If the blog response to TR is anything to go by, it could have terrified voters into supporting the bill as well.

On the other hand, needless to mention that Tariq himself is not only a swiss citizen but was born and raised there, so he is aware what is happing.

Anyway, I am aganist generalizing, stereotyping and extremism in anything.

a single TV commerecial with a rabbi and a imam would have done more to forestall the bill than all the posters have done to promote it.

I think the larger discussion is very interesting. I try not to pontificate about Muslims in Europe since I don’t have any personal feel for their situation. I would resist generalizations of either kind — since it would seem that while there is a significant lack of acceptance of Islam as being swiss, there is also significant and widespread opposition to this vote on various levels of European society.

[Ramadan is] right, of course, the minarets are just a pretext, but I’m surprised that he’s not aware that kosher slaughter has been banned in Switzerland for more than a century, and they’re now considering banning importing kosher slaughtered meat into the country as well.

The original reason for the ban was simple:

At the time, Jews had recently been granted full civil rights and some Swiss citizens feared an invasion of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, who they considered to be unassimilable, foreign and unreliable. By banning the performance of a core Jewish ritual, the Swiss people found a disguised way to limit the immigration of Jews into Switzerland

Tariq Ramadan is fooling himself when he thinks that what Judaism couldn’t do in hundreds of years of being in Europe, Islam could do within the short span of a couple of generations. The more Muslims assert that “Islam is Swiss”, the more the Swiss are going to actively reject the notion.