What you would never know, from all this hand-wringing about “Islamophobia,” is that only a few weeks before the conference, the country’s media had reported on a popular imam in Biel who, in his sermons, “asked Allah to destroy the enemies of Islam — Jews, Christians, Hindus, Russians, and Shiites.”
The imam in question, Abu Ramadan, preached that Muslims who befriended infidels were “cursed until the Day of Judgment” — which, of course, is not radical at all, but is straight out of the Koran.
The crisis is real. But, says Swiss Muslim author Saïda Keller-Messahli, Swiss politicians, “especially on the left,” refuse to address it. Instead of trying to defend their country from radicalism, they think their job is to “protect minorities and multiculturalism.”
Mosque kindergartens and youth groups, too, are “places of religious indoctrination” for Swiss Muslims. So are the German-speaking public schools, in which imams are permitted to teach classes in Islam using instructional materials from Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
If you listen to some of Switzerland’s pollsters and government officials, the country is suffering from a serious and ever-intensifying crisis — anti-Muslim bigotry.
In August, a study concluded that Swiss Muslims “are generally well integrated into Swiss society.” Their main problem? They face “Islamophobia.”
Another study the same month found that the percentage of Swiss non-Muslims who feel “threatened” by Islam had more than doubled since 2004, from 16% to 38%.
At a September 11 conference, Switzerland’s Federal Commission against Racism (FCR) issued an explicit alert: “hostility toward Muslims,” it warned, was rising – and was “fed by facts that have nothing to do with Muslims themselves.”
Conference organizers blamed this “hostility” on online “propaganda”; Interior Minister Alain Berset accused Swiss citizens of erroneously holding “Islam responsible for all the extremist acts committed in its name.”
What you would never know, from all this hand-wringing about “Islamophobia,” is that only a few weeks before the conference, the country’s media had reported on a popular imam in Biel who, in his sermons, “asked Allah to destroy the enemies of Islam — Jews, Christians, Hindus, Russians, and Shiites.” The imam in question, Abu Ramadan, preached that Muslims who befriended infidels were “cursed until the Day of Judgment” — which, of course, is not radical at all, but is straight out of the Koran.
Abu Ramadan has been living in Switzerland for almost two decades. In 1998, he came to the Alpine country from Libya as an asylum seeker, but over the years has returned home several times — in addition to visiting Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. This fact should have automatically negated his right to asylum and resulted in his expulsion. But the years went by, and the government, ignoring the evidence right there on his passport, did nothing.
On the contrary: over the years, in fact, the Swiss state had given Ramadan the equivalent of $620,000 in welfare payments.
Reportedly, some public officials were well aware of his hate sermons — but until the content of those sermons surfaced in the media, nobody in the government had made any effort to do anything about him. Instead, people such as Interior Minister Berset and the members of the FCR had kept busy going to conferences and tarring the general public as “Islamophobes”.
At least one high-profile individual in Switzerland has long rejected the official line about successful Muslim integration and unfounded infidel Islam-hatred: Saïda Keller-Messahli. Of Tunisian descent, living in Zurich, she has spent years investigating institutional Islam in Switzerland and urging politicians to take action against it. Asked in a recent interview whether Abu Ramadan is an isolated case, Keller-Messahli said no: such preaching, she explained, is common in Swiss mosques, part of an international strategy to plant a “discriminatory” and “violent” Islam in Switzerland and elsewhere in the West.
Keller-Messahli has just published a book entitled, Switzerland: An Islamist Hub (“Islamistische Drehscheibe Schweiz”). It is sort of a field guide to Islam in Switzerland. The country’s mosques belong to various networks based here and there in the Muslim world; many of the imams have been trained in Egypt or Saudi Arabia; many of the mosques receive funding — and take orders — from organizations in Turkey. In her book, Keller-Messahli draws all the connections, follows all the money trails, and spells out the poisonous articles of faith. And she prescribes strong medicine: monitor the mosques, cut off the foreign cash, and expel the preachers of jihad.
