Melanie Phillips/The Australian

WELL, who would have thought the Swiss had it in them? The country that until now was known for nothing more exciting than banking, cheese and cuckoo clocks has secured its place in history by becoming the first in Europe to say to Islam: “thus far and no further”.

Here you can watch raving headbanger Azzam Tamimi supported by Neturai Karta nuts…

Related Links:

• Just whose idea was Swiss minaret ban anyhow?
• PM: France will not ban minarets/not yet, anyhow….
• Fatih Akın boycotts Swiss over minarets/the guy is a scumbag, so we shouldn’t be surprised…
• Norway pissed off over Obama/is there any US ally not pissed off with this MF?
• In an alarming security breach in the United States, an airport security manual has been posted on the internet./your safety in the hands of Al Qaeda! What could go wrong?

Jihad Fritz & other news:

• Terror charges for man in Germany over US targets – The Associated Press
• British Muslim convicted of transatlantic plane terror plot
• No More Minarets in Switzerland – Right Side News

And France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel have both acknowledged that the Swiss vote reflects growing fears within Europe that the continent is being steadily Islamised.

This fissure in European opinion suggests the issue is rather more complex than the superficial consternation might suggest. The stock liberal view is that the state has no business telling a religious community how to construct its houses of prayer. And in general this is absolutely right.

But liberal societies also hold that minorities must not threaten or coerce the majority culture. If that precept is followed, then just like any other minority, Muslims should certainly be welcome to practise their faith. And many do so in just such a way.

The problem is that while many such Muslims sign up to democracy, human rights and the separation of religion and state, the Islamists who dominate the Muslim world are pushing the agenda of Islamising the west. And the minaret is a symbol of that religious aggression. The suggestion that banning minarets attacks Muslim rights to religious observance could not be farther from the truth. For the minaret has no religious significance in Islam.

To Western eyes, it may seem nothing other than an architectural feature. But historically it has served as a symbol of Islamic political power and aspiration.

It is designed to help impose Islam on the surrounding society. As a powerful symbol of Islamic dominance, it is often constructed to be higher than other religious buildings specifically to send the message both to Muslims and those of other faiths and none that Islam is supreme.

That is why Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan described minarets as the “bayonets of the faith”. They are political instruments of religious domination. And that is what the Swiss have understood as a threat to their society.

For liberals, any issue taken up by a party they brand the “far Right” is automatically made toxic by such association. But it is the issue that matters, not who is taking sides over it.

The West is so bamboozled by multiculturalism, the doctrine that all cultures must be held to have equal value and any differentiation is prejudice, that it cannot see the destructive absurdity of this fuss.

For while it is having a fit of the vapours over the so-called threat to religious freedom represented by the minaret ban, it is silent over the fact that in Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia there is no freedom of worship, no churches are allowed to be built at all and apostates from Islam are punished by death.

Islamism is encroaching in Europe and the West because liberals are so paralysed by their own nostrums they cannot defend their own culture — a vulnerability the Islamists are exploiting to the hilt. The Western response to the ban is characterised by fear of the Muslim reaction to it — thus demonstrating to the Islamists once again that terror and intimidation work.

Islamists themselves have given the game away. Both Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Council of Britain have said that mosques and minarets in European cities “are manifestations of the proudly indigenous nature of Islam in Europe”. But Islam is not indigenous in Europe. The last attempt by the Islamic world to conquer Europe was repulsed at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

It is possible that the Swiss vote will now give courage to other European countries to stop the march of political Islam — and that future generations will talk of the jihad being repulsed at the gates of Geneva. But then again, Europe’s own death-wish may be just too strong.

Swiss legislator condemned by Islamic scholar as ‘new Hitler’

Earth Times

Doha – The verbal war over Switzerland’s ban on building new minarets on mosques escalated Tuesday during a talk show when an Islamic academic condemned a key backer of the Swiss referendum as the “new Hitler of Europe.”The director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, Azzam al-Tamimi, made the remarks on al-Jazeera broadcaster about the Swiss legislator Oskar Freysinger.

“Freysinger is a danger for the future of Switzerland,” Tamimi said. (Mohammedanism is a far greater danger for all of us)

Freysinger, a member of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) that called the referendum, who was also a guest on the show, retorted that it was “absolutely a democratic decision” and that unlike the Swiss referendum, “Hitler did not allow people to vote.”

Freysinger also countered that in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the building of Christian churches is banned.

Al-Tamimi praised Swiss church leaders who spoke out against the ban. He called on the people of Switzerland to protect the reputation of their “beautiful, free country” by opposing the ban.

On November 29, more than 57 per cent of Swiss voters agreed that new minarets on mosques should be banned. The vote has reignited passions around the role of Islam in Swiss society and other parts of Europe with large Muslim populations.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power after a series of democratic votes during Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s. Only after he was named chancellor in 1933 did Hitler transform the country into a totalitarian one-party state and ban free elections.

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