Citing religious discrimination, a diverse coalition of Jewish organizations is objecting to Switzerland’s ban of minarets on local mosques.

Swiss voters this week approved by a strong majority a referendum outlawing the construction of minarets. The measure, pushed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), was supported by 57 percent of the population.

However, Jewish organizations, realizing that a crackdown on Islam could have repercussions for Jews as well, have come to the defense of Muslim worshipers, arguing that the Swiss’s move was unjustifiable.

This story made me think of the famous poem First they came…. Stand up for others now so they will stand with you later.

From The Bizarre Logic Behind the Swiss Minaret Ban by Yassin Musharbash:

One should certainly avoid sugar-coating the sometimes unpleasant situation faced by Christians living in the Muslim world. There is room for criticism. But one should choose the appropriate means. To paint the Swiss referendum against building minarets as an act of solidarity with Christians living in the Middle East, as some are now doing, is just plain bizarre.

Some of those who support the result of the Swiss referendum can be heard to say things like: As long as Saudi Arabia won’t allow any churches to be built there, we’re entitled to tell Muslims that they can’t build minarets here. It is a specious argument.

I think Swiss right-wing rhetoric also tilts this Clash of Civilizations towards a holy war. No good can come of such a thing.

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

I disagree with a few of Armstrong’s points because they don’t align with my personal beliefs (atheist with strong non-deist Buddhist leanings). But I completely agree with Armstrong’s central point which is this: Religion is a given. God isn’t dead because we (collectively) won’t let him die.

Rather than trying to stamp out religion, particularly in countries where European-American secularism is seen as a form of cultural imperialism, Armstrong asks us to study religions and understand the intersections between faith and politics. As I wondered in a recent post, jihadism and Islamism may be best understood as a form of liberation theology, a religious response to a political condition.

It was the most successful form of colonialism: the colonized mind identified completely with the colonizer. The Javanese had held out for centuries, but finally they had lost. Their idea of there being many paths to God, none better than the other, had broken under the weight of the orthodox Arab injunction about the one true faith. The Javanese now skulked like criminals where their president had meditated just twenty years earlier.

Indonesian native Sadanand Dhume on the rise of an Arab-looking — rather than a localized, Indonesian-looking form of Islam — that has taken root in the country in the last 30 or so years. From this month’s Guernica piece, The Colonized Mind.

On a slightly related note: is it useful to think about jihadism and Islamism and the rhetoric from them as a form of global, anti-neo-colonialist liberation theology rather than a literal call to arms?

Also: Check out Irshad Manji’s book The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. Read a bit about the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, and check out Marc Lynch’s Foreign Policy blog post Ft. Hood and the Clash of Civilizations: Security vs political correctness revisited.

The pairing of “Islam” and “fascism” has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism – indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain. Protestant and Catholic terrorists in Northern Ireland, both deserving the label “fascist,” never had their religions prefixed to that word. Nor have Hindu extremists in India, nor Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka.

No really: watch the clip. Or read the quote:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.

And what scares me even more is that the majority of the Christians in this country wouldn’t see one thing wrong with doing so. The same folks who cower under their blankets fearing ‘Islamofacism’ — a buzzword that denies our effed-up neo-colonial policies as a contributing factor to the current rage against us — are completely okay with making the rest of us conform to the Jesus-loving variant* that I’ll call Christiofacism.

As an atheist with Buddhist leanings who would be one of the first victims of a Christian Society**, this scares me.

*Mind you, Jesus-loving is not the problem. The problem is when we argue that Christianity should be the single, universal moral basis for making laws.

**No, we are not currently a Christian Society or a Christian Nation. We are a society and a state with a predominantly Christian population. There is a difference. Our founders were clear about the role the state in religion and religion in the state, though they were clear that their religion guided their politics.