Voters in Switzerland have approved a ban on the construction of minarets on mosques, official results show.
I agree that this is discriminatory and likely to fuel Islamophobia in Switzerland, but I cannot help feeling that this is an own goal by Muslims.
I don't know what the different parts of the Muslim community in Switzerland have been saying and how they have been behaving but if they are anything like Britain's Muslim community then the conclusion must be that they have brought this onto themselves.
In Britain, most Muslims keep to themselves – many are integrated into British society and many others are not and live in semi-ghettoes in places like Leicester, Bradford and parts of Birmingham and East London. On the whole, they are apolitical, just like the native Britons.
However, a very small minority of Muslims – small but vociferous – now and again utter nonsense, like wanting Sharia law in the country. They already have a kind of Sharia if they want to use it, in the form of Sharia courts with powers to rule on Muslim civil cases. These idiots are not content with these courts – they want them for everybody, Muslims and non-Muslims, even though the vast majority of the country is nominally Christian.
Now, I don't know anything about the politics of the Muslim community in Switzerland but if the Swiss have their own equivalent of those in Britain who advocate Sharia, then I can understand – not agree with, but understand – why 57 per cent of the Swiss voted in favour of a ban on the construction of minarets on mosques, which they see as a symbol of the perceived threat of Sharia.
I was born a Muslim and I am no Islamophobe. But most enlightened Muslims will probably agree with me that Sharia is a bad thing and, whether in the Muslim world, the West or elsewhere, we should all work together to exorcise it from our societies. Sharia was good and progressive 1,500 years ago. But it is the law of one-and-a-half millennium ago, not of the 21st century.
One last word about the hypocrisy and double standards of the British media when it comes to Sharia. The largely racially-prejudiced and Judaeo-centric British media can prattle on endlessly about the "threat" of Sharia in Britain but who is talking about the Jewish Beth Din, the rabbinical courts set up by a UK statute more than 100 years ago and still recognized within the legal system? Anyone who knows anything about the Torah will tell you stories that will make you cringe with horror. But who would dare say anything when most British politicians and media are in the pockets of the Jewish lobby!