By ROSS DOUTHAT/The New York Times

They toasted to progress in Europe’s capitals last week. On Tuesday, the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect, bringing the nations of the European Union one step closer to the unity the Continent’s elite has been working toward for over 50 years.

But the treaty’s implementation fell just days after a milestone of a different sort: a referendum in Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance, in which 57.5 percent of voters chose to ban the nation’s Muslims from building minarets.

Related Links:

• Christianity’s Minarets Originally Used By Islam To Show Dominance In Conquered Lands
• Former Muslims back Swiss vote on Minarets
• Black wreath saying ‘In the eyes of God, Islam is the sole religion’ laid in front of Swiss Embassy in Ankara Turkey [Photo]
• Are there lower standards for Muslim nations when it comes to tolerance towards other religions?
• Iran warns Switzerland of consequences over minaret ban

Switzerland isn’t an E.U. member state, but the minaret moment could have happened almost anywhere in Europe nowadays — in France, where officials have floated the possibility of banning the burka; in Britain, which elected two representatives of the fascistic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the European Parliament last spring; in Italy, where a bill introduced this year would ban mosque construction and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.

If the more perfect union promised by the Lisbon Treaty is the European elite’s greatest triumph, the failure to successfully integrate millions of Muslim immigrants represents its greatest failure. (Here the writer makes the common mistake to burden Europeans with “the failure to integrate millions of Muslims”- who’s failure is that? One can hardly blame the Europeans for throwing billions of Euro’s in welfare benefits at a hostile creed that has no intention to integrate at all and that sees assimilation as a “crime against humanity”/ed) And the two are intertwined: they’re both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe’s leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.

The European Union probably wouldn’t exist in its current form if the Continent’s elites hadn’t been willing to ignore popular sentiment. (The Lisbon Treaty, for instance, was deliberately designed to bypass most European voters, after a proposed E.U. Constitution was torpedoed by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.) But this political style — forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops — is also how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.

The immigrants came first as guest workers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor shortages, and then as beneficiaries of generous asylum and family reunification laws, designed to salve Europe’s post-colonial conscience. The European elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as antiquated as scimitars and broadswords, and that a liberal, multicultural, post-Christian federation would have no difficulty absorbing new arrivals from more traditional societies. And they decided, too — as Christopher Caldwell writes in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” his wonderfully mordant chronicle of Europe’s Islamic dilemma — that liberal immigration policies “involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on.”

Better if they had let their voters choose. The rate of immigration might have been slower, and the efforts to integrate the new arrivals more strenuous. Instead, Europe’s leaders ended up creating a clash of civilizations inside their own frontiers.

Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain’s fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism, and the threat of terrorism, from London to Madrid.

And it means a rising backlash, in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don’t seem to have anything to say about the problem.

In fairness, it isn’t clear exactly what those leaders could offer at this point. They can’t undo decades of migration. A large Muslim minority is in Europe to stay. Persisting with the establishment’s approach makes a certain sense: keep a lid on prejudice, tamp down extremism, and hope that time will transform the zealous Islam of recent immigrants into a more liberal form of faith, and make the conflict go away.

Or least keep it manageable. Caldwell’s book, the best on the subject to date, has a deeply pessimistic tone, but it shies away from specific predictions about the European future. Other writers are less circumspect, envisioning a Muslim-majority “Eurabia” in which Shariah has as much clout as liberalism.

But even a decadent West is probably stronger than this. The most likely scenario for Europe isn’t dhimmitude; it’s a long period of tension, punctuated by spasms of violence, that makes the Continent a more unpleasant place without fundamentally transforming it.

This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.

They’re right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders — now, and for many years to come.

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The Sydney Moonbat Herald offers a soapbox to  JULIE SZEGO, who predictably gets it all wrong and distorts the rest:   Irrational response to rational anxiety about Islam

KRuddworld & Kruddwatch:

TONY Abbott has attacked Kevin Rudd, saying he needs to learn that he was elected to represent Australia, and not the world.

Swiss poll ‘reflects unease with Islam’

Susanp comments:

No matter what islamic country commits atrocities against Jews, Christians, and other non-muslim people, the West continues to encourage muslim immigration and continues to call islam a “religion of peace”. How much longer can Western political elites get away with their blatant lies about islam? How much longer will we allow them to imperil Western Civilization by importing millions of hostile muslims?

People who will not tolerate religious freedom in their own countries are not good candidates for life in pluralistic, diverse, democratic societies. That explains why muslims do not and will never assimilate and why should they, when they have secluded islamic enclaves waiting for them wherever they go. New country, same islamic routine. We don’t need any more muslims, mosques, islamic centers, or madrassas in the West.  Susanp

Germany’s SPIEGEL buys Tariq Ramadan’s BS:

Swiss Minaret Ban Reflects Fear of Islam, Not Real Problems

Swiss poll ‘reflects unease with Islam’

As a Swiss referendum backs a ban on the building of minarets, the BBC’s Islamic affairs analyst Roger Hardy looks at the often uneasy relationship between Islam and Europe.

It might be argued that Switzerland is a special case without much relevance to the rest of Europe.

It is true enough that the country has its own individual form of popular democracy – and that it is home to only 320,000 Muslims, between 4% and 5% of the population.

But it is not just in Switzerland that the presence of growing Muslim communities has polarised opinion.

A series of controversies from the Rushdie affair 20 years ago to the more recent row over Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad have reflected the unease that many Europeans feel about this relatively new Muslim presence.

This is not confined to a few tabloid newspapers or a few xenophobic right-wing parties.

It is an Islamophobia driven by a variety of factors.

Since the attacks of 9/11 in the United States, and the bombings in Madrid and London, Muslims have often been regarded as a security threat.

They are seen as not just resistant to integration, but determined to impose their values on the Christian or post-Christian societies of the West.

For governments anxious to maintain social harmony at home and good relations with Muslim governments abroad, this poses a set of difficult dilemmas.

And for many of the estimated 15 million Muslims in Western Europe, the Swiss vote will be seen as one more sign that – whatever governments may say – they are simply not welcome.

There are no men in once great Britain. There are only limp dicks….

Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi in “War and Peace in Islam”:

At its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity. Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world. “We have sent you forth to all mankind” (Q. 34:28).

If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da’wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them. In Islam, peace requires that non-Muslims submit to the call of Islam, either by converting or by accepting the status of a religious minority (dhimmi) and paying the imposed poll tax, jizya. World peace, the final stage of the da’wa, is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not aggression but a fulfillment of the Qur’anic command to spread Islam as a way to peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not war (harb), a word that is used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not hurub (the plural of harb) but rather futuhat, acts of “opening” the world to Islam and expressing Islamic jihad. Relations between dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of war, according to the Qur’an and to the authoritative commentaries of Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the da’wa, are blamed for this state of war, for the da’wa can be pursued peacefully if others submit to it.

In other words, those who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them. Only when Muslim power is weak is ‘temporary truce’ (hudna) allowed (Islamic jurists differ on the definition of ‘temporary’).

“The Qur’anic Concept of War”, by Pakistani Brigadier S.K. Malik, it says

(in the preface):

“But in Islam war is waged to establish supremacy of Allah only when every other argument has failed to convince those who reject His Will and work against the very purpose of the creation of mankind.”

Faithfreedom has more>>

Update: Tariq Ramadan springs into action, blames “fear”

from the Guardian (of Islamic terrorists)

The Swiss have voted not against towers, but Muslims. Across Europe, we must stand up to the flame-fanning populists. (Frere Tariq finds them “scary”) There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched?

Simple: Mohammedan’s don’t allow churches or synagogues or temples in their countries. Why should we?   from the Guardian (of Islamic terrorists)

The enlightened progressives at Harry’s Place find this great news “depressing” and call on their readers to “defend-religious-freedom-in-switzerland”- me thinks they should start with once great Britain…..

A Mohammedan demonstrator wears a minaret made from paper on his head to protest against the results of a vote in Switzerland at the Helvetiaplatz square in Zurich November 29, 2009.

Lots more pic’s here from Islamization Watch

“Opposing Islam Causes Terrorism”

For the soldiers of Allah take their religion seriously. These people are not in Switzerland to become Swiss, they came to make Switzerland Islamic. They follow their religious commands, like  ” fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah. (8:39)

“Unbelief is worse than slaughter”

Qur’an 2:191: “And slay them wherever you catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for persecution is worse than slaughter…” and cites various scholars as explaining the verse to mean that “the state of Kufr [unbelief] or Shirk [idolatry] is worse than the act of killing and worse for the believer than being killed. Therefore, preserving life, or any of the other four essentials at the expense of losing the Deen [religion], is a violation of Allah’s Sharia’ah.” In other words, unbelief is worse than killing, thus Muslims should not hesitate to kill unbelieving noncombatants. More>>>