Reply To: Swiss Ban on Minarets

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#669913
charliehall
Participant

rabbiofberlin,

You clearly were not paying attention. Two days after the minaret vote, the leader of the mainstream conservative party in Switzerland — not the nutty far right People’s Party — proposed banning Jewish and Muslim cemetaries because they were segregated.

And I don’t think Christians should be prohibited from wearing crosses. When I teach medical students I wear a black velvet yarmulke and I am glad that I live in a country that lets me do that.

And Europe is not being Islamicized. No country in Central or Western Europe has more than a 9% Muslim population according to both the Pew Foundation and the CIA World Factbook. When I was in Spain I never found a single Muslim building, or a single Muslim. I did see a beautiful mosque in Ireland but the only Muslim I found was an Jordanian professor who was attending the same conference I was attending.

Regarding Jewish schools accepting non-Jews, that was necessary to continue to receive government funds because the schools are too small to operate with the small number of Jewish students. If you take government funds, you accept government rules — and there would be no Jewish school without those government funds. In Ireland, that would mean Jewish students would have to attend schools run by Christian churches as essentially all schools in that country are run by churches. The community determined that it was better to have a school run by Jews even if non-Jews attended. (And while I was there I met a Christian Irishman who proudly he told me that he went out of his way to send his kids to the Jewish school because he thought Jews would give his children a better education!) I don’t know much about the situation in Spain.