Symbolen-propaganda

[Henk Vreekamp]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Is die Zwitserse SVP soms een trotskistisch project dan?
hv,u
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Antid Oto" <aorta at home.nl>
To: "Henk Vreekamp" <vreekamp at knoware.nl>
Cc: <d66 at nic.surfnet.nl>
Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 2009 10:41 AM
Subject: Re: Symbolen-propaganda


> [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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>

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