Informed Comment

Switzerland on Sunday voted by 58 percent in favor of banning minarets.

This campaign poster was banned for being racist, but apparently the goal of the poster, now that is all right.

Swissinfo surveys the headlines in Switzerland Monday morning and finds that the press there universally condemned and expressed dismay at Sunday’s vote. Editors expressed consternation at the inevitable tarnishing of Switzerland’s image and worried about the consequences. Will there be boycotts? Sanctions? Appeals to the European Court of Human Rights?

I can anticipate right now arguments to excuse this outbreak of bigotry in the Alps that will be advanced by our own fringe Right, of Neoconservatives and those who think, without daring saying it, that “white culture” is superior to all other world civilizations and deserves to dominate or wipe the others out.

The first is that it is only natural that white, Christian Europeans should be afraid of being swamped by people adhering to an alien, non-European religion.

Switzerland is said to be 5 percent Muslim, and of course this proportion is a recent phenomenon there and so unsettling to some. But Islam is not new to Europe. Parts of what is now Spain were Muslim for 700 years, and much of the eastern stretches of what is now the European Union were ruled by Muslims for centuries and had significant Muslim populations. Cordoba and Sarajevo are not in Asia or Latin America. They are in Europe. And they are cities formed in the bosom of Muslim civilization.

The European city of Cordoba in the medieval period has been described thusly:

‘ For centuries, Cordoba used to be the jewel of Europe, which dazzled visitors from the North. Visitors marveled at what seemed to them an extraordinary general prosperity; one could travel for ten miles by the light of street lamps, and along an uninterrupted series of buildings. The city is said to have had then 200,000 houses, 600 mosques, and 900 public baths. Over the quiet Guadalquivir Arab engineers threw a great stone bridge of seventeen arches, each fifty spans in width. One of the earliest undertakings of Abd al-Rahman I was an aqueduct that brought to Cordova an abundance of fresh water for homes, gardens, fountains, and baths.’

So if the Swiss think that Islam is alien to Europe, then they are thinking of a rather small Europe, not the Europe that now actually exists. Minarets dotted Cordoba. The Arnaudia mosque in Banja Luca dates back to the 1400s; it was destroyed along with dozens of others by fanatics in the civil war that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

As for the likely comeback,that Muslims came to Europe from the 700s of the Common Era as conquerors, unlike Christianity, actually both were conquering state religions. It was the conversion of an emperor that gave a favored position to Christianity in Europe, which was a small minority on the continent at the time. And Charlemagne forcibly imposed Christianity on the German tribes up to the Elbe. In the cases both of European Christianity and European Islam, there were many willing converts among the ordinary folk, who thrilled to itinerant preachers or beautiful chanting.

Others will allege that Muslims do not grant freedom of religion to Christians in their midst. First of all, this allegation is not true if we look at the full range of the countries where the 1.5 billion Muslims live. Among the nearly 60 Muslim-majority states in the world, only one, Saudi Arabia, forbids the building of churches. Does Switzerland really want to be like Saudi Arabia?

Here is a Western Christian description of the situation of Christians in Syria:

‘ In Syria, as in all other Arab countries of the Middle East except Saudi Arabia, freedom of religion is guaranteed in law . . . We should like to point out too that in Syria and in several other countries of the region, Christian churches benefit from free water and electricity supplies, are exempt from several types of tax and can seek building permission for new churches (in Syria, land for these buildings are granted by the State) or repair existing ones.

It should be noted too that there are Christian members of Parliament and of government in Syria and other countries, sometimes in a fixed number (as in Lebanon and Jordan.)

Finally, we note that a new personal statute was promulgated on 18 June 2006 for the various Christian Churches found in Syria, which purposely and verbatim repeats most of the rules of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches promulgated by Pope John Paul II. ‘

That is, in Muslim-majority Syria, the government actually grants land to Christians for the building of churches, along with free water and electricity. Christians have their own personal status legal code, straight from the Vatican. (It is because Christians have their own law in the Middle East, backed by the state, that Muslims in the West are puzzled as to why they cannot practice their personal status code.) Christians have freedom of religion, though there are sensitivities about attempts to convert others (as there are everywhere in the Middle East, including Israel). And Christians are represented in the legislature. With Switzerland’s 5 percent Muslim population, how many Muslim members of parliament does it have?

It will also be alleged that in Egypt some clergymen gave fatwas or legal opinions that building churches is a sin, and it will be argued that Christians have been attacked by Muslims in Upper Egypt.

These arguments are fallacies. You cannot compare the behavior of some Muslim fanatics in rural Egypt to the laws and ideals of the Swiss Republic. We have to look at Egyptian law and policy.

The Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar Seminary, the foremost center of Sunni Muslim learning, ‘added in statements carried by Egyptian newspaper Youm al-Saba’a that Muslims can make voluntary contributions to build churches, pointing out that the church is a house for “worshipping and tolerance.” ‘ He condemned the fundamentalist Muslims for saying church-building is sinful. And Egypt has lots of churches, including new Presbyterian ones, following John Calvin who I believe lived in . . . Geneva. Aout 6 percent of the population is Christian.

The other problem with excusing Switzerland with reference to Muslims’ own imperfect adherence to human rights ideals is that two wrongs don’t make a right. The bigotted Right doesn’t even have the moral insight of kindergartners if that is the sort of argument they advance. The International Declaration of Human Rights was crafted with the participation of Pakistan, a Muslim country; the global contemporary rights regime is imperfectly adhered to by all countries– it is a claim on the world’s behavior, something we must all strive for. If the Swiss stepped back from it, they stepped back in absolute terms. It doesn’t help us get to global human rights to say that is o.k. because others are also failing to live up to the Declaration.

The other Wahhabi state besides Saudi Arabia, Qatar, has allowed the building of Christian churches. But they are not allowed to have steeples or bells. This policy is a mirror image to that of the Swiss. So Switzerland, after centuries of striving for civilization and enlightenment, has just about reached the same level of tolerance as that exhibited by a small Gulf Wahhabi country, the people of which were mostly Bedouins only a hundred years ago.

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Solar Power Costs 50% Lower than Last Year : CleanTechnica

Thin-film solar is leading the way down to greater affordability. Higher finance costs have hurt recently, but those are expected to ease, while the equipment is likely to get cheaper.

Solar is the only real game in town to decisively solve the world’s energy problems– addressing renewability, pollution and climate change.

Almost everyone could now be heating their water with solar, but unfortunately in most states there is no retail infrastructure for providing it, and no tax abatement. Here in Michigan I called around, finally found someone, and was told there would be a two-year wait for installation and I’d get my money back typically over 6-8 years but that the state would not help out in any way. It shouldn’t be so hard.

I know, I know, things are different in California. Most of us do not live in California (or Washington State, which is also responsible).

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Afghan border police say they killed 27 Taliban fighters in Khost Province.

If the Afghan security forces were that good, however, then they wouldn’t have allowed several captives in a prison, including several Taliban commanders, escape.

This is the level of efficiency President Obama can expect from his Afghan partners if he, as expected, does announce an escalation of troop levels on Tuesday.

US troops are finding that Afghanistan is a far, far more challenging situation than that in Iraq, in part because of the vastness and cragginess of the geography.

Meanwhile, the ethnic mix of Afghanistan’s National Army is less than ideal for the purposes of national reconciliation. Gareth Porter writes:

‘ The latest report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued Oct. 30, shows that Tajiks, which represent 25 percent of the population, now account for 41 percent of all ANA troops who have been trained, and that only 30 percent of the ANA trainees are now Pashtuns.’

The new figures are less promising than older ones that had suggested that Pashtuns were 40% of troops (about their proportion in the population). Now it seems they are just a third of the troops. To have a Tajik army patrolling and searching Pashtuns could be a bad scene. So too would be a Pashtun denial of the legitimacy of the Afghan National Army.

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By far the most important news coming out of Pakistan has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It is a tale of the maneuvering of a wounded, corrupt presidency to avoid snap parliamentary elections, and to avoid renewed scrutiny by a newly feisty Supreme Court. And,I would argue that it is about poor economic management of the country, which is weakening the present government.

Pakistan’s beleagured President Zardari turned over control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to his prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, on Saturday. In Pakistan’s parliamentary system, the prime minister is sometimes very powerful, but martial law provisions have in recent years invested the president with more powers. Zardari is under pressure from civilian politicians of all stripes to rescind his own extensive presidential powers and to return to a parliamentary system. Zardari has been slow to renounce the control the president gained under Gen. Pervez Musharraf, which has added ot his considerable unpopularity. Zardari faces several outstanding corruption cases, now that an amnesty passed by Musharraf in 2007 has expired, but he continues to enjoy immunity as long as he remains president. Zardari therefore suddenly has a powerful incentive to keep his government from falling, and to assauge the anger at him of the Supreme Court and parliament. Relinquishing some key presidential powers may buy Zardari time.

AFP reports that the official inflation rate in Pakistan this year is 10 percent, and the true rate is much higher because that figure only measures government-supplied goods whereas most people shop in the markets. AFP adds:

‘ The rupee has depreciated by 35 per cent in the last year while electricity, gas and petrol prices have doubled in the last two. The country faces a crippling energy crisis, producing only 80 per cent of its power needs, causing debilitating blackouts and suffocating industry. ‘

There are also high prices for staples such as sugar.

AFP quotes a Pakistani observer saying that bad economic performance does not bring down governments in Pakistan– rather they most often fall prey to military coups. But popular movements and demonstrations do help bring down governments, as with Bhutto in 1977. The return to civilian rule in 1988 was a function not only of the death in a plane crash of Gen. Zia ul-Haq, but also of the demonstrations launched by the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy from the mid-1980s, which dissuaded the military from trying to stay in power. And popular demonstrations were key to the fall of Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007-2008. Anything that rallies the urban masses in Pakistan can affect the fortunes of the sitting government, and people are upset about the economy.

The rival of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, led by Nawaz Sharif, might already have attempted to bring down the the government (elected February 2008) and force midterm elections, except for fear of so destabilizing civilian politics and bringing the military back in. Still, the PMLN believes that the PPP government may well fall before its 5-year mandate is up. Nawaz Sharif is said to prefer even Zardari’s presidency to another officers’ putsch.

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Irony of the decade: How the War on Terror spawned a whole troupe of Middle Eastern-American standup comedians.

Q TV’s interview with comedian and actor Maz Jobrani

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