It's an ethical dilemma that I don't find easy to solve. Are the Swiss wrong to forbid the building of mosques? Are Londoners only being racist or xenophobic in opposing the Abby Mills Mosque or are they legitimately protecting themselves from the strife, turmoil, noise and sometimes the violence said to be growing in formerly calm, ecumenical and liberal countries? Is the curtailment of religious freedom justified in some cases? Yes, in the US, we have to fight for the idea that the free exercise of Christianity does not convey the right to push non-Christians around, but just how far do our own laws concerning religious freedom extend and how far should we let them extend?
Like many people, I'm uneasy when a Swiss party leader calls for the banning of Muslim and Jewish cemeteries and we all know the horrible history of sectarian strife in Europe such measures evoke. Yet I see how the Liberal Netherlands has to deal with what appears to many of them as a growing population opposed to the secular, liberal and highly permissive culture they are so proud of and I can sympathize. By sympathising however, with people whose hard won freedom is put in jeopardy by a growing sub-culture, am I able to disassociate myself from groups who want to close the American borders to anyone who might not look Anglo Saxon or be Protestant? How much of the Dutch, Swiss and American fear of a large Muslim presence is real and how much is misguided? When is ethnic cleansing not ethnic cleansing? Most importantly, can we even discuss these things over the snarling of the trolls?
Volumes could be said about this (your readers may find this recent review on my site to be of interest), but one point in particular should be made.
ReplyDeleteThe hard-line Islamists in western Europe (who make up a hard-to-estimate but quite large proportion of the total Mulsim population) present exactly the same kind of threat to secularism, gays, women's rights, and democracy that the hard-line Christian Right in the United States does -- they are both theocratic totalitarian movements. There are, however, three major differences:
1) European Islamists have a much worse track record of murderous violence than the Christian Right in the US does.
2) Muslims in western Europe (not the Balkans or Russia) are recent immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants, not even an indigenous minority as Christian fundamentalists in the US are.
3) Islamism in Europe includes a fiercely anti-Jewish component which has no real equivalent in the US, anywhere.
Europeans have every right to be exasperated with the thuggery, intimidation, and open totalitarian aspirations which Islam has brought to their societies. Banning minarets and headscarves is a way of sending a message to the interlopers: assimilate (adopt European values) or leave.
The Swiss (other countries) never claimed to be the open boarder, race and culture melting pot that America does.
ReplyDeleteThe French put that poem on the Statue of Liberty because they and most of the rest of the World perceived America as the one country in the World that would except all people.
That's what made us different from old Europe.
Other countries never made that claim, and don't want the race and culture problems we have because of our melting pot.
Why do we expect the rest of the World to be like America? Even America is not what Americans claim it is, when it comes to race and culture civility.
The angry screams from the American right, is the last gasp of hanging onto the "good old American values." Like Christian only, or white only.
America does not have, never had, nor is trying to protect thousands of years of a mono religious or race society.
Our society is not comparable to other societies, and we should not judge them based on our experience.
I think our multi-race, multi-cultural, multi-religious society is better, problems and all.
History shows that when these kind of social problems get out of hand, that's when real incivility happens. Maybe they are right and we are wrong.
One more point about the Swiss minaret ban (they have only banned the construction of new minarets, not mosques):
ReplyDeleteMany of the Muslims in Switzerland come from Kosovo. Muslims in Kosovo have destroyed almost 150 Serbian churches and monasteries over the last five years. Not just banned the building of new ones, but destroyed existing ones, many of them historic (so far from being an interloper in Kosovo, Serbian culture is older there than Muslim culture, even though Serbs are now in the minority).
Can we be surprised that the Swiss want to discourage Islam in their own country, when it behaves that way where it came from? Let's not lose track of which culture is truly intolerant of pluralism.
Don't know if you so Stephen Colbert's interview with the UN Ambassador to Switzerland about this but it was just awesome.
ReplyDeleteWhat was weird is that the Swiss didn't ban mosques, they banned minarets. An architectural feature. So I guess you couldn't build a restaurant with that on the top, or s hopping mall.
I find that so bizarre.
It's a reminder of why America's religious freedom is so precious. Despite all of the haranguing and War On Christmas crap that's been going on in recent years, America is still trully blessed in its religious tolerance.
Don't know if you so Stephen Colbert's interview with the UN Ambassador to Switzerland about this but it was just awesome.
ReplyDeleteWhat was weird is that the Swiss didn't ban mosques, they banned minarets. An architectural feature. So I guess you couldn't build a restaurant with that on the top, or s hopping mall.
I find that so bizarre.
It's a reminder of why America's religious freedom is so precious. Despite all of the haranguing and War On Christmas crap that's been going on in recent years, America is still trully blessed in its religious tolerance.
"Our society is not comparable to other societies, and we should not judge them based on our experience."
ReplyDeleteI dunno, I think we use the idea that we're different too often to ignore evidence of what works and doesn't.
"I think our multi-race, multi-cultural, multi-religious society is better, problems and all."
I agree with that and I think we're still better at assimilating people than some other countries despite our traditional fear and hatred of immigrants. Switzerland is, and you're right, very different in it's immigration policies - basically it's damned near impossible to become a citizen. The Turkish and European Muslims there probably aren't and probably can't and probably will always be there only as 'guest workers.' I have some family in Switzerland and I've never noticed that anyone there is particularly fond of outsiders, even though most Swiss speak three or four or more languages. Yes, they are a tiny country with a small population and they want to keep it that way. It makes more sense for them than it does for us.
"America is still trully blessed in its religious tolerance."
'Blessed' would suggest that tolerance was handed to us rather than fought for (by liberals.)
By the way, has anyone else noticed that nobody is lucky or fortunate any more - they're "blessed?" I hardly ever heard that 50 years ago. Is this another way common usage is forcing us to acknowledge something we don't believe? I'm just sayin. . .
"Banning minarets and headscarves is a way of sending a message to the interlopers: assimilate (adopt European values) or leave."
ReplyDeleteHow is a minaret a cultural value? I'm confused. If you want Muslims to leave female circumcision and jihad behind, then I'm right there with you. But...architecture?
Stop building minarets, or get out! just doesn't pass the test of rationalism. Neither does the head scarf thing. It's quite simple: don't ban head scarves, and don't require them either. Make it a...what's that word again? Oh, yes. Choice. Make it a "choice."
Minarets don't have moral value. They barely have any symbolic value. It's just another way of saying, "we don't want your kind around here," whatever kind that happens to be. Maybe one day you'll be one of "them."
Or maybe that's the fear. Maybe if there are too many of them, then they will determine what your values are. Except that there is no way the Muslim population of Europe is anywhere near large enough to "take over" any part of Europe.
The only values under attack here are inclusiveness and tolerance.
I would agree that the minaret mashup is silly, though it’s possible to understand it if one takes up for the sake of temporary perspective a Ruskinian semi-romantic view of architecture’s cultural significance, i.e. as stone and other building materials expressing the spiritual aspirations and the life of an entire people. (Not that I'm endorsing this view -- I find language like "an entire people" disturbing in itself.) It’s fair to assert, I think, that the anti-semitism, racism and xenophobia of the WWII era were by no means limited to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; it seems that a number of European countries opted for generous post-war immigration policies as a corrective to recent sins. I’m no expert in this area, but would it be fair to suggest that the generous policies, in some cases, were less heartfelt than necessary for success? If you let people in but never really welcome them or want them around, it seems logical that alienation and mutual distrust will be the result, and perhaps that narrow-minded fanatics of whatever party will assert themselves, making matters still more difficult and tense.
ReplyDeleteEveryone thinks of Switzerland as tolerant because they remain neutral and don't participate in wars, yet they were happy to keep the deposits left by Jews in the 30's nor were they particularly welcoming toward Jewish refugees from Hitler.
ReplyDeleteI once threw out a very expensive pair of Bally of Switzerland shoes after I found out they had acquired it from murdered Jews.
They do not want Muslims to feel too much at home, lest they get ideas about staying there when the visas run out.