The organisers of the petition argue that the minarets, which are used on mosques, are a symbol of political and religious claims to power, not just a religious sign.Schlüer said last year: "We've got nothing against prayer rooms or mosques for the Muslims. But a minaret is different. It's got nothing to do with religion; it's a symbol of political power." -- from this news story
Of course the minaret is not necessary. Wahhabi mosques don’t have minarets at all, and disapprove of them. It cannot be argued that Muslims need to have minarets from which a non-existent muezzin will utter the Call To Prayer (which is not permitted because of sound zoning laws), or that they need them even where a Call To Prayer is allowed, since if it is played and then amplified electronically, there is no conceivable need for height.
Are there any devices that tell the time in Switzerland? Yes, there are. Do Muslims all over the world now have access to clocks, and watches? Yes, they do. Do they possess, on their calendars, in their fancy agenda books (oh, those rich Arabs, with their briefcases and their agenda books, and their Rolex watches, and their everything, all of it so completely, grotesquely, underearned, unmerited), or even homelier models for the just-us-folks Muslims, telling them the exact time of each of the five canonical prayers, in the tiniest town or village anywhere in the world? Of course they do.
The minaret is merely a sign of power. It is a sign of dominion over the nearby churches and synagogues. Why do you think that, according to the Shari'a, no church or synagogue can be built higher than a nearby mosque? Why do you think that mosques were always built on the highest ground? For a nice example, see the mosque in Grenada that was opened a few years ago. The Spanish government thought it would be a great idea. They thought it would be a demonstration of real "tolerance" for Muslims that would somehow be reciprocated. Of course it wasn't. That mosque looms over a convent and a church, and with its Call to Prayer has disrupted the quiet lives of the nuns, who actually dared to protest. To no avail. Of course.
Minarets are claims of power. They are claims to dominance. That is what they are. And that is what these Swiss, who were called -- you know what they were called -- "far right-wing" Swiss, have properly identified. And therefore they have petitioned for a referendum to be held.
I saw yesterday, at 2 p.m., on the French channel, a French-language report from Switzerland. It showed the petitions being delivered with their 114,685 signatures. There was some patter about the government "being worried."
But think of it. If it is just a "far-right party" that was behind this petition, then the Swiss government should have no trouble at all holding a referendum on the matter. After all, how many votes can these "extremists" in this "far-right party" possibly get?
Why, practically none. I'm sure that those nearly 115,000 signatures constitute the entire membership of that "far-right party."
I'm sure you'll agree. I’m sure everyone will agree. So surely the Swiss government will forthwith obey its own rules, and now that the appropriate number of signatures has indeed been gathered, it will hold that referendum, and hold it quickly.
Switzerland is a democracy, isn't it? You know, William Tell, and a citizen's army, holding out for months in mountain redoubts against possible totalitarian enemies that might invade from without, and all that? So what could possibly be wrong with holding a referendum, and Letting The Swiss People Speak?
Could it be that the invasion they are worried about is not one that any citizens in mountain redoubts can repel, but instead it consists of those who are already within the country, and who are growing in numbers and in power, and in the ability to influence the Swiss government’s own ability to respond -- as has been demonstrated most vividly in that Swiss government's reluctant or even hostile response to this very petition by its very own citizens, for a referendum on minarets to be held?
Minarets are also phallic symbols, as the Black Rock is a female sex symbol. A phallic symbol is a symbol of power, male dynamic creative energy, not always pointed in the right direction. Erecting minarets
is a display of Islamic power. Sex and/or violence are natural outlets for the primitive intellect.
Minarets are symbolic of both.
The Swiss government, represented by that monstrous woman Calmy Rey, the foreign minister, has just brokered a 30 billion dollar gas deal with Iran and also recently contributed 30 million dollars towards the creation of a Palestinian state. It's shamelessly accepting and tolerant of human rights violations by Islamic supremacists. Its own economic interests come first and it maintains a fake neutrality for that purpose. Switzerland is not a country...it's a business. It did business with the Nazis...supplying the Germans with hard currency in exchange for looted gold and art,as well as arming them.
And now Calmy Rey is seeking to succeed Louise Arbour as UN Human Rights commissioner! What hypocrisy and corruption!
A growing number of the Swiss people are disturbed by Muslim demands and crimes committed by Muslims, from the Balkans especially. When they are robbed, their houses are burgled, their women raped and the prisons fill up, then they start caring.A recent highly publicised case of a Somali family inflicting genital mutilation on their daughter has added to the concern. Soon,forced marriages and honour killings will come to light too.
Sadly, though, they only really care when it affects them on the domestic front. There hasn't been any protest about the huge deal with Iran, because it serves their interests and supplies them with gas. Ethics? Forget it. And on the whole, the Swiss perceive the Palestinians as the victims and Israel as the aggressor. The Swiss media as far as the ME is concerned, are no better than the MSM elsewhere.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the usual multicultural nonsense that Switzerland subscribes to like the rest of Europe....and it does need its guest workers to keep doing the donkey work.....let's be thankful that it's preserved the system of direct democracy and legislation through referendums.
"And on the whole, the Swiss perceive the Palestinians as the victims and Israel as the aggressor. The Swiss media as far as the ME is concerned, are no better than the MSM elsewhere."
-- from a posting above
Is this true? Is the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, which used to have Arnold Hottinger as its main ME correspondent, who -- I thought -- knew what was what, or is the Journal de Geneve, included in this indictment? This is a real question, not a rhetorical one.
Hugh:
Here's a fairly recent interview with Arnold Hottinger wherein he deplores the demonisation of Islam and plays down the jihad and the symbolic power of minarets. He comes across in this interview as somewhat clueless.
http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/top_news/detail/Expert_says_no_need_for_Swiss_to_fear_Muslims.html?siteSect=106&sid=7289966&cKey=1164391206000
As for the NZZ, it has moved towards being a moderately conservative paper from being more center left and seems to cultivate a balanced,dispassionate and well considered approach. But I wonder about the value of dispassion,balance and sitting on the fence in our present treacherous times.
The Weltwoche, a weekly magazine,more in line with the policies of Blocher's Swiss People's Party (SVP), who are responsible for the current initiative to ban minarets,is more realistic and less compromising in relation to Islam and immigration and is decidedly pro-American and pro-Israel. It is refreshingly fearless and non-PC.Indeed, one of its regulat columnists is an SVP politician.
As for the Geneva paper...I have no idea.
I am surprised, and disturbed, by the clear evidence you present of muddied thinking about Islam by Arnold Hottinger. Maybe I've misremembered, or maybe I was misconstruing what I read by him, about the Middle East, a long time ago.
And I am even more surprised, and disturbed, to discover that I had no excuse for being surprised and disturbed. An article by Hottinger appeared here three years ago, and I not only read it but put up a long comment about Hottinger at the time -- one I just happened to unearth.
Here it is:
Hottinger was once a correspondent not without value, which makes one wonder if a certain kind of senility has set in, or if he was never quite so acute to begin with, or if the influence, personal and professional, of Arab and Muslim friends (a real hazard, especially if those friends are lavish in their hospitality and seeming empathy, and anguished expressions of dismay and implied requests that sympathetic Westerners come to their defense -- even at the expense of historical truth). In other words, he is not a complete idiot, or confirmed anti-Israel reporter who avoids Islam, or fails even to understand that Islam matters -- as H. D. S. Greenway (he of the bowtie, and the Chinese vases, and the different car driven to Morrissey Boulevard from Needham every day), and Chris Hedge (he of the "Israelis kill Palestinians for sport" observation) or the Fisks and the Orla Guerlins and the rest of them).
No, Hottinger is a bit more substantial than that. But he has not studied a good many of the scholars of Islam whose works have been buried, or ignored for nearly the last 50 or so years, and he has not been immune to the influence of every kind of apologist or semi-apologist, deliberate or ignorant, for Islam. One wonders what he would make of Levi-Provencal, of Edmond Fagnan, of Antoine Fattal (does he think, as Bernard Lewis preposterously said at Brandeis two years ago, that "dhimmitude" is a fiction, as Lewis said with studied (and false) evenhandedness, just as much as the "myth of an Andalucia" depicted as some kind of tolerant, multicultural paradise was entirely fiction) David Margoliouth, Snouck Hurgronje, W. R. W. Gairdner, Sir William Muir, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, Arthur Jeffery, Tor Andrae, Bat Ye'or, and a hundred others, English, German, American, French, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Armenian, Russian, Polish -- careful students of the texts of Islam, the reception and understanding of those texts, the influence of those texts, the history of Muslim conquest, the history of post-conquest subjugation of non-Muslim peoples -- Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and other smaller sects and groups -- a history that, in time and space, is remarkably similar and, therefore, suggests that the teachings of Islam, as worked out in practice, no matter where, and no matter when, inevitably tend to the same grim results.
As far as Hottinger's reference to his "trips to Central Asia," he must be talking about Uzbekistan (where sufferers from Weiss-Schwartz Syndrome are warmly welcomed) and Tadjikistan, but cannot be talking about the most important, largest, and richest country of the five stans, Kazakhstan. Just how much time has he spent in Almaty, Astana, or boomtown Atyrau? In Kazakhstan, the place to which Stalin exiled some of the most talented Russians, and where 50% of the country is non-Muslim (Russians, Belorussians, Jews, Baltic Germans, even a colony of Koreans and now the Chinese who come across the border and marry local girls, and aim to stay), those who, if asked to identify themselves, answer "Muslim" mean almost nothing by that. They almost all deplore the activities of "Muslims" elsewhere, and almost all can unself-consciously describe themselves as atheists. Hottinger is badly informed, or perhpas is determined to badly inform us.
For Hottinger to confusedly admit that Kemalism did not permanently secularize -- i.e., constrain the political and social power of Islam -- Turkey, but that, at the same time, the E.U. should not keep this apparently permanently Muslim (i.e., not secularized) Turkey out of the E.U., shows that Hottinger does not see a contradiction between the beliefs of Islam, the political and social arrangements and understandings of Islam, and the beliefs of the advanced Western democracies. Islam as a totalitarian system, that presumes to regulate every area of life and to offer a complete explanation of everything, that favors despotism because it does not, and cannot permit, the idea that political legitimacy flows from the will of the people (rather than from what is contained in Islam itself, in what has been derived from Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira over the centuries by Muslim scholars, and which the will of the people may not ever contradict).
Perhaps Hottinger, like some in this country, think he can avoid considering the history of Muslim conquest, and subjugation, of non-Muslims outside the West -- Hindus, Buddhists, and so on -- so as to continue to appeal to a Western sense of guilt, or the idea that it is we who have, by our actions, caused Muslism to dislike us.
This is one more example of the "Why Do They Hate Us" school of thought which carefully refrains from noting that 60-70 million Hindus were killed, Zoroastrians exiled or reduced to 150,000, that the Greco-Buddhist civilization of Afghanistan was destroyed. Hottinger does not consider the consequences to mental freedom, to artistic expression, to scientific inquiry, of the spread of Islam.
For Hottinger to forget all the great orientalists and to go back all the way to "early churchmen" (which ones does he have in mind? The brilliant Riccoldo da Montecroce? Which churchmen did not manage to depict Islam correctly, in Hottinger's view? Aside from those who did not analyze Islam at all, or who considered it, as Dante did, a Christian heresy, which serious students of Islam in the West, prior to the last 30-40 years of virtually uninterrupted apologetics and nonsense and covering up of past scholarship, does Hottinger think misstated the nature of Islam?
And does he include Indian scholars such as Jahundath Sarkar and K. S. Lal, or are they simply prejudiced Hindus (and of course, "supporters of the caste system and fascistic Hindutva, etc. etc." -- we have been there before, haven't we?).
In short, this article is not only obviously flawed, but a disgrace, calling into question Arnold Hottinger's long career. Use of that absurd word "Islamophobia." Appeals to the idea that the West has been unfair to Islam, when the mere fact that millions of Muslims have been allowed to move to that West and settle there, and everywhere they have gone, from Scandinavia to France to Australia, have made demands for changes in the societies and by the peoples who have so unwarily welcomed them, and everywhere have exhibited a seemingly inexplicable hostility and disloyalty to the Infidel nation-state that no other set of immigrants, no matter how outwardly non-Western -- Hindus from India, Buddhists from Vietnam, Chinese who are Confucian or Christian or atheists or anyting at all, Bolivian peasants, black Christians from Nigeria or Senegal or the Sudan -- never seem to exhibit. What is it that explains the different behavior of Muslims, who refuse in French schools to permit discussion of World War II
Hottinger's performance is a disgrace, from first to last. This is someone who has forgotten what the West is, what it achieved, and how everything can be lost. His sympathies are entirely with the Muslims, with the Turks who simply "must" be allowed into the E.U. (what is this -- admission to the E.U. as part of self-esteem studies, a party favor, something to be distributed like confetti after an Italian wedding? What?).
How he arrived at this point, what ignorance of which we were heretofore unaware, or what lapses in thinking, or what failure to understand Islam as the real scholars of Islam have unanimously understood it (the scholars from 1880-1960, before the Arab money, and the Muslims themselves, and of course their non-Muslim apologists, more or less seized control of the academic centers for the "study" of Islam and of Arabs -- with a few old-fashioned holdouts here and there) have led to this foolish and disgusting performance?
[Posted by: Hugh at June 27, 2005 10:07 AM]
I apparently can't even remember what I wrote about someone three years ago? Not senile dementia, not juvenile dementia, but let's call it middle-aged or medieval dementia.
I'm wearing a dunce cap now and standing in the corner, facing the wall. If it gets too unbearable, I will release myself, but the plans for now are to stand here until the end of the school day.
Not to worry Hugh. Your lapse was fortuitous as it resulted in you reposting the above usual no-holds-barred article, which I personally had never read.
And yes, one wonders how someone like Hottinger arrives at such stupidity and blindness in the face of the Islamic threat. Arab and Muslim friends sounds about right. And a soft brain resulting from too much comfort, privilege and prestige.
The call for prayer is more effective by SMS. That makes the minarets obsolete.
johndoe
Please don't take the MSM in Switzerland for the people of Switzerland.
The Minaret Initiative reached the 100'000 signatures necessary in record time, with no publicity whatsoever, only (negative) articles in the MSM and info in internet.
With the initiative, the topic is on the table. In good old Swiss democratic manner, we will have discussions and people will make up their mind.
My guess is there will be a NO to the initiative (as it is not practicable - how do you tell a round tower from a minaret?), and there will be much going on behind the screens, and with unsuspected laws and by-laws.
Posted this the other day, but it's worth reposting here:
On Dec. 12, 1997, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan added his own lines to a 1912 Turkish poem at a public gathering in Siirt, Eastern Anatolia:
Mosques are our barracks,
domes our helmets,
minarets our bayonets,
believers our soldiers.
This holy army guards my religion.
The report in which Erdogan's poesy appeared may be seen at:
http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2003-10-16-senyener-en.pdf
Free speech:
Sorry if I came across as rather harsh on the Swiss. I live in Switzerland actually and appreciate the place in many ways. But when it comes to the issues under discussion, there is plenty of room for improvement. Everyone I encounter here is ignorant of Islam and its history. They've read nothing on the subject and are loathe to see it as anything other than another benign religion. They fear falling into racism...absurd, as obviously Islam is not a race.....and indeed see the SVP as a racist party.
This wilful ignorance and blindness is rampant throughout the West, partly if not wholly due to the passive and uncritical acceptance of what the MSM tells them, and also the unwillingness to make the effort to read up on the subject.
The call for prayer is more effective by SMS. That makes the minarets obsolete.
Posted by: FreeSpeech
---
I am sure you know that they're building the minarets not so much to be reminded of the prayer times so much as to impose their ways on our societies.
The minarets serve as both a visual and - if they can get away with it - aural affirmation of their omnipresence.
It should be viewd as fitting that Saddam Hussein built a mosk where the minarets were designed to resemble nuclear ICBMS.
Nothing describes the islamic mindset better than that.
Hugh - don't be too tough on yourself.
You put an enormous amount of work into this website, besides whatever else it is that you are up to. Small wonder that your memory slips up occasionally. Completely forgivable.
The beauty of this Virtual Hedge School, and the benefit of the open comments field, has just been exhibited, along with the phenomenon known as 'distributed intelligence' - you made an error, someone else politely queried it, you were then able to correct the error, and offer further instruction into the bargain.
All done in a very civilised fashion.
On a more personal note - Hugh, perhaps you need to give yourself a break. Take a day off and soak yourself in your favourite music.
You, and others like you, on the intellectual/ spiritual frontline, are under enormous stress. Look at what has happened to David Littmann. I'm not surprised he's had a mini-stroke, not after reading the transcript of that appalling meeting at the UN.
You're an atheist, so this is not something you'd take into account; but I'll still say that, speaking as a Christian, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Mohammedans are spewing out occult curses at you, and at Mr Spencer, and at everyone else associated with Jihadwatch, as fast as they possibly can. Rest assured that the Christians on this comments floor are running 'prayer cover' for the entire jihadwatch board.
(PS - on a lighter note, did that Jacques Lasry/ Sarah Gorby CD I sent you, ever turn up? Mr Spencer told me to send it to him, c/o Regnery, and he'd send it on to you. But perhaps something went astray).
I'm wearing a dunce cap now and standing in the corner, facing the wall. If it gets too unbearable, I will release myself, but the plans for now are to stand here until the end of the school day.
Posted by: Hugh at July 9, 2008 1:32 PM
Hugh, I am in constant awe at what I have learned reading your posts.
Now, look in the mirror and say:
I am human. An extremely intelligent one, mind you , but a human all the same. One that makes mistakes. One that fu*ks up once and a while. Stope being so hard on yourself.
Sorry about the "stope" instead of stop! heh. Mea culpa pertainintg to the spelling mistake. Not sure whether to blame it on the new acrylic nails or the four vodka and ginger ales while listening while listening to some classic Smiths' tunes. Can't sleep tonight so got to catch up on what I missed this week on my favourite website.
You know , I travel past Chinese/Vietnamese /Khmer temples daily and guess what ...the buildings reflect the respective culture and traditions. I past the local Anglican Church..amd like wow , a spire upon a steeple...with a bell , that rings ...like a call to prayer? So now we are picking on historical remnants of bygone era , the minaret , confusing 'form' with 'function'. To have referendums on minarets is akin to censoring art , to proscribe someones aesthetic sensibility because we attribute some sinister function to forms and shapes that stem from the 'others' cultural heritage. The fact that people can not see this means that they are well on the way to being apologists for totalitarianism.
"give yourself a break..."
I've been forced to give myself a break. I've been laid up, literally, ever since the weekened, and for some time it has made posting impossible, or limited me to a teeny-tiny window of opportunity. Believe me, that kind of break is not all it's cracked up to be.