Sunday ka Funda

There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.
— Hunter S. Thompson

Front page rage

There was a knock on the door. A young man stood there assuring me, “Don’t worry, I am not selling anything”. Great. So, why was he here?

“I am a working professional.” He paused, waiting for the information to sink into what he might have perceived as the pyjama-clad brain. I played along with the “pressure-cooker is about to whistle” harried look, although the whistling part can be deemed misogynistic. He smiled. “Actually, a few of us are trying to do something.” I twiddled my thumb, just to underscore how important he was.

“You know there are so many senior citizens hanging around…”

The shock on my face had no impact on his terminology. The smile was still in place. “We want to do something.”

“Like what?” I finally broke my silence.

“Oh, we will collect funds.”

And he said he was not selling anything? Of course, I was not going to help his part-time activist and fulltime arrogance. Who the hell has given these people the right to land up at our houses, and assume that we are not aware and do not ‘do anything’? Only because he was dressed well, “cool” really, the watchman allowed him in and did not even alert me on the intercom. The youth movement has figured out that you send your smart men and women and they will be acceptable.

This was not the first time. What I was perturbed about is this fellow telling me about what happens in my locality (senior citizens don’t hang around, and they are not looking to be fed) without giving any information about himself and those “few people” who have decided to save others. I had no inclination for a conversation, pissed off as I am with this neo-activism everywhere. But, who are these people? What organisations back them? How do they disburse the funds, and who is accountable for all this? If at all they want to approach people, they ought to first provide this information in writing.

And, no, don’t come anywhere near my door. For, as far as I am concerned, you need to be saved from your delusions.

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Speaking of which, The Times of India today had a front page story with the headline: “Bikers harass fashion stylist in auto at Malad”. The unnamed stylist did not go to the police to register a complaint against these men who passed lewd comments, but she allowed her friend to post the picture she took of these guys on her cellphone.

It is sad I even have to write a disclaimer to say that obviously I do not condone such acts by these louts. But here, I have said it, so can we move on to some questions?

How does this qualify as a front page story? If it bothered her – and it would – why did she not go to the cops? If they do trace these men after seeing the photograph, on what grounds can they take action based on some newspaper report by an anonymous person? It is also interesting that she noted that one of the guys was wearing a “BMC uniform”. Being a municipal worker as opposed to her stylist profession obviously makes the story more palatable to the urban youth.

The story continued on the inside page with snippets from the social media. One word leaped out: pepper spray. Women need to get out of the house with pepper sprays. Why this sudden interest? A few days ago, DNA carried a report about a social worker-socialite who wanted to donate pepper spray cans. Clearly the target was the slick urban young women who could fit it like a lipstick in their bags. The samaritan had decided to name it after herself, and added that having spoken to some people they were willing to pay for it. So, it could turn out into another business venture?

If women wish, they can just add some water to pepper powder and fill aerosol spray bottles with it. There is no need to market it. Women in Delhi two decades ago used to wear ‘porcupine’ clips in their hair to ward off men in public transport. In other cities too similar methods have been employed by women when they could. While women need legal protection and security, let us see it as a necessity and not buy into this culture of paranoia.

The lewd comment story must have gained enough mileage. The TOI, after giving it front page importance, had another report on Page 6: “Father strips, assaults 15-year-old girl, held”. It had about four short paras. No rage. The man is an alcoholic and unemployed. His wife does odd jobs. They do not figure in the elite concern. Whistling men on bikes get us more agitated.

Curiously, the same paper carried this on Page 12:

Same paper, same day, a senior woman editor wrote an Op-ed titled, “Don’t Make Her Lose Her Face”…the subhead: “Because the raped woman isn’t the one who has to be ashamed”. Oh, get over it already. You say don’t make her lose face, as though she cannot decide on her face and everything else, and then add this “ashamed” bit, like an afterthought. It just sounds horrible, because we are taking over and deciding not to shame her.

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Shame is having a good time. Asaram Bapu has finally been arrested and here are the two bits that are highlighted:

• He will be in the same cell as Salman Khan was in for hunting black bucks. 

In effect, the media is equating rape with such hunting and also giving this fraud godman celebrity status.

• That he passed the potency test on the first round.

He agreed to it despite initial reservations and then did so because he said that the body is only mortal. There is more than meets the eye. He has a huge number of followers, including women, who took to the streets to support him. A man in his 70s who comes out flying with flying colours in potency gets validation. After all, he is also a healer of sorts, so this is an advertisement for his prowess. His superhuman qualities.

The only thing that is always impotent is rage.

©Farzana Versey

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Also: Re-examining sexual violation - Asaram Bapu and five men

Regurgitating Jihad: Boston Marathon

Is she dead? Injured? Her limbs blown off? I will never know. I knew her only as a pseudonym. She often spoke about training for the marathon. She was, from all accounts, rather fit “for my age”. I did not know how old or young she was. I only discovered the tremendous effort she put in for something that gave her so much joy, such a sense of achievement.

Stray exchanges revealed that she was a nurse of Pakistani origin. However, I felt her constant assertion of her American nationality a bit overarching. There was a touch of insecurity, and I know how it feels.

Take any attack and the first word on everyone’s lips – and that probably constitutes most non-Americans too – is jihadi. Miles away, my first thought was not one of sympathy, but “Hope it is not a Muslim” on hearing about the Boston Marathon bomb blasts. Paranoia is dehumanising us, instead of making us more sensitive. I was shocked that President Barack Obama was berated for not calling it a “terrorist attack”.  The same people who demand the use of the catchphrase refer to the many more trigger-happy young kids and racists as gunmen and almost always there is an attempt to understand their behaviour in terms of “mental instability”.

It is not a very healthy attitude when only due to one’s origins we wait for the insiders to voice our thoughts and heave a sigh of relief. I usually do not hold back, but even when I openly give another perspective, I am always aware that I will be judged not dispassionately for what I say, but for ‘who’ I am.

And so when I read Glenn Greenwald write in The Guardian that a day after the April 15 Boston attack, “42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country”, I thought more people would understand. Greenwald by virtue of not being a Muslim is quite above any suspicion or agenda. There will most certainly be people who might castigate him, but he will not be seen as someone who is paid by terrorists.

Here are some salient points from his piece and my reaction to them:

“The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others.”

I am not too sure if empathy is the solution, as the tweet he reproduces reveals. How can it when the immediate reaction is to hark back to 9/11, without even trying to comprehend the difference in the reasons and manner in which the attacks were carried out? 

It would be expecting too much for the large majority of Americans to be concerned about Yemen or Iraq just as Iraqis and Yemenis would not empathise with America; for most of them, their contact is with US forces sent to protect them.  It is not incumbent upon the citizens to rationalise. This is the job of the government, and political expediency demands creating a fear psychosis. None of the countries the US has intervened in has benefited from its democratic ideals.

“The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead)…Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was ‘Jihad in America’.”

The victims of this so-called jihad are largely Muslims. I do not know what sort of religiosity would make them target their own places of worship, their own people. This is proof that their ideology is to use the name of a faith, much as others use the patriotic card to whip up xenophobic sentiments. It is, indeed, the job of investigators to question people, but getting hold of a Saudi national immediately and then making it public does convey that it wasn’t about investigations; rather, it does seem more like a gotcha moment. Osama bin Laden is dead. The Al Qaeda is not a unified group anymore. I do not need to emphasise again that George Bush was quite friendly with the House of Saud and Osama was himself a tactical weapon of the CIA during the Russian war in Afghanistan.

“Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.…in US political discourse, "terrorism" has no real meaning other than: violence perpetrated by Muslims against the west. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was "terrorism" is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it's little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda.”

I have often wondered why this does not qualify as a conspiracy against a community when so many conspiracy theories prevail. The Atlantic Wire mentioned the Boston Police Department's final press conference where Dan Bidondi, a radio host for InfoWars, asked:

“Why were the loud speakers telling people in the audience to be calm moments before the bombs went off? Is this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties and promote homeland security while sticking their hands down our pants on the streets?”

To further quote from the piece on what a "false flag" attack is:

“The term then expanded to mean any scenario under which a military attack was undertaken by a person or organization pretending to be something else. What the questioner was asking, then, was: Did the United States government orchestrate this attack, pretending to be a terrorist organization of some sort, in order to justify expanded security powers?”

I would understand if the manipulative machinery projected the view about “devices found”, “threat perception”, “intelligence reports”, or even conducted a mock exercise. I very much doubt if the US government would endanger the lives of its people to actually organise an attack. It will most likely want to create fear among the citizens, and that should be enough to grant it the privilege to use its security powers. It has used 9/11 as a propaganda ploy, and this has worked because the United States was not accustomed to being attacked on this scale.

Does a nation go on the offensive against countries where the perpetrators could be without any evidence? The runners are innocent and so are the villagers who live under threat of drones. The point is no one should be stuck on empathy. We cannot feel the pain. And, for all his genuinely balanced opinion, Greenwald too when speaking about ethnic groups feeling alienated added, “even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations”.

This is the problem. You have to state it loud and clear. Stand on the soapbox and declare that your heart is clean and you care. It would be so much better, and convey the true spirit of America, if these people were not boxed into a group, and instead seen as US citizens like any other. Here, it sounds as though they are being granted the magnanimity of being ‘like us’, and not ‘like them’.  

© Farzana Versey

Cameron’s “culture of fear”

David Cameron has so canonised water cannons that they appear to be miracle-makers of the new morality drenching the fires of protest. “London is not Kensington,” an expat tells me. It is a discovery for the immigrant, too, and armed with this knowledge commentary is caged behind fabricated fences on two sides.

As an outsider, I have conveniently been relegated to the posh areas of mood-lit darkness with the occasionally permitted literary yearning for a Bradford-on-Avon. Cameron, one might conjecture, moved slowly precisely to prove a point that has significantly been marking territory and has become the torchbearer of the empire striking back – multiculturalism is dead. What better way to prove the efficacy of such a declamation than show how fissured society is?

There is an England that is slowly trying to get rid of what it sees as flotsam. This is Europe-centric, but as the greatest colonisers the British have to deal with much more leftover baggage. From the Tottenham-Nottingham the fires spread to Birmingham and Southall, the open ghettos with sinewy lanes that hide desperation and despair even as the loud sounds and strong smells assault.

One summer day, I sat in a most unremarkable eatery in just such a lane. It was run by a Bangladeshi and we were served chicken that was in rigor mortis. I was mortified for more than that reason. Inedible as the food was, and rather late for lunch, a few people still trooped in. They all seemed to know one another. They talked in whispers. I did not look like I would seek out anything halal. My credentials were suspect. I could hear the expat spitting out, “London is not Kensington!” My small talk got more attention than it merited. Eye contact, when made, had confusion reflected in the irises.

Walk into stores and you will see it. Leaders choose not to. If you can see, then you must understand, and if you understand then you may need to empathise. Empathy, especially if you are a moralist, would expect some proactive reversal of fear. Where power fumes are exhaled from paranoia, this would not lessen the impact. However if the fear can be used, then the leader will rise to the occasion. Cameron got his moment of empathy when South Asian victims were affected. Three young men of Pakistani origin killed and Sikhs standing guard with sticks and swords outside the temple, with one of them saying, “We’ll take the law into our hands, bad luck.”

Here is how a phrase – taking the law into our hands – that might have played havoc, and which the ‘rioters’ are bludgeoned for, has come in handy and is up for praise. In the House of Commons session, Cameron said, “We saw it (the spirit) in the hundreds of people who stood guard outside a Southall temple, protecting it from vandalism”. He also paid tribute to the parent of one of the Pakistanis: “Everyone will be impressed by the brave words (urging calm) of Tariq Jahan, a father in Birmingham, whose son was so brutally and tragically run over and killed.”

Passive-aggressive is often the subcutaneous layer of such policing. Had the Sikhs or any other group taken the law in their hands for their own demands, they would be deemed criminals. Had the Pakistani father cried for justice and exacted action against the laidback cops, he would not be imbued with this halo. Pugnacity and calm act as the dichotomous daredevils to solve the moral dilemma that seeks to eat into the very innards of pluralism.

There is cunning calculation here, though. A few weeks ago, Britain had announced a new Tier-1Visa category for exceptionally talented immigrants from India and other non-EU countries. The first lot of the best in the fields of Science, Humanities, Engineering and the Arts will be baptised between August 9 and November 30. Britain wants to fatten itself on and flatter itself with outside excellence. These conciliatory noises following the violence are not really meant for the shopkeepers; they are to send out the right signals that the United Kingdom can be home if you are brilliant. The neo-geniuses are just trumped up store owners, who would sell patents and art, and occasionally rationalisation of establishment impunity, the “science of the soul”, if you will.

* * *

The nation of shopkeepers has lived with its corner stores that grew into lanes and streets and hemmed-in areas.

Mark Duggan, the young man who was shot dead by the police, did not spearhead the movement in the streets. No one knew him. And no one cares about him. He is not even a symbol. The people who came out, burned, and looted were dressed for it, in hoods and masks. When those masks were peeled out, we had faces that did not fit the stereotype of race. There was Laura Johnson, peach-pretty, with loads of money. What would she do by robbing laptops, plasma TV sets and high-street clothes?

This question itself exposes elitism. The riots in London and the outskirts have revealed that it is not economy in the doldrums that led to the protests. No, not protests, it is riots, say the mainstream media, as they shout down ‘other’ voices. The problem is not with how the economy is doing but what the economy makes people do. If it were disgruntled Black youth, then why would they rob their own neighbourhoods and kill people who were not the bratpack? What was the police’s pregnant pause about? To let this happen and send a message that crime in the ghettos is the driving force behind recession?

When Cameron finally woke up – revived, one might say, after his belated Tuscan café outings – he spoke about using water cannons against the “culture of fear”. An indelicate analogy may be drawn as to how people often react to fear with a full bladder. It is an instinctive bodily need. The Prime Minister is conducting the business of politics in just such an impulsive manner.

This deciduousness of culture is in fact due to propagated fear. We have seen and heard how Darcus Howe, West Indian writer and broadcaster, was verbally pummeled by the BBC anchor . He called this an insurgency. He wanted to recollect history; she wanted a human interest story: “So, you were saying about your grandson…”

The leader of the nation has all the sons and grandsons on his fingertips. He said, “In too many cases, the parents of these children – if they are still around – don’t care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing. The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.”

Not only is this messed up psychoanalysis, but insensitive. There is no reason to condone those who have killed and destroyed parts of the city but he has claimed that the police did not use stringent methods because, “Looting had wrongly been treated as a public order issue, not as simple criminality” until it gathered momentum. Whose sons are the cops? Moreover, how can he insinuate that the parents of these young people may not be around? Is he implying they are later immigrants who have come without knowledge of the United Kingdom and have the temerity to disunite it? Or, is he suggesting that a certain class of people have removed themselves from the mainstream specifically to resurrect a counter-culture against the genteel British one? Perhaps, he might like to consider a walk through the most corseted times of English history, of an era where the morality he loves to flash dictated societal norms, and see for himself the sort of crimes committed then.

His smarmy statement, “These people were all volunteers. They didn’t have to do what they did”, conveys his trick-or-treat attitude. Having packed off the parents to the moral dungeon, he offers the children the luxury of choice. They ‘volunteered’ to commit such crimes. He does not specify whom they were volunteering for. This is part of the fear psychosis. To haunt is better than to hunt. He sent a message from the pulpit: “We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done.”

It has taken him a while to find that out. Or was he biding time for the opportune moment where disparate sides could be played against one another and he could bask in the glory of gumption?

* * *

Who will they shut up? The reasonable middle-class as represented by the media talks about those who took to the streets for “justice”, not justice. It is their version as opposed to the proper one. It is pertinent to point out that the few who were not poor belonged to the creamy layer. This works wonderfully to posit evil against evil. The millionaires’ club versus the murky cubby hole. It serves the establishment to partake of the a la carte tokenism of Laura’s theme.

Let us recall the Ernest debate. Discussions about Hemingway’s paranoia were renewed and it was all out again – his depression and his suicide. No one believed his slurred ramblings, including his friend and biographer, A.E. Hotchner who wrote in the New York Times about it. The writer would say, “Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”

As they drove one day, Hemingway peered into a bank; two men were working inside. He said, “Auditors. The F.B.I.’s got them going over my account. Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it’s my account.”

Hotchner was to realise the truth of it: “Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.”

We are discovering the plausibility of how the system seeks to subvert thought with WikiLeaks and now how the Murdoch empire used the purveyors of news to create and destroy news. The United Kingdom will need to figure out that the “culture of fear” is not in those stolen in H&M jeans.

Who is the paranoid one here? Is not xenophobia a paranoid reaction by a nation?

© Farzana Versey 

Sunday ka Funda

It is not always unfounded. When you fear fear itself. There is a reason beneath the skin. I have never been really paranoid, but there was a time in the recent past that shook me up. After that, I have not been the same.

This was not about inner demons. Those are there, will always be there as long as we have a past and a future that runs faster than we can chase it.

I watched this video almost a year ago sent by a friend. I was stunned. So stunned that I refused to watch it again. Until yesterday when I was thinking about my fear and I clicked on the link, at first eyes averted and then saw the images and heard the deep sounds of a part of us that we may not know about. I know. And I too ask:

Is the blame on you? is the blame on me?

Why don't I stay in my own? Struggling

Filling the hole that's through my life

Paranoia – Elsiane

Dear Praveen bhai Togadia

Why you so angry? I am thinking how big NRI doctor leaving all antiseptic and scalpel comes to smelly hometown and trishul to make India proud. I am thinking and thinking that one day you will get just desserts for your sacrifice. No, no, not shrikhand and puran poli. I am talking about you getting something for giving up big job. Here you are only giving speeches.

I don’t know why that SIT called you. You are just man with big mouth and cannot do anything on your own. I can be wrong also, maybe you are real Chanakya and you took hypocritic oath and all. They are calling you VHP international general secretary, so your bhaav is more in Hindutva market but that is only upra-oopar.

Really they are showing you off, but I am not getting the intention. What is there in you to show off? You got old green card? But they don’t like green. So you gave that up also?

What international work is VHP doing? You are collecting money? For what? You must be open book.

I felt very emoshunal when reading that you are being victimised because you are Hindu. I wanted to tell you no need to worry so much. Please. I am feeling your pain. You said:

“SIT has called me because I am a Hindu. No Hindu in Gujarat is safe. In this country, Hindu saints, temples, organisations are targets of jihadis.”

You are expat Hindu, not dal-dhokli Hindu, so they must give more respect. I understanding your pojishun awkwardness. Gujarat is not safe for Hindus that is only why the CM and other politicians and police officers did danga-fasaad. It was to defend because alien attack was going to happen from Mars. Mars has green men and green men are all jihadis.

I am only asking frank question like Indian to NRI type, okay? Don’t mind, hanh…which saints have been killed? How many temples have been targeted? How many Hindu organisations? I knowing you are excited and don’t know difference between Indian and Hindu. Chalta hai. You are not experienced. For you it is all like patient – one wound on hand and you want to cut arm because you thinking whole arm will become wound.

I tell you I am feeling like crying. We Indians like to treat NRI nicely and here you are asked to sit in SIT office, all sit, sit and answer question about what speech you gave and why you were in town when riot took place. Where you will go? You have to protect Hindus. You are international general secretary. Whole world is looking and seeing how you do good work.

Zakia Jafri took case to Supreme Court because her husband was burnt alive in Gulberg Society. Some saying 2000 people landed there. She named 62 people. So SIT called you.

See, Praveen bhai, Modi bhai is telling all how Gujarat making leaping and bounding progress. He is bringing Nano, moto, everything. Now you saying that it is unsafe. So who will come to that place, who will invest? You are one time saying you are in danger, then you are saying:

“Very soon, they (Zakia Jafri and her supporters) will get a befitting reply to whatever they have been trying to do.”

My mind is getting confusing.

Keep quiet, be honest. Bas. If you had gone back, I would come to airport with sandalwood garland and box of thepla and Surat pedha. Now it is too late.

I am giving you free advice because I am feeling very pain when you say you are not safe. I want to give you medicine for this afraid beemari even if you are doctor. It is not anyone after you but your own shadow.

Ekdum sincerely,
Suraj ni kiran

Lindt it or lump it?

Minarets don’t really float my boat, but to ban them? That too in Switzerland by a referendum from the people. 57.5 percent voted in favour. It has been opposed by the Swiss government, parliament, business groups and churches but given the thumbs up by the Right wing Swiss People’s Party.

Here are a few issues raised and it reveals the hollowness that has come to apply to political discourses:

There are only four minarets among the tens of thousands of church spires in Switzerland but the SVP campaigned against them as a symbol of Islamic political influence, which it claimed could eventually undermine the nation's Christian values and democracy.

Since when has Switzerland become a Christian nation? Values cannot be politicised. Minarets do not stand for political influence. Muslims constitute about five percent of the population, and they are mostly from East Europe which can hardly claim to be symbols of Islam.

The spires are traditionally used to make the call for prayers at mosques but Swiss noise control regulations have already stopped them from being used for that purpose; instead, they became an architectural symbol of the Islamic faith. The ban on minarets does not stop the building of mosques, and Muslims were still free to practise their faith.

This is weird. A muezzin could shout from atop a dome as well. And what about church bells? Personally, I am against the call to the faithful at unearthly hours and would rather they invest in alarm clocks, but to use this as a stick to beat a community with is ridiculous.

Embarrassed government spokesmen agreed that the ban would "serve the interests of extremist circles" only, and Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey claimed that a yes vote "could make Switzerland a target for Islamic terrorism".

Wow. Even when they are decrying the ban, they are slyly suggesting that this could result in a backlash. Did they want it? Switzerland was not attacked in the two world wars. During the First war, Lenin lived there; it managed to remain unscathed during the WW 11 by playing along with the Germans, although it did not fall into the Nazi trap.

If it has managed to work its way around such major upheavals in history what is the fear now? Mosques have been attacked these past two weeks.

Ulrich Schluer, an SVP politician has been holding forth:

"We compare our situation to Germany, France or England and the problems they have in their suburbs. That is what we do not want here. Mosques are not part of freedom of religion. This is not against Islam. The minaret is a symbol . . . of conquest and power, which marks the will to introduce Shariah law as in other European cities. We will not accept that".

Obviously, someone needs a few lessons in history. How is it not against Islam if it assumes that Shariah law will be introduced? Civil society building mosques is going to now connote conquest?

The problem is that many of these nations will market their goods, send their expertise to Arab countries and bask in the special privileges they get there, but at home they treat immigrants with suspicion.

I have already talked about the breach in the White House security. This was no terrorist attack.

I understand the need for societies to retain their own identity, but what can five per cent of the population do? Are we trying to use examples of a few terrorists? There is no way to justify those acts, but how many people are gunned down in campuses, how many people are murdered, how many fanatics of different stripes – and not just religion – walk around selling their ideologies? What about those versions of ‘shariah’? No one can impose a religious law in a democracy. This bogey is deliberately created to marginalise some groups.

Businesses such as watch-maker Swatch and Switzerland's famous banking industry said they feared the ban could provoke expensive boycotts by Muslims around the world, while the Swiss government warned it could inflame tensions between religions.

Oh, sure. This is what the business lot would be concerned about. Here is news. Muslims, the real rich ones, are the Arabs. They will not boycott anything so long as it is kosher. Trade will continue. If they just kept quiet and went about with their Alps and stopped getting all jittery about something rising up towards the sky, there would be no problems. The rowdies may come out in the streets and make a noise. This seems deliberate.

In the form of direct referendum to get views, they could have asked people about more pressing issues. Why did they choose this? To please the rest of Europe? France, Germany? Perhaps the country should take a good look at itself and watch how the different sections of its own French and German sides are disparate and have an ongoing quiet battle on between them.

I only hope Muslims forget about it as a bad joke and go on with their jobs. They do work too, you know? And the Swiss can be certain that at least one Muslim here has worshipped at the altar of Sprungli. And will continue to do so.