“The surprise Swiss vote last month to ban new minarets triggered the expected gnashing of teeth,” The Chronicle of Higher Education weekly quotes Carlin Romano critic at large.

“Islam is the least tolerant of faiths when administered by autocrats and absolute monarchs,” Romano outlines. “It is an expression of intolerance, and I detest intolerance. I hope the Swiss will reverse this decision quickly,” the source reads referring to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

“Forgive me if I, too, do not weep that 57.5 percent of the Swiss, now hosts to a largely moderate Muslim population of Turks and former Yugoslavs, want to keep their country a quiet car among nations. I am still busy weeping for the Armenians, the first people in their corner of the world to officially adopt Christianity, almost eliminated from history due to regular massacres by the Muslim Turks among whom they lived for centuries. Is bringing in the Armenian genocide too big a stretch when contemplating an electoral act about urban design rather than a state policy to implement ethnic cleansing? After all, the ban doesn't involve violence (so far), or suppression of religious worship (mosques remain OK),” Romano notes.

Carlin Romano again recalls Turkish government's massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, specifying: “As early as 1895, The New York Times ran a report headlined, ‘Another Armenian Holocaust’.”

The source quotes the author as saying: “Thankfully, the quality and extent of scholarship about the Armenian genocide continues to grow, though it still falls short of that on the Holocaust.”

“Precisely because the Armenian genocide remains unfamiliar to many, it's necessary to at least sketch what happened.

In 1908, the original Young Turks, officially the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP, began their takeover of the collapsing Ottoman Empire by forcing Sultan Abdul Hamid II to re-establish the empire's constitution, leading many to see the CUP as a reformist movement. The supporters of the Sultan, who himself saw Armenians as &‘degenerate’ infidels, fought back, spurring massacres of Armenians in 1909, before the CUP deposed him. But as the Ottoman Empire lost most of its European territory during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and Muslim refugees flooded into what is now Turkey, anti-Christian sentiment and Turkish nationalism both intensified,” Romano outlines.

“The Swiss vote is a signal rather than an endorsement of intolerance. The Swiss, while facing only a sort of creeping, minor Islamicization of their society. They are aware of the gargantuan intolerance shown by some Muslim societies against minority Christians. While they may not seriously fear such a consequence, many of them plainly want to draw a line in the sand and say: We will not become a Muslim-dominated society, and we will stop that process early,” the source concludes.

L.A.