PrintSeptember 8, 2007
Multiculturalist Slurs Swiss
As the Western European public awakens to the very real problems caused by high levels of immigration, little things like skyrocketing crime rates and riots in France, Denmark, Swden, and elsewhere, adherents of multiculturalism's dogmas are panicking and lashing out, employing accusations of not just racism but Nazism to punish those groups supporting the radical notion that immigrants ought to conform to the existing norms of their new homeland, and not be tolerated if they transgress the law.
How else to explain this article [hat tip: Drudge] from the Paul Vallely, associate editor of the left-leaning UK newspaper, the Independent? The title gives away the game: "Switzerland: Europe's Heart of Darkness?" The superior moral compass of the left is once again called upon to reveal the evil in the hearts of those who dare to disagree with it. Vallely is no ordinary lefty journalist, he's a Companion of St Michael and St George, a high official honor in Britain, so no wonder he feels right at home on top of his high horse.
What is it that causes Vallely to fling about terms like "racist", "unjust", and "xenophobic" in just the first paragraph of his article? The first thing he mentions is a
"...poster [that] looks like an innocent children's cartoon. Three white sheep stand beside a black sheep. The drawing makes it looks as though the animals are smiling. But then you notice that the three white beasts are standing on the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is kicking the black one off the flag, with a crafty flick of its back legs."
Subtle, isn't he? The "innocent children's cartoon" is juxtaposed with a "crafty" kick. I never knew sheep were capable of craftiness. The reader is being told (again) that deep and dark forces are at work. So beware of sympathizing with what may sound like reasonable measures being considered by the Swiss. They are not to be trusted, because their motives are evil.
And as all PC-sensitive sentient beings understand, any time something black is used, the cry of racism cannot be far behind. The centuries of history behind the expression and image of a "black sheep" mean nothing. Only traditions coming from other cultures, specifically non-Western cultures, deserve respect in the multi-culti handbook. Just because Switzerland happens to full of meadows containing sheep and cows, there is no excuse for the outrage of depicting a black sheep and the Swiss flag.
By paragraph four, he is ready to drop his first N-bomb:
"A worrying new extremism is on the rise. For the poster - which bears the slogan ‘For More Security' - is not the work of a fringe neo-Nazi group. It has been conceived - and plastered on to billboards, into newspapers and posted to every home in a direct mailshot - by the Swiss People's Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country's coalition government."
Nice work! The fact that no actual neo-Nazis can be found in the subject matter at hand does not stop him from using the explosive term adjacent to the the name of the largest party in the Swiss Parliament. "Extremism" is on the rise, even in the largest party. Those excitable Swiss bear close watching. They have been craftily hiding their penchant for extremism all these centuries while the rest of Europe fought wars and they remained at peace.
Two hundred and seventy words into his article, after approvingly citing the UN three times, he finally mentions something legally tangible:
"The party has launched a campaign to raise the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes once they have served their jail sentence."
The horror! The horror!
Evidently, foreigners "who commit serious crimes" maintain some sort of basic human right to remain in their adopted foreign place of residence. This silly contention won't convince many who have not gone mad with political correctness. So Vallely moves on in the next paragraph to write about the further intentions of the SVP:
"But far more dramatically, it has announced its intention to lay before parliament a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as sentence is passed.
It will be the first such law in Europe since the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft - kin liability - whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for their crimes and punished equally."
Leave aside the second N-bomb and think for a moment about the implications. Who would be the first to decry the "inhumanity" of ripping a child from the bosom of his Swiss-resident foreign family, should an underage serious criminal be deported? The United States recently witnessed the spectacle of Elvira Arellano, who illegally entered our country and who illegally used a fake social security number, refusing to take her child with her when deported for her crimes, and then complaining loudly at the inhumanity of separating her from her child. Just imagine what the UN's special rapporteur on racism (cited by Vallely as an authority on the evils of the Swiss) would have to say about a child deported without his family.
The multi-culti gotcha game is all too clear here. Note that the prospective new measure doesn't require deporting the entire family, it only allows it. As, for instance, when it would appear the child needs to be with his parents. Or when it might appear that some familial sociopathology is at work when serious crimes are committed by an underage felon. So we are left with the understanding that it is Nazism for a country to deport serious child criminals and to take into account the family which produced that serious juvenile criminal.
There's much more alarmism in the article. Vallely gushes worries about the immigrants he sees in a railway station, like the
"smiling Somali girl selling pickled herring sandwiches, a north African man sweeping the floor, and a black nanny speaking in broken English to her young Swiss charge,"
as if they will be somehow caught up in a dragnet and unjustly convicted of serious crimes and then deported along with their families. It does not seem to occur to him that they are more likely to be victims of serious crime and benefit from the absence of serious criminals in their midst, than they are to be hustled out of the country unjustly convicted of serious crimes. Or does he think that dark-skinned people are prone to serious crime? Talk about a heart of darkness....
He also worries that Dr. Ulrich Schlüer, "one of the men behind the draconian proposal", is small, affable and speaks softly. These must be sinister signs of the "big stick" he wields. Once again his superior moral status enables him to explain to his dullard readers the deep darkness in the heart of a man he met in a train station café.
He also worries that Dr. Ulrich Schlüer, "one of the men behind the draconian proposal", is small, affable and speaks softly. These must be sinister signs of the "big stick" he wields. Once again his superior moral status enables him to explain to his dullard readers the deep darkness in the heart of a man he met in a train station café.
Vallely cites a proposal to ban the construction of minarets. Dr. Schlüer notes
"'We're not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolises a place where Islamic law is established.' And Islamic law, he says, is incompatible with Switzerland's legal system."
Another one of the milti-culti obsessions, allowing Sharia law to be exercised within Western jurisdictions receives a glancing blow. Perhaps conscious that defending Sharia's attitudes toward women might not go over very well with his readers, Vallely does not bother contesting the point. One is just supposed to understand that it isn't nice or just to place any restrictions on Islam's theory and practice of Jihad, which requires Muslims to extend the reach of their faith and the application of their law to the enntire world.
Vallely closes with an illogical diagnosis of the SVP via criticism of Switzerland's venerable rules of citizenship which, unlike the UK's and America's but like many other nations, do not confer citizenship on children of foreign residents born within its borders. How can such practices, on the books for a very long time, be used to discern the intent behind laws which haven't even been formally introduced for parliamentary debate? The lack of logic does not stop him from making the connection.
Vallely closes with an illogical diagnosis of the SVP via criticism of Switzerland's venerable rules of citizenship which, unlike the UK's and America's but like many other nations, do not confer citizenship on children of foreign residents born within its borders. How can such practices, on the books for a very long time, be used to discern the intent behind laws which haven't even been formally introduced for parliamentary debate? The lack of logic does not stop him from making the connection.
"The truth is that at the heart of the Swiss People's Party's vision is a visceral notion of kinship, breeding and blood that liberals would like to think sits very much at odds with the received wisdom of most of the Western world."
The unconscious honesty is startling. By "received wisdom" he does not mean the ancient democratic traditions of Switzerland like the referendum. Nor does he mean the Bible or the rule of law. He has in mind the "wisdom" received from the likes of the UN's special rapporteur on racism and Paul Vallely.
Aye, there's the rub.
Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of American Thinker.
