The Swiss Ban Minarets, Ctd

Eric Pape notes the irony between the perceived threat of radical Islam within Switzerland and the post-referendum threat from foreign radicals:

[T]he minaret referendum invites unprecedented security threats, both within the alpine nation and to its many humanitarian workers in remote outposts. (Swiss Red Cross workers in Central Asia, northern and eastern Africa, and the Middle East can’t be happy about the target that their compatriots have just painted on them.) As the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs Micheline Calmy-Rey warned during the campaign, a ban on minarets risked making her country into “a target for Islamic terrorism.”

Yet:

Switzerland has just fouryes, fourminarets at the moment. (There areor wereplans to build about ten more.) Sharia law seems particularly unlikely given that barely 10 percent of Switzerland’s estimated 400,000 Muslims actively practice their faith in a country of nearly 8 million people. And most Swiss Muslims have migrated from nations with particularly strong secular traditions (Turkey, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia), leaving many of them about as likely to be extremists as are non-practicing cultural Jews in the US.