Civilized and democratic Switzerland [2] isn't looking so civilized and democratic these days. On Nov. 29, Swiss voters approved a ban on minarets by 57.5%, at the urging of the right-wing Swiss People's Party—which argued that the minaret is a symbol of Islamic political power and not protected by guarantees of religious freedom. Switzerland has 400,000 Muslims—many of them Bosnian and Kosovar Albanian refugees from the former Yugoslavia. (CSM [3], Nov. 30)
What a double insult—these Bosnians and Kosovars fled the Serb campaign of ethnocide in the '90s, in which mosques and minarets were burned down and blown up, only to find them banned in supposedly tolerant Switzerland where they sought refuge. And the idiot left [4] in the West continues to deny or make apologies for the Bosnia genocide [5], even while making a pretense of opposing Europe's (and America's) resurgence of Islamophobia [6] and right-wing militancy [7]. Nothing exposes their hypocrisy as clearly as the Swiss case.
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