Shame On Switzerland

As I'm sure you have heard, the Swiss people, in a referendum, have voted against the construction of minarets (though apparently NOT against the presence of Islam).

This significant, though inadequate vote, has resounded in the universe of the MSM with thunderous cries of racism, Islamophobia, right-wing extremism, and similar standard accusations hurled against any country or individual who does not bow down in abject servility to the world-conquering ideology.

Francois Desouche has posted this video of Jean Ziegler's reaction to the Swiss vote against the building of minarets. Ziegler has served on the Geneva city council, on the Swiss National Council, in the Swiss Parliament as a Social Democrat, and as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Read his biography at Wikipedia, but prepare yourselves for a description of a very mixed-up personality whose best deed seems to have been that he rejected the Moammar Qadhafi Human Rights Prize (or that he was nominated for it).




Here is the gist of what he says in this video:

I am not only surprised. I am ashamed, I'm scandalized because Switzerland has just veered to the extreme Right, has become a racist country; 57.5% of the population, in a completely free election, with a high voter turnout, have voted to ban the minarets, at the demand of a party of the extreme Right, the Union Démocratique, a little like the Front National in France. What is especially scandalous is the result - of course absurd, to ban through the Constitution, the Federal Constitution of a country that has been a democracy for 700 years - minarets on the most scandalous pretext: that minarets are the expression of the inherent violence of the Muslim religion, that it is a religion in which the minarets symbolize all the violence, the irrational, all the terrorism, that is contained in this religious dogma. It's totally insulting to the 420,000 Muslims who live peacefully, working in Switzerland and totally respectful of the laws, and it is totally insulting to the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. Because the third monotheistic religion, Islam, is the religion of tolerance, of goodness, of love as the two others have said. This outcome, expressed by my people who are, God knows, not idiots, not illiterates, the Swiss, is something I am profoundly ashamed of...

The poster used by the two conservative parties - UDC (Democratic Union of the Center) and the UDF (Federal Democratic Union) sent a powerful message to the voters. Le Figaro suggests that the changes that will be made to the Constitution as a result of the referendum may not be constitutional:

Banning the construction of minarets will be described as a measure whose purpose is "to maintain peace between the members of different religious communities." (...)

It remains to be seen if the new text is constitutional. The Swiss Minister of Justice Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf warned, even before the referendum, that banning the minarets would be contrary to freedom of religion and discriminatory. Accepting the initiative would violate human rights and would place the image of Switzerland in peril. The Green Party announced on Sunday that it would examine the possibility of taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

It's reminiscent of the Irish referendum: when you don't get the results you want the first time, see to it that you do the second time.

Source: europenews.dk