Swiss Hiss: Switzerland's new wave of intolerance is reflected in its majority party's sponsorship of a referendum to ban the building of minarets. Bigoted posters pushing the referendum are an arresting sight in many parts of Switzerland.
"Switzerland," The Economist wrote in a survey of that country a few years ago, "has always prided itself on its exceptionalism." It is the oldest democracy in the world and the most stable. It's been at peace for five centuries, longer by far than any square inches in Europe. The Swiss have a reputation for fairness, quality and precision (those watches), discretion (those banks), and remarkable resourcefulness for a landlocked country that has no natural resources other than stunningly beautiful minarets in the shape of Alpine peaks. But, the Economist also noted, "there are signs that it is becoming more like other countries." In displays of bigotry especially.
Becoming may be too kind a work. Maybe reality is catching up with the myth.
Earlier this decade the world finally discovered that the Swiss were not quite the neutral indulgences they pretended to be during World War II. They turned back their share of Jews at the Swiss border. They only recently pardoned those who illegally helped Jews into the country. They bought masses of gold from Nazis, essentially helping to finance the Nazi war machine. More recently, it's been moving so far right that Sean Hannity could fairly be called the Switzerland of the airwaves. In November 2007, Christoph Blocher led the far-right Swiss People's Party to electoral victory (though Blocher himself was denied a seat on the Federal Council which runs the government). Weeks earlier the party had plastered Switzerland with obscene posters depicting white sheep on top of a Swiss flag booting out a black one, a metaphor for one of the party's platforms: expelling entire immigrant families the moment one of the family's members commits a crime. The last government to have such a "kin liability" law? Nazi Germany.
The People's Party, dominant in Parliament, is up to its reprehensible tricks again. This time it's the obscene poster plastered at the top of this blog post--and, of course, across parts of Switzerland (Basel and Lausanne have banned the poster from public places). The People's Party wants the building of minarets banned. "They claim," the BBC reported, that "the minaret is not necessary for worship, but is rather a symbol of Islamic law, and as such incompatible with Switzerland's legal system." They collected enough signatures to have a referendum on the matter on Nov. 29. There are about 7 million people in Switzerland, 350,000 of them Muslim, or 5%, about 1% less than in France. But it's not as if minarets stab the sky the way church steeples do. There are all of two minarets in Switzerland, one in Geneva and one in Zurich, and neither is allowed to let muezzins ply their vocal chords. In other words, no Muslim call to prayer under Swiss law.
But just look at that poster. Look at the sinister suggestions. The minarets are made to look like missiles. The eyes behind the veil are made to look like those not of a woman of faith but of a cross between a suicide bomber and a paranoid agent of the Swiss equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security. In a sense the poster is so cliche, so patently offensive, that it's a parody of itself. It's risible. But the majority of the Swiss People's Party isn't so risible. It represents a strain of phobias that speak of a disquieting darkness in Swiss culture. And if Switzerland, the timekeeper of European tolerance, is slouching toward that sort of Gomorrah, what of the rest of Europe?
Used to be that Lebanon was referred to as the "Switzerland of the Middle East," the way the same image might attach to the Ivory Coast for West Africa or certain neighborhoods of Lahore in Pakistan.
Not anymore. Switzerland can have its Switzerland, though it can use a bit of Lahore or Beirut for a corrective.
See Also:
- What Is a Muezzin?
- Cairo's Fired Muezzins, On Stage in Berlin
- "Muezzin," the Sebastian Brameshuber Documentary
- France and the Burqa Ban
- Moroccan Woman Denied French Citizenship for Her Niqab
- Brigitte Gabriel, Islamophobe
Comments
“It’s been at peace for five centuries”
How quickly we forget the Sonderbound, the Napoleonic occupation, the 2 Kappel wars, the 2 Villmergen wars, the peasant war and the many upheavals of the 18th century. Switzerland may have been neutral since 1515 but at peace? Certainly not.
“Weeks earlier the party had plastered Switzerland with obscene posters depicting white sheep on top of a Swiss flag booting out a black one, a metaphor for one of the party’s platforms: expelling entire immigrant families the moment one of the family’s members commits a crime. The last government to have such a “kin liability” law? Nazi Germany.”
The Swiss people rejected that initiative, like they did with every other initiative of referendum from the SVP in recent years.
Talleyrand, I relied for that old fact on John McPhee’s opening to his fabulous “La Place de la Concorde Suisse” from 1983 (”The Swiss have not fought a war for nearly five hundred years, and are determined to know how so as not to”) and the much-vaunted New Yorker fact-checking department, which let the line through. Benjamin, the initiatives still speak of a disturbing trend, as does the fact that SVP remains the dominant party.
“Switzerland… can use a bit of Lahore or Beirut for a corrective.”
Nice call to violence by the author. Strange, too, how he doesn’t choose more apt cities like “New York”, “Madrid”, or “Washington D.C.”, in his murderous fantasy of terrorizing the Swiss.