Switzerland Welcomes Radicalization

by Judith Bergman • June 20, 2018 at 5:00 am

There are approximately 250 mosques in Switzerland, but the authorities do not know who finances them. By rejecting the proposal compelling mosques to disclose who finances them, the Swiss authorities can now remain willfully blind.
The Muslim World League is behind "a whole network of radically-oriented mosques in Switzerland... with the clear intention of spreading Salafist thought here". — Saïda Keller-Messahli, expert on Islam in Switzerland.
Above all, the Swiss government seems not to have considered the rights of Swiss non-Muslim citizens, who are the ones left to live with the consequences of the government's ill-thought-out policies.

(Switzerland photo by Monk/Wikimedia Commons)

Switzerland has just rejected a proposed law preventing mosques from accepting money from abroad, and compelling them to declare where their financial backing comes from and for what purpose the money will be used. According to the proposal, imams also would have been obliged to preach in one of the Swiss national languages.

While the proposal narrowly passed in the lower house of parliament already in September 2017, the upper house recently rejected it. The proposal was modeled on regulations in Austria, where already in 2015, a law banning foreign funding of religious groups was passed. The Austrian law aims to counter extremism by requiring imams to speak German, prohibiting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria, and stressing the precedence of Austrian law over Islamic sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

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Turkey: Erdogan's "Holy War" Obsession

by Burak Bekdil • June 20, 2018 at 4:00 am

When non-Muslims deny Muslim minorities the rights that Muslim-majority countries systematically deny non-Muslim minorities, extremist Muslims in Turkey seem to have the habit of threatening non-Muslim lands with holy war.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who spoke of "a war between the cross and the crescent" because the Austrian government closed down seven mosques, does not seem to bother with any of those visible, documented cases of religious discrimination against non-Muslims and against Islam's minority sects.
Muslim leaders complain of travel bans on some Muslim nations, but many Muslim countries have travel bans against other Muslims in addition to banning Israelis.

American Pastor Andrew Brunson, pictured with his wife Norine, has been in a Turkish jail for more than a year and a half on spurious charges of terrorism and espionage. He faces up to 35 years in prison.

When non-Muslims deny Muslim minorities the rights that Muslim-majority countries systematically deny non-Muslim minorities, extremist Muslims in Turkey seem to have the habit of threatening non-Muslim lands with holy war.

"Soon religious wars will break out in Europe. You are taking Europe toward an abyss. That's the way it's going," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, predicted in a 2017 speech. The minister was angry with the European states that had banned Turkish Islamist political shows in their territories.

On June 10, Erdoğan said: "These measures taken by the Austrian prime minister are, I fear, leading the world toward a war between the cross and the crescent."

So, once again, we are hearing promises of holy war, and an angry Islamist threatening a Christian state because a Christian state had decided to close down seven mosques and expel some 60 Turkish-funded imams as part of a crackdown on extremist Islam.

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