Switzerland this week revealed its dark side in voting for a ban on the construction of minarets. The campaign, initiated by right-wing populist parties, was hardly subtle. Posters featured minarets as missiles on a national flag, and a burqa-clad woman. How could the civilised Swiss succumb to this absurdity?
One theory has been advanced by Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and one of the big names at Melbourne's Parliament of the World's Religions. The populists' strategy was to play up the idea that the Swiss were under siege from Muslims, he said. "Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people," wrote Ramadan in The Guardian. A sound theory, but he then goes further. "Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burqa; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence, cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands — and so on."
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