As Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian, I’m interested to see what might happen for Friday prayers in Switzerland tomorrow – I wonder how Swiss Muslims (and non-Muslims) will react to the vote.

If you’re following reactions on the internet, you shall discover also that people start arguing about how to describe this; i.e. whether it is “xenophobia”, “racist”or just stop by “hey it is Swiss democracy” but no arguments about problem(s) led to this result in a country like Switzerland.

You’ve perfectly went beyond this, and here I am recalling Tariq Ramadan’s commentary on this too. Finally, I’ve blogged about this issue three days ago and you are welcomed to read.

Something more concrete would have worked better – perhaps an image of ordinary Swiss people going to pray in a minaret-less mosque, with the statistic that of more than 200 mosques in Switzerland currently, only 4 have minarets (i.e. mosques aren’t scary).

Or an image of a Swiss workplace, or a cafe, or a cinema audience, showing a diversity of ethnicities and styles of dress (i.e. Muslims aren’t scary).

Or an image to engender pride in the nation – Switzerland as a place of welcome, security and prosperity for all (i.e. ‘yes we can’).

Let’s face it – there are any number of ways to defuse the kinds of fears that racists like to whip up – because those fears (of being swamped, of cultural miscegenation, of loss of identity, of otherness) are essentially groundless. They are childish fears of monsters under the bed. In an adult they strike me as akin to mental illness. In a society they are like a form of mass hysteria.

Take the racist arguments, address them line by line, pick them apart and expose them. Take their single images, and counter them with single images. Most of all, laugh at them, because they are ridiculous little people.

You’re right about complacency. This vote highlights a depth of smugness, docility and apathy on the part of the Swiss establishment that has shocked even me (and I’ve spent a LOT of time in Switzerland). That’s why I posted. Not to challenge the racists, but to shame the anti-racists. They have failed their country, and the world.

That said, I’m not sure what they could have done. It seems unfortunately very easy to provoke fear with a poster. I’m not sure how to provoke the opposite, or undo the fear with such a simple medium.

Then you’ll also agree, I imagine, that this fictitious scene is intended to inspire outrage in those who view it, at the thought of Islam (represented by the minaret) displacing the culture and atmosphere of traditional Lucerne (represented by the fallen tower, the 14th-century wooden Chapel Bridge to the right and the Jesuit church in the background).

To be clear – the responses that the designers wish to engender by creating this fiction are outrage and loathing at the ‘foreignness’ of the scene.

You’ll also agree, I hope, that a poster designed to evoke outrage and loathing at the prospect of a foreign cultural implant in the viewer’s home city qualifies as xenophobic in its aims and ideals.

If you do, then since this particular expression of xenophobia was not made in isolation, but rather in the context of a political campaign specifically targeted at the suppression of the cultural attributes of one particular religious group, it therefore crosses the line from mere xenophobia to become an active attempt to influence public opinion and therefore collude in that public act of cultural suppression.

Political suppression, in the public arena, of one cultural group on the grounds of that group’s religion is persecution.

Persecution on religious grounds is racist.

And no, I don’t have a link to the Swiss Society of Minorities.

Would you care to explain the nature of the “racism” exactly?

The Society of Minorities’s poster was excellent. It said it all. We’ll probably use it. Do you have a link to their site?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by matthewteller: How Switzerland was persuaded by the racists: blog on the anti-minaret poster campaign http://bit.ly/7Ww165...