Symbolen-propaganda

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

[Ja het was te verwachten dat anti-multiculturalist Vreekamp dit
onderwerp zou aansnijden. Lees het onderstaande artikel voordat je
rare vergelijkingen gaat trekken of Ayaan naar de mond praat.]

Switzerland bans minarets
By Marianne Arens
3 December 2009

In accordance with the result of a referendum held on November 29,
Switzerland has banned the building of minarets, or prayer towers. The
decision is a new high point in a European-wide campaign aimed at
stirring up prejudices against Muslims and dividing the working class.
Earlier steps in such a campaign were the publishing of caricatures of
Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten and the ban on head
scarves in schools for Muslim girls and women in France. The result of
the Swiss referendum has been welcomed by reactionary forces across
Europe.

On Sunday, 53.4 percent of the Swiss electorate voted, with 57.5
percent voting in favor of the ban, thereby achieving the necessary
majority of Swiss cantons. The result of the referendum now means that
Switzerland is the first country in the world to lay down a ban on
minarets in its constitution.

The initiative for the referendum was launched by the so-called
“Egerkinger Committee,” which is backed by the right-wing populist SVP
(Swiss People's Party) and the equally right-wing EDU (Swiss
Democratic Union). Ulrich Schlüer, the founder of the anti-minaret
initiative, is a SVP deputy and former coworker of James
Schwarzenbach, the initiator of the first Swiss campaign against the
“inundation of the land by foreigners” in the 1970s, which sought to
repatriate 300,000 immigrant workers and their families.

In its campaign for the referendum, the Egerkinger Committee used
every trick in the book in order to spread fear and stir up
prejudices. A poster pasted across the country depicts a black masked
woman alongside several threatening minarets (black, without the usual
half-moon), which shoot up like rockets against the background of the
Swiss flag. A computer game has even developed permitting users to
shoot down minarets that spring up on the computer screen.

The right-wing parties conducted an extensive campaign over a number
of months, meeting little in the way of opposition from the country's
established political parties. The campaign found a resonance in rural
regions and central Switzerland, where comparatively few Muslims live.
In Appenzell Innerroden (the canton that did not grant women the right
to vote until 1990) the initiative against minarets was supported by
over 70 percent of inhabitants. On the other hand, a majority rejected
the initiative in the cantons of Waadt, Neuenburg, Geneva and the city
of Basel.

Switzerland has around 8 million inhabitants, of whom 5 million are
entitled to vote. The country has approximately 330,000 Muslims and
150 mosques—just four (!) of which have minarets.

In its campaign, the SVP maintained that the construction of
additional mosques represented a claim to political power by Muslims
and encouraged the spread of the Sharia. The SVP claimed that the
referendum was not aimed at limiting the constitutional right
guaranteeing freedom of religion. In reality, the arguments of the SVP
are completely disingenuous.

While the referendum does represent a blow against the right to
religion, more significant is the openly xenophobic nature of the
SVP-led campaign. On its homepage the initiative makes this clear and
states: “Who ever builds minarets is intent on staying … For the
population mosques and minarets are the highly visible proof that
immigrants want to stay.” This sentence is thoroughly revealing and
makes clear that the campaign against minarets is linked to driving
immigrants—and not just Muslims—out of the country.

The web site then continues with a hateful tirade against Islamism,
claiming: “Classical Islamism [is] more than a religion in the modern
Western sense… it is [rather] a religiously justified social order
based on dominance.” It goes on to state that Islamism inevitably
contradicts “the liberal democratic achievements of Switzerland.”

These are precisely the arguments so often used by the political elite
to equate Islamism with violence, intolerance and terror. The same
arguments have been used for years to justify the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan—both countries with a predominantly Muslim
population—although the real issues at stake center on oil and the
strategic significance of the two countries. An additional central
feature of the current campaign against Muslims is to facilitate the
building up of the state apparatus for domestic purposes under the
pretext of combating terror, while at the same time stepping up the
deportation of immigrant workers and their families.
No principled opposition

The established Swiss political parties did little to oppose the
right-wing campaign of the SVP. The Liberal Democrats, Christian
Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens, together with the Swiss
government, all expressed their opposition to the initiative and
called for a “no” vote. But their arguments were entirely unprincipled.

Instead they concentrated on the importance of “Switzerland's image
abroad” or the “consequences for the economy” of such ban. None of
these politicians exposed the initiative for what it was, i.e., a
deliberate provocation aimed at dividing the working population.

The social-democratic foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, for
example, argued that the ban on minarets would undermine Switzerland's
influence with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It
is “unwise,” Calmy-Rey told a Swiss paper, to “confront our partners
with a minaret prohibition.” Switzerland's exports could also suffer,
she maintained, because “Muslim countries are also among our customers.”

It should be noted that the social-democratic Swiss Women's Federation
have already publicly supported the campaign to ban the burqa. The
Federal Council has until now rejected such a prohibition, but at the
start of November Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer Schlumpf (a
former SVP member) indicated her approval for such a ban.

Widmer Schlumpf took over as justice minister two years ago with the
support of deputies from the Greens and Social Democrats, who even
organized a demonstration for her candidacy for the Federal Council in
front of the federal parliament.

At that time Christoph Blocher, the billionaire industrialist and
leader of the SVP, had been voted out of the country's seven-strong
Federal Council. His place was taken by Widmer Schlumpf. Blocher then
expelled Widmer Schlumpf from the SVP and announced he was going into
opposition.

Already in 2007, the World Socialist Web Site had warned: “Growing
social tensions can find no political outlet in a system in which all
the major parties, including the social-democrats, cooperate in
unison. Blocher has taken advantage of that fact.”

Reactions abroad

Reactionary forces across Europe and internationally have welcomed the
result of the Swiss referendum. One of the first to express his
support for the result was the Dutch right-wing extremist Geert
Wilders, chairman of the Freedom Party (PVV). He was jubilant,
stating: “For the first time people in Europe have opposed
Islamisation.” In 2006, Wilders was the first individual to published
on his homepage the anti-Muslim caricatures printed in the Danish
newspaper Jyllands Posten.

The Italian government minister, Roberto Calderoli, from the
xenophobic Northern League, declared: “There has been a clear signal
from Switzerland: Yes to the church tower, no to the minaret.” In
France, Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and vice
chairman of the extreme right-wing National Front, stated: “The French
should also be allowed to vote on the building of local mosques.” In
Austria the two main extreme-right parties, the Freedom Party of
Austria and the Alliance for the Future of Austria, have also called
for a ban on minarets.

German politicians also welcomed the result of the referendum. Thilo
Sarrazin (SPD), former Berlin finance senator and currently a member
of the German Central Bank committee, expressed his support for the
decision. Sarrazin told the finance paper Handelsblatt: “The Swiss
referendum shows that the core of society thinks differently than the
political class and the majority of the media want us to believe.”

German Christian Democrat Wolfgang Bosbach demanded that popular fears
of “Islamisation” had to be taken seriously. Der Spiegel cited Bosbach
as saying that the architecture of mosques manifests the “Islamic
drive for mastery.”

Support for the Swiss referendum decision also came from the other
side of the Atlantic. The Wall Street Journal devoted an editorial
comment to a vicious tirade against Muslims and applauded the ban as
an example of Swiss voters standing up to their political elites. The
WSJ goes onto complain that the referendum “was a decidedly
mild-mannered sort of protest” and implies that even more stringent
measures are necessary to combat Swiss “fears” of “radical imams and
terrorist acts.”

Muslims living in Switzerland are seeking to challenge the ban on
minarets and a number of legal experts have declared that the Swiss
constitutional ban violates international law. The Bern-based
professor for international law, Walter Kälin, has declared that
Switzerland will be forced to revise the ban, which in his opinion
contravenes international law.

In defending the ban, SVP leader Christoph Blocher told the “Daily
Talk” television program that should other European powers try to
force Switzerland to revise its decision then it would be necessary to
take a leaf out of the book of the Italian head of government Silvio
Berlusconi. Italy defied the European Union prohibition of crucifixes
in classrooms with Berlusconi declaring: “We will do its anyway.”

It is no coincidence that the current campaign against the
“Islamisation of Christian Switzerland” takes place in the middle of a
profound financial crisis and growing social polarization. Only
recently the major Swiss bank UBS was rescued from bankruptcy with
billions in taxpayers' funds. At the same time, recent strikes by
workers at SBB Cargo and by construction workers are a clear sign of
the growing divisions in Swiss society. The campaign against minarets
is aimed at demonising the country's small Muslim community, turning
it into a scapegoat in an effort to split the working population. An
utterly hypocritical debate on establishing a “national identity” is
being waged in order to divert attention from the profound class
divisions in Swiss society.

Such developments have been made possible by the complete prostration
of the so-called left in Switzerland, social democracy and the trade
unions, which are quite prepared to allow immigrants to become first
victims of attacks on social and democratic rights. Nothing could
demonstrate more clearly the necessity to build a section of the
Fourth International in Switzerland.

Henk Vreekamp wrote:
> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> Democs,
>
> Weer wat standaardnieuws gemist op dit forum. De tegenwoordig
> alleen online Christian Science Monitor vroeg Ayaan Jirsi Ali om
> een reactie op het Zwitserse verbod per bindend referendum van
> nieuwe minaretten. Onze Ayaan: het gaat hier om een verbod op de
> politieke islam (islamisme). De minaret is te vergelijken met de
> swastika en de hamer-en-sikkel.
>
> Consequent?
>
> Henk Vreekamp, Utrecht
>
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