Anne Applebaum has a silly piece in Slate about the Swiss Minarets controversy
She argues that the voters who supported the ban weren’t anti-Muslim they were against Islamic extremism. Of course other comments in her article suggest that “extremism” to her is wearing hijab.
There are at least two major problems with this argument. At the heart of the problem lies the obvious fact that minarets bear no relationship to extremism. So, what in the world does it mean to say that the vote was due to fear of ‘extremism.’ To say that people are opposed to every Muslim or innocuous aspects of Muslim or Islamic cultures because they are afraid of extremism not because they inherently hate every Muslim is a distinction without a difference as far as I’m concerned.
Second, banning minarets does nothing to prevent extremism and in fact high profile emotional campaigns by right wingers for symbolic expressions of anti-Muslim feeling is surely more likely to contribute to extremism than to promote integration.
