Its kind of sad, but I guess this is expected given what is going in Europe now days.
Swiss voters ‘back ban on building of minarets’ - Times Online
Swiss voters ‘back ban on building of minarets’
(Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone/AP)
There are four minarets in Switzerland. Proposals to build one in Berne prompted the vote
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Swiss voters appear to have defied their Government and churches today and approved a national ban on the construction of minarets.
Early results showed that 57 per cent of voters had backed the proposal, ensuring international embarrassment for Switzerland and a possible backlash in the Muslim world. A majority of the 27 cantons supported the move, according to partial results.
“The initiative would appear to have been accepted, there is a positive trend. It is a huge surprise,” said French-language Swiss television said after polls closed at midday.
The referendum was launched by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the largest group in Parliament, after residents opposed the construction of a minaret in a town north of Berne, the capital.
The approval is the latest act by European voters in support of anti-immigrant parties, following electoral successes over the last decade by far-right parties in Austria, the Netherlands and France.
The Swiss Government, the business world and most churches had urged the country to reject a proposal that they said breached the Swiss constitution and its guarantees of freedom of religion. The proposal, to ban the construction of minarets in the Swiss constitution, would only “serve the interests of extremist circles”, the Government said.
The ‘yes’ vote, if confirmed, shows the strength of feeling against a Muslim population which has grown over the past 20 years to 350,000 or four per cent of the population. The majority are not regular practitioners of their faith. Most are from Turkey and the Balkans.
Only four modest-sized minarets exist in Switzerland, where there are 150 prayer houses. None are used to call the faithful to prayer.
The SVP used the issue openly as an assault on what it depicts as the inroads of political Islam in Switzerland.
“We just want to stop further Islamisation in Switzerland,” Walter Wobmann, head of a committee of initiative backers, said today.
The SVP’s campaign used shock posters showing a burka-clad woman and a Swiss flag bristling with menacing minarets. The party also used for its campaign a remark by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, in which he said that minarets are the “bayonets of Islam”.
The vote was in sharp contrast to opinion polls which showed that a steady 53-54 per cent would reject the referendum. SVP leaders had predicted that people were not revealing their true voting intentions.
Ulrich Schluer, an SVP MP who drafted the initiative, told The Times in Berne last week that he was certain of approval. “We are still at the beginning of the process. We compare our situation to Germany, France or England and the problems they have in their suburbs,” he said. “That is what we do not want here.”
The SVP rejects the Government view that a ban would breach the law on freedom of religion. “Mosques are not part of freedom of religion. This is not against Islam. The minaret is a symbol of political power,” Mr Schluer said.
The Swiss political world is worried about the prospects of a worldwide Muslim backlash of the kind that hit Denmark after the affair of the Muhammad cartoons.
“Swiss-made”, the most trusted brand image in the world, is at stake, say business leaders. Gerold Burhrer, president of the Swiss Business Federation, has reminded the country that it earns £10 billion a year from Muslim countries and that Geneva alone received 174,500 visits from the Gulf last year.
The referendum result, if confirmed, is certain to be challenged in the courts as a breach of the constitution. Amnesty International and other campaign groups had warned that the Swiss initiative would breach the norms of international human rights.
It will also be seen as further evidence of Switzerland’s desire to resist political integration with the rest of Europe. This has been manifested by the rise of the SVP and growing grass-roots hostility towards the European Union. Switzerland narrowly rejected EU membership 19 years ago and mainstream politicians acknowledge that there would be little chance of approval now.