By Kanchan Gupta
Turkeys Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was being faithful to his creed when he declared, Mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our soldiers. Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a fascist Sunni imam with a huge following among those who subscribe to the Muslim Brotherhoods antediluvian worldview, was more to the point when he thundered at an event organised by Londons then Labour mayor Ken Livingstone, The West may have the atom bomb, we have the human bomb. Sheikh Qaradawi, who is of Egyptian origin, frequently exhorts Muslims not to rest till they have conquered Christian Rome and believes throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. Islamic schools in Britain funded by Saudi Arabia use textbooks describing Jews as apes and Christians as pigs. Theo Van Gogh, who along with writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali produced Submission, a film on the plight of Muslim women under shariah, was shot dead by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim, in Amsterdam. Rallies by radical Islamists, which were once rare, are now a common feature in European capitals with banners and placards denouncing democracy as the problem and Islam as the solution.
Such crude though accurate assertions of Islamism, coupled with the relentless jihad being waged overtly exemplified by the London Underground bombings and the riots in Parisian suburbs and covertly as exposed by Channel 4s stunning investigation in its Dispatches programme titled Undercover Mosque, have now begun to raise hackles in Europe. The first signs of an incipient backlash came in the form of French President Nicolas Sarkozy demanding a ban on the burqa (the shariah-imposed hijab is already banned at public schools in France). Any doubts that may have lingered about Europes patience with Islams rage boys running thin have been removed by last Sundays referendum in Switzerland where people have voted overwhelmingly to ban the construction of minarets which are no longer seen to be representing faith. For 57.5 per cent of Swiss citizens, the minaret, an obligatory adjunct to a mosque which is used by the muezzin to call the faithful to prayers five times a day, is now a political symbol against integration. They view each new minaret as marking the transmogrification of Christian Europe into Islamic Eurabia. The Islamic minaret, according to Swiss Peoples Party legislator Ulrich Schluer, has come to represent the effort to establish shariah on European soil. Hence the counter-effort to ban their construction.
Last Sundays referendum and the massive vote against Islamic minarets is by no means an unexpected development, as is being pretended by Islamists and those who find it fashionable to defend Islamism or are scared of taking a stand lest they be accused of Islamophobia. Resentment against assertive political Islam has been building up in Switzerland for almost a decade, triggered by refugees from Yugoslavias many civil wars seeking to irreversibly change the Swiss way of life to suit their twisted notions of Islams supremacy. For the past many years the Swiss Peoples Party and the Federal Democratic Union, both avowedly right-of-centre organisations, have been trying to initiate an amendment to Article 72 of Switzerlands Constitution to include the sentence, The building of minarets is prohibited. After doing the cantonal rounds, both the parties set up a joint Egerkinger Committee in 2007 to take their campaign to the federal level. The November 29 referendum is the outcome of that campaign.
The resultant vote 57.5 per cent endorsing the proposed amendment to the Constitution with 42.5 opposing it provides some interesting insights. For instance, the Swiss Government and Parliament, which are opposed to the amendment, clearly suffer from a disconnect with the Swiss masses. The voting pattern also shows that the spurious cosmopolitan spirit of Zurich, Geneva and Basel, where people voted against the ban by a narrow margin, is not shared by most Swiss. The initiative has got 19.5 of the 23 cantonal votes Basel city Canton, with half-a-vote and the largest Muslim population in Switzerland, barely defeated the initiative with 51.61 per cent people voting against it. This only goes to show that the Left-liberal intelligentsia may dominate television studio debates, as is often seen in our country, but it neither influences public opinion nor persuades those whose perception of the reality is not cluttered by bogus tolerance of the intolerant.
Daniel Pipes, who is among the few scholars of Islam not scared to be labelled an Islamophobe, is of the view that the Swiss vote represents a turning point for European Islam, one comparable to the Rushdie affair of 1989. That a large majority of Swiss who voted on Sunday explicitly expressed anti-Islamic sentiments potentially legitimates such sentiments across Europe and opens the way for others to follow suit. As always, Pipes is prescient. An opinion poll conducted by the French Institute for Public Opinion after the Swiss referendum shows 46 per cent of French citizens are in favour of banning the construction of minarets, 40 per cent support the idea, while 14 per cent are indecisive. That it was the usually quiet, low profile, un-newsworthy, politically boring, neutral Swiss who suddenly roared their fears about Islam only enhances their votes impact, says Pipes. The post-referendum opinion poll in France shows that one in two French citizens would not only like to see minarets banned, but along with them mosques, too.
Yet, it may be too early to suggest that the tide of Islamism will now have to contend with the fury of a backlash. Governments and organisations that find merit in toeing the line of least resistance have reacted harshly to the Swiss vote; rather than try and understand why more and more people are beginning to loathe, if not hate, Islamism, a case is being made all over again for the need to be tolerant with those whose sole desire is to subjugate the world to Islam. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Navi Pillay, who is yet to utter a word about the suppression of freedom and denial of dignity in Islamic countries or the shocking violation of human rights by jihadis, has been scathing in her response, describing the Swiss vote as a discriminatory, deeply divisive and thoroughly unfortunate step. The Organisation of Islamic Conference has warned that the vote will serve to spread hatred and intolerance towards Muslims. The OICs complaint would carry credibility if it were to demand tolerance towards non-Muslims in its member-countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and denounce Islams preachers of hate. |
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The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.