5 comments

• Joe

  Muslims want the freedom to impose their views and extinsh everybody else’s. They don’t respect freedom of expression, religion, to vote or any other one can think of.

  Tolerance must not be granted to intolerant people. Muslims don’t adapt, they want everybody else to adapt to their views, to live as their religion dictates.

  NO MORE!

  1 December 2009, 20:44 pm

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• Trevor Bailey

  What blatant hypocrisy!

  Maldives prohibits the practice of any religion other than Islam. They will not permit the construction of a church —and do not even contemplate a steeple!

  1 December 2009, 23:17 pm

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• SAS

  People who disagree with the minaret ban have the right to express their point of view.

  Hopefully, freedom of expression will not be made subject to the will of the majority any time soon – for Muslims or non Muslims.

  And last time I checked people from the Maldives are as entitled to their views as anyone else.

  3 December 2009, 4:53 am

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• Bottles

  Right to freedom of religion has not been violated.

  Muslims can be Muslims without facing discrimination, and they can exercise their religion.

  This ban is against the institution that is Islam, it is not against the freedom of people to believe in Allah and to follow the precepts of the Qur’an.

  It is unfair to say this ban violates human rights, because the right to be a Muslim is not violated here.

  Minarets are not even a religious symbol in Islam, they were just built in big cities to make it easier to call everyone for prayer.
  Calling for prayer is forbidden in Switzerland anyway.

  This is Switzerland, the Swiss people have a right to chose what may be built in their country and what religious organizations are accepted.
  As long as people can believe in what they want and practice what they want, there is nothing to complain about.
  A religious organization does not have to be accepted for people to practice the ideology of this religion.

  3 December 2009, 10:36 am

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• Webster

  Visiting Asseel’s blog via the link above I find that the three lines quoted above are by way of introduction to the theme. They are there to get the reader’s attention. It works. I, for one, have taken the trouble to read Asseel’s page before commenting.

  Churchill said:
  I may not agree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it.

  If we could all but follow Churchill’s advice we might begin to sort out the world’s problems. Unfortunately there are still many places on this planet where one is not allowed to voice one’s point of view for fear of imprisonment or worse.
  I am deeply saddened that we are living in an age where we can point our telescopes to the very edge of the universe, to more than 13,700,000,000 years back in time and see what was at the beginning, or we can detect the smallest invisible particles and smash them together at almost 186,000 miles per second and trace their paths, or we can inject children and protect them against once rampant diseases like smallpox …and yet we cannot communicate with each other on a person to person or country to country basis without coming up against insurmountable difficulties that we have inherited via the ancient sayings of people who lived many generations ago and who had no comprehension of what kind of world we 6,000,000,000 rising soon to 10,000,000,000 people would be living in and the many modern problems that we would be faced with. These people whose sayings we take, be they Christian, Jew or Muslim, had no idea that there would be cities of 20,000,000 people from all ethnic backgrounds and cultures, from all corners of the world, living and working side by side to some common purpose – towards what Bronowski calls ‘the ascent of man’.
  We must release our minds from the heavy chains that bind them and begin to open them and share our ideas and thoughts. We were born with unifying qualities like imagination, humour, creativity, curiosity; qualities, incidentally, which are ignored by those ancient sages who would have us believe that we are much less than we are.
  In Switzerland the Internet was invented. We are now using it. Let us do so wisely.

  3 December 2009, 15:37 pm

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