Germans more negative towards Muslims than other Europeans
Only about one third of Germans think positively of their Muslim neighbors, a much lower proportion than in other western European countries, according to a new poll published on Thursday. In contrast, 62 percent of Dutch and 56 percent of French people responding to the TNS Emnid survey indicated they had positive attitudes toward Muslims.
Detlef Pollack, a Muenster University sociologist who led the study, attributed Germans’ views to their lack of contact with Muslims compared to people in other nations surveyed. “The more often you meet Muslims, the more you view them as generally positive,” he said.
The survey broke down the German results into western and eastern responses, reflecting continuing divisions in the once-divided country. Only 34 percent in the west and 26 percent in the east had positive impressions of Muslims, it said.
Contact with Muslims also showed regional differences, with 40 percent of westerners but only 16 percent of easterners saying they occasionally met Muslims. French people appear to have the most contact with Muslims, 66 percent of those responding saying they had such contacts.
The survey was conducted before former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin plunged Germany into a heated debate over Muslim integration with a controversial best-selling book published in August.
Read the full story by Eric Kelsey here. There plenty more in this study — click here for the English-language press release.
Muslim group aims to reverse Swiss minaret ban
A Swiss Islamic group has said it was launching a popular initiative to reverse a ban on building new minarets in the Alpine state, saying voters would decide differently if the matter came up for referendum again. Last year, 57.5 percent of Swiss voters approved a ban on the construction of new minarets, drawing international condemnation. The government had rejected the initiative as violating the constitution.
The plan to reverse the minaret ban comes a day after a majority of Swiss voted to back expulsion of foreigners convicted of serious crimes, the latest sign of growing hostility to immigration.
The text of the proposed initiative will state that the ban on building minarets is to be stricken from the constitution, the Central Islamic Council of Switzerland said on Monday. “Today we can clearly say that accepting the ban has brought neither the voters nor this country any profit,” said Nicolas Blancho, president of the group. “This (new referendum) will also show that we respect democracy and stick to local law.”
The Berne-based Council says it has 1,700 members. In May the Federal Migration Bureau excluded it from an inter-cultural dialogue, saying it first needed to condemn the notion of stoning of women as a punishment.The Swiss-born Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan called him “a marginal figure in the Muslim landscape.” About 350,000 Muslims live in Switzerland, which has a population of 7.7 million.
When asked why voters would decide differently should the question of minarets come up again for referendum, Oscar Bergamin, an advisor to the group, answered: “People today are much better able to differentiate. They’re better informed and have time to become still better informed in coming years.”
Both the expulsion and the minarets initiative were put forward by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which has mined increasing fear about immigration in recent years to become the country’s biggest political movement. Referendums are common in Switzerland and have been held on issues ranging from health insurance to smoking bans.
Europe cited in US religious freedoms report
The United States voiced concern on Wednesday over deteriorating religious freedoms in many parts of the world, including several European countries where “harsh measures” limiting religious expression have been put in place.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled the latest State Department report on global religious freedom, which rates countries around the world.
“Religious freedom is both a fundamental human right and an essential element to any stable, peaceful, thriving society,” Clinton told a news conference
The report cited North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, China, Sudan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan among the worst offenders, repeating criticisms the United States makes almost every year.
But it also took note of countries such as France and Switzerland where voters and lawmakers have passed laws forbidding Muslim face veils and new mosque minarets.
After minarets, will Switzerland ban burqas too?
Full Muslim face veils could become the next divisive religious issue to take centre stage in Switzerland, where voters last November approved a measure banning the construction of new minarets. The Swiss federal government said in February it saw no need for a “burqa ban.” Politicians at the national level say there’s no “burqa problem” in Switzerland. But few thought there was a “minaret problem” either, until the question was put to a national referendum and the minaret ban campaigners won.
Like the minarets, of which there are only four in Switzerland, there are very few veiled women in Switzerland. The most likely place to see them is Geneva, where many rich Middle Easterners do their banking. Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey recently told the newspaper Blick that she’d once seen fully veiled women there and was “furious, because the burqa is a symbol of the enslavement of women.” But she insisted to her interviewers: “I’m against burqas. And I’m against a burqa ban … we don’t have a burqa problem in Switzerland. Very few women wear a burqa here. Have you even seen one?”
Similarly, Economy Minister Doris Leuthard, who is also serving this year as the country’s president, has said “we’ve got much tougher, more important problems.” Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf has said “we don’t really have a burqa problem in Switzerland now.” She did add, though, that she was watching to see whether a “parallel society” was developing. “We are not ready to let our legal system and our values be compromised,” she said.
Down at the cantonal level, though, things may be moving. The legislature in the canton of Aargau has voted overwhelmingly to propose a national bill to outlaw full face veils. Two more canton legislatures, in Bern and Solothurn, are reported to be ready to do the same.
Will these initiatives lead to a national ban? It’s too early to say. But the minaret ban idea started at the regional level, too, in Zurich canton, and turned into a national referendum that ended in a surprise. It will be worth watching to see if Switzerland looks likely to follow the example of Belgium and France.
European Muslims face growing discrimination – OSI report
Muslims are facing increased discrimination across Europe and urgent action needs to be taken at local, national and EU levels to tackle the problem, according to a report published on Tuesday.
The Open Society Institute, a private foundation set up by billionaire financier George Soros, said many Muslims suffered unfair treatment along with social and economic disadvantages, despite being integral to the cities in which they lived.
“Europe needs to live up to its promise of an inclusive, open society,” said Nazia Hussain, director of OSI’s At Home in Europe project. “Switzerland’s recent ban on minarets is a clear sign that anti-Muslim sentiment is a real problem in Europe.”
The OSI report, based on more than 2,000 interviews in 11 cities in seven countries — the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Britain, France and Sweden — said Muslims faced higher unemployment, had lower-paid jobs and suffered higher poverty rates. Some Muslim pupils faced racism and prejudice, and were confronted by lower expectations from teachers.
Here’s a link to the full report.
oh my,this story comes as a big surprise. racisim and discrimination in europe? who would have ever thought that would happen?…..please, europe is what it always was and will be in the future.
Swiss minaret ban reversal vote in pipeline
Swiss liberals are considering a new referendum to overturn the ban on building new minarets in the country, Sunday papers reported, as Libya’s Muamar Gaddafi warned the ban played into the hands of terrorists.
Club Helvetique, a group of over 20 Swiss intellectuals, will draw up an action plan to overturn the ban, which has drawn widespread criticism abroad and prompted hundreds of people to take to the streets this weekend in Zurich, Basel and Berne.
“A new initiative is the most democratic way of achieving this,” constitutional lawyer Jörg Müller told Sonntag.
Voters adopted the ban in a referendum a week ago, defying the government and parliament which had warned the right-wing initiative violated the Swiss constitution, freedom of religion and a cherished tradition of tolerance.
Two complaints questioning the legality of ban had already been handed to Switzerland’s Federal Court, Sonntag said.
Swiss politician apologises over cemetery ban call
The leader of Switzerland’s centrist Christian Democrats (CVP) has apologised for calling for a ban on new Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, just days after Swiss voters approved a halt to building minarets.
“I am sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” CVP leader Christophe Darbellay told the tabloid Blick daily on Friday, adding: “It was about the principle that we all belong to the same Swiss society … but you can’t explain that in 15 seconds.”
Darbellay provoked protests when he told local television earlier in the week that Switzerland should not allow the building of separate cemeteries for Jews or Muslims in future.
The Conference of European Rabbis criticised his comments on Thursday and said the Swiss minaret ban will fuel xenophobia and risks making Jews the next target of religious intolerance. “We don’t have a situation of the extreme right in Europe attacking Jews because they are content to attack Muslims,” Philip Carmel, the international relations director for the Conference of European Rabbis, told Reuters.
“But the Swiss example is classic: it’s not just Muslims who are going to be targeted by the extreme right.”
Darbellay has also proposed a ban on the Muslim burqa, or face veil. His comments are seen as a response to the rise of the populist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) which campaigned for the minaret ban.
Bishop of Arabia dismayed by minaret ban in Swiss homeland
Many supporters of the Swiss ban on minarets justified it with the argument that limitations on mosques in Europe were permissible because Christians can’t build churches in some Muslim countries. This was also a recurring theme in comments to FaithWorld (see here and here). But doesn’t this tit-for-tat approach simply provide further arguments for Muslim authorities who don’ t want to concede more religious freedom to their Christian minorities?
One man uniquely placed to judge this is the Swiss-born Roman Catholic Bishop Paul Hinder. Based in Abu Dhabi, he is at the frontline of the “reciprocity” debate on treatment of Christian minorities in the Middle East. In an interview in today’s French Catholic daily La Croix, Hinder says he was “dismayed” that the minaret ban passed in a referendum last Sunday. “For us Christians in Arabia, it will certainly not make our work easier, although some might think they have done us a favour by saying yes to this initiative,” he said.
“Nobody can deny that the ban on minarets punishes a specific religious community, whose members in Switzerland have done nothing wrong,” he added. “I certainly understand the irrational fears of many Swiss faced with the heightened visibility of religion that they previously knew only by hearsay but now find right at their doorsteps or in the apartment next door.”
Swiss who supported the ban seem to think that Muslims can live in Switzerland as long as they keep out of sight, Hinder said. “If that’s so,” he remarked, “then a mosque should look like a Swiss chalet and the call to prayer, if any, must be done from the balcony with an Alpine horn!” In his opinion, a minaret was no less foreign to the Swiss landscape than the golden arches of McDonald’s “which seems to have almost a force of religious attraction for many people.”
“Hopefully this result, which is surprising for me, will at least lead to a more thorough debate on the question of how far religion has the right or even duty to be visible in society, “ he said, adding that the referendum result will certainly not go down in the history books as “a glorious page for direct democracy.”
What do you think? Should western countries respond to restrictions on Christian minorities in Muslim countries by putting limits on Muslims in the west?
These Muslim haters used to hate Jews some time back, Same people were behind Genocide of 6 million Jewish people, Now they are coming up false stories of Islamic atrocities on Christian countries, while attacking Many Muslim countries and destroying them .
Search google images with this text “Church Masque” , There is not a single Christian majority country in world where both Masque and Churches are side by side, You will find hundreds of photos from Muslim majority countries where Churches and Masques are side by
side. So that means when Christian are majority they don’t allow masque near their Churches. but tolerant Muslims do.
White Christianity is totalitarian ideology, They don’t tolerate any body who does not look like them , talk like them or walk like them. Red Indians were first victims of this intolerant cult, than blacks, than people in their Colonies, than Jews (WW2), Now Muslims
are new target of this cult.
U.N. rights boss denounces Swiss ban on minarets
The top U.N. rights official in Geneva has said Switzerland’s ban on building minarets was “deeply divisive” and at odds with its international legal obligations.
Navi Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement on Tuesday that prohibiting an architectural structure linked to Islam or any religion was “clearly discriminatory.” She said the ban was “discriminatory, deeply divisive and a thoroughly unfortunate step for Switzerland to take, and risks putting the country on a collision course with its international human rights obligations.”
Pillay’s spokesman, Rupert Colville, was asked at a news briefing whether this meant that Switzerland was violating the pact. “It’s not quite the same as saying it’s a violation, but it is a very short step short of saying that,” he said. Read the whole story here.
In Strasbourg, the Council of Europe, a European human rights watchdog, said the ban raised concern over “whether fundamental rights of individuals, protected by international treaties, should be subject to popular votes.”
Thorbjoern Jagland, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, said in a statement that the ban was linked to issues such as freedom of expression and of religion, as well as the prohibition of discrimination guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights.
“Therefore, it would be up to the European Court of Human Rights to decide, should an application be submitted to the Court, whether the prohibition of building new minarets is compatible with the Convention,” he added.
Here’s a Reuters video on reactions to the vote:
Search google images with this text “Church Masque” , There is not a single Christian majority country in world where both Masque and Churches are side by side, You will find hundreds of photos from Muslim majority countries where Churches and Masques are side by side. So that means when Christian are majority they don’t allow masque near their Churches. but tolerant Muslims do.
White Christianity is totalitarian ideology, They don’t tolerate any body who does not look like them , talk like them or walk like them. Red Indians were first victims of this intolerant cult, than blacks, than people in their Colonies, than Jews (WW2), Now Muslims are new target of this cult.
The Swiss minaret ban and other trends for Islam in Europe
Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets on mosques there raises the question of whether anything similar might happen elsewhere in Europe. Researching this for an analysis of the vote today, I found experts distinguished between actually banning an Islamic symbol such as the minaret and using the minaret example to fan voters’ fears and boost a (usually far-right) party’s chances at the polls. It seems Switzerland’s trademark direct democracy system makes it possibly the only country in Europe where both seem possible right now.
This distinction could become more important in coming months as far-right parties, as they are expected to do, try to exploit the minaret ban to rally support for their anti-immigration policies. The Swiss far right has already suggested going for a ban of full facial veils (aka burqas and niqabs) next. Marine Le Pen, deputy leader of France’s National Front, has called for a referendum in France not only on minarets, but also on immigration and a wide array of other issues linked to Muslims. Filip Dewinter, head of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, said he wanted to change zoning laws there to ban “buildings that damage the cultural identity of the surrounding neighbourhood”. It remains to be seen how far they can get with these demands.
At the same time, the consensus reaction from politicians and the press across Europe today was critical of the Swiss vote. Most of the excited calls for more action come from fringe parties the majority parties keep at a distance (except the Northern League, which is part of Silvio Berlusconi’s government in Italy). Referendums are not as easy to stage in other European countries and are even banned in Germany, where the up-and-coming team of Hitler andGoebbels used them before 1933 to rally support for the Nazi Party.
Muslims in Europe were naturally shocked by the vote and worried about what might come next. The possibility of further pressure on them cannot be ignored because globalisation is forcing European societies to deal with increasing religious, ethnic and cultural diversity. While not denying that pressure, which naturally does not make life welcoming for Muslims here, let’s look at a few trends that seem to get drowned out in the headlines.
The first is that mosques are now part of the European landscape. There were some quite raw confrontations over them in the 1980s and 1990s in the countries with bigger and older Muslim communities such as France, Britain and Germany. There are still some heated debates, as the uproar over the plan for a large Turkish mosque in Cologne showed. But for the most part, those mosque projects have gone ahead. In the Cologne case, despite repeated criticism and far-right protests, the new mosque will have two 55-meter minarets — tall for an average church, but nothing like the 157-meter spires above the city’s famous Catholic cathedral.
Just like a bell tower or spire is normal but not necessary for a church, the minaret and the loud public call to prayer — both regular features in Muslim countries — are optional elements for mosques. Almost no mosques in Europe use loudspeakers for the adhan, preferring to keep the call to prayer within the mosque, and many of them do without a minarets or agree to shorten their planned heights to make them fit into the local cityscape. These details can be negotiated constructively, if both sides — repeat, both sides — bring the necessary good will to the table.
Another fact is that there is now roughly enough mosque space for Europe’s Muslims, according to recent estimates, so the phase of active expansion of mosques and prayer rooms — which created the initial tensions with majority populations — may be waning. In some areas, a new one has started as Muslim communities take root and want to “trade up” from makeshift prayer rooms to better and more visible mosques. That can create new tensions. This was the case in Cologne, where Turkish-German Muslims are swapping a mosque set up in a former factory for the elegant new purpose-built mosque that caused so much controversy. But these controversies take place in cities where many locals now know some Muslim neighbours and take their side in the conflict. Do difficulties remain? Sure. But do situations develop? Certainly. Many critical commentators don’t take that dynamism enough into account.
Just because most Christians no longer consider most of the teachings of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) to be relevant today does not mean Muslims are going to accept that attitude toward the Qur’an, regardless of what governments impose on their Muslim populations.
Geez! I can’t believe how easily Europeans get bent out of shape!
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Thilo Sarrazin is of arab descent, the only thing which made him a German was his family adopting the protest religion. The German population is strictly under the control of the church, who pay ten percent of their income to the Church, unless they opt to leave the church. The church in germany is a very powerful institution in Germany and have deliberately kept its followers unaware of Islam, says the former chancellor of Germany Helmuth Schmidt. The xenophobia in Germany saw its climax during the third Reich when Jews became the main group which suffered. There is a lot of improvement in their outlook but certain elements such as the sarrazin keep bringing up Nazi philosophies about different races.
The statistics are misplaced and needs to be qualified.
Rex Minor