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Fitzgerald: The minaret controversy in Switzerland

Sep 7, 2008 7:07 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Switzerland has for decades been the home, or the second or tenth home, for many rich Arabs. The Omani doctor, the Kuwaiti contractor, the Saudi prince with houses in Vevey, Lausanne, Montreux, who merely spend money, and money, and money (and of whom Swiss bankers and real estate men are naturally and inordinately fond), provide a kind of brake based on short-term interests to a sensible realization that those ever-expanding and ever-more numerous mosques are not quite seen as the threat they are. This is particularly striking in a country that has prided itself (and sometimes, as in the period 1938-1945, shamed itself) on keeping non-Swiss out. And of course it does not help that the anti-mosque or anti-minaret campaign in Switzerland is led by someone who can easily be identified as on the “right” or “far right.”

It would help, in Switzerland, if those Swiss who receive short-term financial benefits from their deals with rich Arabs — fine fellows all, naturally, not like the “extremists” who are “easily identified” and “can be dealt with” — had a bit more patriotism, and less cupboard love so directly related to their own self-interest and so little related to the national interest correctly defined.
And it would help if others, especially in the French-speaking parts — Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux — of Switzerland, among those who are certifiably “un-right-wing,” were to grasp the meaning, and therefore the permanent menace, of Islamic Jihad.

But this would require a coming-to-their-senses by many more people. Otherwise, even without being a member of the E.U., the Swiss — supposedly so solicitous of their national identity — may succumb (at a slower rate, of course, than in Great Britain or France) to an ever-larger Muslim presence. To counter this, the issue of the minaret is a good one because it is now widely understood that the minaret is not essential to the mosque. Rather, it was adopted as a symbol of power by early Muslims. It was and is a way of o’ertopping existing bell-towers of the Christians. The minaret has been seen as a symbol of such power, bristling with aggression (“the minarets are our bayonets” as a Turkish Muslim leader said). The minarets are symbols of Islamic triumphalism.

One hopes that there will be a citizens’ revolt against the bien-pensants of the Swiss government, but where’s the William Tell, or a million of them?

Those who are building these minarets mean to signal, among other things, that they are in Switzerland to stay. But citizenship in any Infidel country can or should only be based on swearing allegiance — and meaning it, and meaning it permanently, not with the mental reservation of kitman — to the Infidel nation-state. That means forswearing that sole loyalty to, or indeed any loyalty to, a belief-system that demands its adherence to work for the spread of Islam, and for the imposition of as much of the sharia as is practical.

This is a minimum demand for any Infidel nation-state to make on those who wish to become citizens, if that nation-state wishes to preserve and protect its own political and social arrangements and its own way of life, and its own Indigenous Infidels who inherited and would like to hold onto this legacy, this inheritance, political, social, cultural, artistic — even in clumsy, even in slightly ungrateful fashion. And it is a demand that no true Believer in Islam can possibly meet.

Take, for example, the case of one Mohammed Karnous, who, according to a 2005 IslamOnline report, declared that “government officials were expected to attend [a meeting of a Muslim group] to listen to minority leaders and address problems facing Muslims.”

“Expected”? By whom? By the imperious Muslims who put on “their annual meeting, themed the Mercy to Mankind, in Fribourg.”

“This is unacceptable and inexcusable,” League of Muslims in Switzerland (LMS) leader Mohammad Karmous said to IslamOnline.

What a tone of imperiousness. Whose country is it? Why are Muslims permitted to settle in it at all, given the clear views of Infidels that are contained in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira? Do Muslims think we cannot read? We cannot study what they learn, cannot find out what they are taught, cannot find a click away online what is actually in the biography of Muhammad, uswa hasana, that model for all Mankind, al-insan al-kamil? Do they think that we read the dozens upon dozens of Jihad-verses in the Qur’an, the hundreds of stories advocating mistreatment, looting, murder of Infidels in the Hadith? All of them are easily located. And why not? They have to be made accessible, if the Believers are to read and know them. One cannot make them widely available at every Muslim website and not expect the Infidels to begin eavesdropping, or dropping in, or beginning to study the matter — not as credulous Believers, but as the intended victims of those Believers, unless of course those benighted Infidels choose to “revert” to Islam.

The arrogance of this man, and of his group. Why should any official in Switzerland, or anywhere else, dignify and inadvertently promote these gatherings, which are inevitably part of the propaganda of local Muslims? No, the time for that nonsense is past — except perhaps among such people as Grover Norquist and all his brothers-and-sisters under the skin in the Democratic Party as well.

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