wish to build a symbol of their religion, that is not different from what we already have everywhere, except for it does not look exactly the same.
If we would be judged by the worst people that Switzerland had to offer we would have been nuked off the face of the earth a long time ago and nobody would have shed a tear. Doing the same believers of Islam is bigotry at it’s highest level.
