Just a quick note, because I do not want to drag this out.

We are libertarians. We are meant to be better than neo-liberals and conservatives. In short, we do not play silly buggers.

Oh, we will defend our liberty with violence, when it is genuinely threatened. However, do buildings really do this? And is the motivation of every Muslim that builds these structures to advocate violence? And even were it so, would it make it permissible to infringe on property freedoms?

I was under the impression that attaining Swiss naturalization was an exceedingly difficult proposition even for wealthy Nordics. Have things changed so much over there?

(By the way, I’m not arguing that numbers should matter in a question of principle — i.e., that the ban would be fairer if the number of affected Muslim citizen is small. No, I’m just plain curious.)

You can have constructive hegemony as well as destructive.That is what the Minarets are all about.Muslims are not prevented from building their places of worship in our lands. Their methods and practice of worship are not banned. But they feel perfectly free to ban our places of worship and practice from their lands.Then they moan that we are being Islamaphobic. No hint of them being Christianaphobic though is there?

And nobody has blown up the minarets that already exist, not will they. All the Swiss people have said is, enough and no further. Worship as you please but do not stick two fingers up to us any longer and think you can get away with it.

Now if you follow the link I provided a bit earlier, you will see what nice rational people we are dealing with.
If they want to play silly buggers, we can too.

It should be noted that in your example, the Swiss would be taking the role of Hitler. It is him that was the one attacking architecture purely for its ideological power. The minarets would be like the buildings of Bath; the minarets aren’t destroying the history and culture of Switzerland – they are merely adding to it.

I do not think the best argument in favour of a particular policy is to use Hitler as an example. Indeed, the lesson we have to take from Hitler’s attacks on architecture, is that it proved unsuccessful. Hitler also wanted to completely redesign Berlin to reflect the power of the 3rd Reich. We still won. So, it sort of shows that it is a pointless gesture to attack architecture.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6941576.ece

We are in a War. Get used to it.

I’ll have to give you points for al-gebr, al-kuhl and coffee… but I will point out that these did exist pre-Islamic times as well, and they also gave us al-hashishim.

As I understand it, the concept of the numerical zero and the *number* zero came from the culture of the minarets … well, it was passed up into Europe through Iberia from North Africa …

The culture of minarets also gave us Algebra, Booze, Coffee, Divans, et cetera …

Sunfish – from way back earlier – minarets are not inherently explosive, true enough … unfortunately, the *words* spread from minarets in this century tend to be explosive or inciting to explosions of violence – and that *is* considered destructive by most of us …

*cough*

Cleans coffee off the keyboard.

“Cultural Conservative”?

As long as it’s your definition of “culture” I assume? Do you have a working definition of “cultural purity” yet?