It is only fair to ask.

Nonetheless, Churches and temples continue to be built with full galore in Islamic countries. There is no talk of banning the church bell, or removing the cross. No Christian Nuns are harassed for wearing their headcover.

It is interesting to note Western sensibilities (rather insensibilities), that they see Hijaab as demeaning to women but have no qualms about catholic nuns being forced to stay celibate as part of religious requirement denying them the right of legitimate sex. Similarly, on one hand all the hell break loose when Muslims request not making fun of their religious figures. The west takes that as violation of their freedom of speech. On the other hand they are,hypocritically, quiet when a Jew violates the same freedom of expression if some westerner dare to draw a cartoon or criticize Holocaust. Why can’t Holocaust be criticized? Why can’t you say that “O Jews!!! enough of your Holocaust rant. Stop playing victims now. You are no more victims. You are actually perpetrating the same crimes to Palestinians now…”

Why don’t you draw a cartoon on that? Why don’t you force jews to assimilate? Jews still get to built their temples with full galore. Jews still get to celebrate Hanukah. Jews still get to wear the skull cap.

Why these double standards? Why are you silent on that? Your silence is deafening.

The Muslims here are reacting very reasonably, showing their disappointment but not acting enraged. There are 4 minarets so far – there were no big plans for many more.

It’s a little bit like the argument of a Sanaullah who commented in a Pakistan Labour Party Forum last week on the death sentence on one of the Gojra Christians on desecrating the Quran:

>>It may sound ridiculous but I have heard that sometimes courts of
first instance pronounce death punishment in such cases to save the
life of the accused as they know the weakness of the evidence will
lead to acquittal from high court but death penalty may help the
hounds [in that case the Jamaati Mullahs] to cool down and hopefully forget about the matter.<<

We give the SVP and the initiative founders their victory and they will stop/diminish their horrible populism on Islam that actually may lead to a rift in society at one point since support for them is rising. The minarets won't.

Little known fact, in one of Austria's provinces Minarets are banned now for quite some time already. And the same "discussions" (one sided media-digging-out-half-truths commentaries in newspapers) that have preceded the popular vote here and have turned quite nasty are quelling in Austria for years now. There its still getting worse. Here in Switzerland it's about to cool down again with the vent they got on Sunday.

Minarets: Ban Them, or Bomb Them?

Either way, it’s a safe bet that at least two of the three will go to South Africa this summer.

I didn’t know Yakin was in the WC squad, thought he had been dropped since last year. He was good in the Euros though, from what I saw.

Yeah, not to detract anything from their acheivement, epecially beating a really good Nigerian team in the finals, where no one gave them much of a chance; you should have mentioned that this is their U17 national team, not their international squad. The U17s are amongst the lower ranked youth teams in anycase.

The vote doesn’t surprise me, Swiss society does have some reactionary streaks that tends to react adversely to what they see as ‘outside influences’; the strong internalisation of parts of the country like Geneva, just adds to this tension.

Seriously, you need to check yourself if you want to make sense to the academic mainstream. I have no idea what this means (other than Jew-envy, perhaps?). The position of Muslims, whether in the world at large, or in the West, has little analogy with that of the Jews. Maybe the Parsis are an analog–numerous, illiterate, poor Muslims are not–sorry, big-guy.

I particularly enjoyed reading the bits where the Swiss government “respects the vote” but is trying to reassure Muslims that Switzerland isn’t really like that…. Yeesh.

To think I sort of pretended that moving to Europe was part of an effort to get away from this sort of thing (a naïve fantasy, of course, but still…)