If they have similar conformity laws in other areas (and I believe they do), yes. Preserving the tourist appeal of Switzerland is a valid concern and while I think banning minuets is dumb I’m willing to tolerate it. For example, not too far from me in Hingham, Massachusetts, there are some neighborhoods that ban non-white Christmas lights (usually candles) to preserve the “character” of their neighborhoods. It’s dumb but it’s not a result of bigotry.
As elmwood pointed out here and here, Switzerland already has plenty of 21st Century architectural diversity (including tacky commercial clutter). To repeat what I said: Switzerland is not a theme park.
And here is one of these nefarious minarets the Swiss just voted to ban construction of. I’m no expert on architecture or Swiss culture, but that looks a whole lot more “Swiss” to me than this.
Deeg, you are way, way out of your element. First of all, a minuet is a piece of music; we’re talking about minarets. Secondly: go back to some of the earlier posts in this thread - ETA: helpfully collected above by MEBuckner - where the suggestion that this is about tourism or architecture is discarded. For your reading pleasure, here’s the reaction of the Swiss People’s Party, currently the largest party in Switzerland and one of the main promoters of this referendum
Also, note that the organization that collected the signatures needed to have a referendum initially wanted to have a broader referendum in which the question would be whether or not to outlaw
The reason they did not go through with this is that the institution in Switzerland that approves referendum questions and tests them for constitutionality would not have it, so they thought better of it. So reading this, do you still think this is about making Switzerland safe for tourism?
That’s a strange attitude towards someone’s reaction to being denied their constitutional rights. Speaking of which, one may find an English version of the Swiss constitution here. Some fun articles which I think apply to this particular issue:
As well as quite a few churches in Indonesia.
Malaysia is predominately Muslim also; however, there are houses of worship for other faiths there. There’s a nice Hindu temple near the train station in Johor Bahru.
They’re Belgian citizens, certainly. You’re right though that there’s more of a Flemish national identity than a Walloon national identity.
Most of them are; it’s not as if Switzerland has a long and rich Islamic tradition. They have several “official” religions and all of them are Christian. Not every country feels the need to be the United States.
Sure, the vote has at least the seeds of xenophobia, but it’s hardly surprising. A Swiss friend of mine seemed proud to tell me that women only got the right to vote in St. Gallen, one of the most conservative cantons, in the 1970s.
And don’t forget the beautiful Christ Church in Melaka, dating back to the Dutch days.
I’m not Swiss so I cannot speak for them but there is a feeling in Europe that there have been too many immigrants from the Middle East and Africa coming in great numbers in a short period of time. It’s very difficult to openly debate the issue without being called a racist etc. A lot of people are asking, however, how many are too many? 1, 1,000 100 million? The numbers are not insignificant and it behooves us to ask why so many choose such small countries such as Holland and Switzerland. I feel it’s a very legitimate frustration as, for example, there have been clear abuses of the asylum system which was never meant to handle the sheer volume of immigrats who have taken advantage of the system.
Aren’t you an immigrant?
Sure, most of them are, but according to this page nearly one-third of all Muslims in Switzerland were born there. That is a substantial percentage, and means that this has to be addressed as something other than an issue of immigrants being obliged to adapt to the country they move to. Which magellan01 has repeatedly refused to do.
According to the page I linked to above, only 5.6% of Muslims in Switzerland are from Arab countries (either the Middle East or Africa). More than half are from the Balkans.
Right, but even in those cases, most of the Muslims who were born there are children of immigrants. Islam is a foreign religion that’s only come to Switzerland recently. It’s not a traditional Swiss religion the way that Catholicism, Calvinism or Judaism are. It’s practiced by Turks, Bosnians, and Albanians who live in Switzerland, not the Swiss itself.
That’s probably generally true, although the percentage of conversions is not clear. There are bound to be some; certainly here in Ireland there are a surprising number of Irish converts among the Muslim community.
But in any case, that’s not the point. These are people who were born and raised in Switzerland. They did not “go to live in another country”, as was being argued in the posts I was responding to.
Amazing! I never knew Christianity came from Switzerland! I always thought it came from the Middle East. As for Judaism- don’t you remember that for most of history Europe has derided Jews as practicing an alien middle-eastern religion?
I am. A legal immigrant. I never claimed asylum, never worked illegally etc. And so what? This means I have to be mute on this issue?
Muslims make up a non insignifcant portio of the Swiss population, how does the current figure compare with say the figure in 1970? Further, I noted in my first post that Eastern European immigration was just as big of an issue.
Switzerland is a small country with finite resources. It really doesn’t have the labour needs for a mass of low to unskilled workers that it has attracted. Instead, there is a sense that it is being exploited for it’s high standards of living and benefits to immigrants. Without free and open discussion about this issue (and potentially a moratorium on immigration), then I think these sort of reactions are going to become more common.
And 30% of the people working in Switzerland are foreigners. But you are not welcome to become a national and immigrants or, worse, halfbreeds get insulted left and right. One of my coworkers in Basel was the son of a Swiss mother and Hungarian father; people kept asking him with a snerk “what’s this lastname, Portuguese?” “sigh no, Hungarian, my father was from Hungary” “oh, so you’re Hungarian!” “no, I’m Swiss, I was born in Switzerland and my mother is Swiss” “but you can’t be Swiss, your name is Hungarian, you’re Hungarian!”
One day. And the next. And the next. For all ten months I spent there. The bosses would join in on “the fun.” Those of us with even more “exotic” provenances would try to intervene the first few times we saw it but learn very fast that it accomplished nothing. Whenever a new foreigner joined the team, the bashing would take place in English - it was the only time the Germans and Germanswiss would speak among themselves in English, to make sure we got the message. Once we’d got it, they’d go back to “poking fun at the halfbreed” in German.
For such an awful, racist place lots of non-Swiss seem to be in a hurry to get there.
It’s for the great chocolate and watches, you know.
Also Malaysia is the place that insisted that some (rather amusing) buildings belonging to a religious community had to be destroyed and its members persecuted (Malaysia ‘teapot cult’ attacked). And the place where they have actually prohibited non-Muslims from using a word (Malaysia withholds ‘Allah Bibles’). And the place where conversion out of Islam is very problematic, both from official persecution and from public persecution. Leaving Islam for another faith or for atheism is also a problem in many other Muslim countries. And while non-Islam religious buildings are not illegal in Malaysia, getting permissions to build one is often extremely difficult and non-licensed buildings have been destroyed. Yet Malaysia is one of the more open and religious liberal “Muslim nations” – but a far way to go before it reach the level of Switzerland. With or without minaret ban.