Anne Applebaum points out that the Swiss vote against minarets may have been unfair to law-abiding, ordinary Muslims, but that you can't say the Swiss vote was about bigotry:
No European government has successfully found a way to deal with this phenomenon. And those that have tried often find themselves running up against their own civil rights and legal traditions. The Danes, determined to limit the number of foreign spouses entering Denmark through arranged marriages, found they had no choice but to make it more difficult for all Danes to marry all foreigners. The French, realizing that the head scarf had become a symbol of political affiliation in some French schools, found themselves limiting the rights of all students to wear religious clothing, including yarmulkes, to school.There is, therefore, nothing especially Swiss, or especially isolationist, about last week's referendum result. A similar question, put in a similar way, might well have had a similar result anywhere in Europe. In fact, fear of Islamist extremism now shapes all European politics far more than anyone ever acknowledges. The growth of the so-called "far-right" parties in the recent past is almost always connected to fear of Islamist extremism. The opposition to Turkish membership of the European Union--which would mean that Turks could eventually work freely in any member state--comes from the same set of fears, though almost no one ever says so.
In other words, the Swiss look around Europe and see that other nations are having a hell of a time trying to integrate the Islamic populations they foolishly allowed to emigrate, and have quite rationally decided that that's one problem they want to avoid. What's the problem? Are you seriously going to argue that the Swiss should want to import that same problems that Germany, Denmark, France, the UK, et alia, have -- this, all in the name of an airy-fairy idea of universalism and multiculturalism?
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I think we are beyond a point in world history when anyone could call Islam an oppressed faith.
Do you realize that the last ethnic cleansing in Europe occurred against Muslims in the 1990s? That over 300,000 Muslims were murdered as part of an ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian genocide? A genocide committed by Christians, mostly Orthodox?
Brian, the numbers have been revised down to, I believe 120,000 total. Yes most of those were Muslim. Yes, they were the primary victims of the Bosnian wars -- though at times they gave as good as they got. Moreover, Izetbegovic wanted to create an Islamic state -- read his Islamic declaration.
Anyway under my scheme, they are an indigenous group -- indeed they style themselves so, they believe they are the heirs of the slavic Bogomils. Their situation is entirely different from recently introduced populations.
Brian, in addition to Stari's observations, there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, only a tiny portion of them in Bosnia, and there was simultaneous "ethnic cleansing" among Serbs and Croats, who I am told have hated each other long before they migrated into the lands they now inhabit, not to mention the Serb-Albanian feuds, in which again, both sides gave as good as they got. There are countries where Christians are persecuted, which American Christians like to play up in a spirit of comfortable vicarious martyrdom, but that doesn't mean that Christianity is an oppressed faith.
On the previous comment of "Christianity is an oppressed faith":
It's clear that there are many policy makers worldwide, who would feel more comfortable if Christianity was 'watered down' and instead became part of a generic New-Age belief system. In parts of the Middle East & Asia, Christians are targeted and systematically oppressed. So the discussion can go on and on...
The issue is not about historical rights or wrongs. Such wrongs have been perpetuated by humankind on each other for centuries.
It's about Christianity being recognized by policy makers as having a right to exist & a right to its specific traditions.
Somehow, I cannot quite make the connection between policy makers desiring that Christianity be watered down, and martyrs being torn apart by lions in the arena. Policy makers seldom agree on anything, but they are entitled to their opinion, which Christians, Muslims, Jews, Jains, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and pagans are entitled to ignore.
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