Excerpt:
Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss justice minister, took to the airwaves as soon as her fellow citizens voted by a landslide majority to write a ban on minarets into their constitution. She wanted to make clear to the world that this was "not a vote against Islam." Her government issued a press release to that effect in Arabic.
The best piece of evidence that this was indeed a vote against Islam is that those who supported a "Yes" vote were not willing to avow it. "Yes" took 58 percent of the vote on November 29. But no poll in the weeks leading up to the vote found more than 37 percent of the public willing to say so. French Switzerland (including Geneva) rejected the constitutional ban; German Switzerland (including Zurich) voted for it.
No one suspected (or wanted to believe) that the low poll numbers reflected anything other than the smallness of the problem. Switzerland has lots of immigrants, but they are mostly tax exiles and rich retirees. Its Muslim population of 400,000--just over 5 percent of a country of 7.7 million--is not by Western European standards large. Switzerland has about 150 mosques but only four minarets, with two more in the works. The sort of social dislocation that has led elsewhere to strife between natives and immigrants is absent: Switzerland's unemployment rate, even now, is under 5 percent. It has not had a major terrorist incident.