...Because of mistakes made by Europeans and by the Muslim immigrants who live beside them, the two groups have, over the past several decades, failed to integrate. Two or even three generations after their arrival, some European Muslims still live in separate communities. They often go to separate schools. And a small but vocal minority openly refuses to respect the laws and customs of their adopted countries.
No European government has found a way to deal with this phenomenon. Those that have tried often find themselves running up against their own civil rights and legal traditions...
There is, therefore, nothing especially Swiss, or especially isolationist, about the recent referendum result...fear of Islamist extremism shapes all European politics far more than anyone ever acknowledges. The growth of the "far right" parties in the recent past is almost always connected to fear of Islamist extremism...
The referendum on the construction of minarets is no different. No one quite says what the real issue is, but everybody knows: As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don't have much Islamic extremism -- and they don't want any.
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