Gerhard Schröder on the Minaret Debate

Social Europe Journal has published an English translation of ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder's op/ed piece on the Swiss vote to ban minarets.  The piece was originally published in Die Zeit: Das Recht auf Türme. Needless to say, the social democrat Schröder is highly critical of the vote and the message of intolerance it sends.  Schröder fears that this will simply further marginalize the Muslim minority communities in Europe:

On the surface this may have concerned a building ban, but the core
issue was a different one: Minarets make crystal clear the deep-seated
change our society is undergoing, through the immigration of people
with different cultural backgrounds and religions. Those who ban the
building of minarets want this social change to stay invisible. They
are ignoring reality and hoping that Muslim believers will continue to
exercise their religion behind the scenes, in prayer rooms in
back-to-back houses or out of the way on industrial estates. This
attempt to drive it to the proverbial margins of society represents
would be exclusion.

Earlier I wrote about how Henryk Broder had celebrated the Swiss vote as the proper response to religious intolerance in Arab and other Islamic countries.  Schröder has a good response to Broder and his fans:

Now an argument is often advanced in the debate about the construction
of mosques and minarets. It runs: »As long as nobody is allowed to
build Christian churches in Islamic countries, we should not allow any
mosques to be built here.« What this argument forgets is: Millions of
Christians live for example in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. But even where
Christian parishes are being created from scratch, the building of
churches is permitted, for example in the ambitious Gulf states or in
Indonesia. There is an undeniable lack of religious freedom in some
Islamic states, but they cannot serve as an excuse to restrict rights
in our own country. We perceive ourselves as an enlightened society.
And enlightenment does not mean repeating the shortcomings of other
societies in our own. Freedom of religion is of great value, which is
why it is rightly protected under our Basic Law.

Predictably, Gerhard Schröder's piece provoked a strong reaction from right-wing Islamophobes.  The hate site Politically Incorrect noted that  Schröder had refused to say "so help me God"  (so wahr mir Gott helfe) when he took the oath of office – so that disqualifies him from commenting on any religious issue.  The German-Turkish commentator Necla Kelek accuses the former chancellor of incredible naïveté for not seeing that minarets are giant phallic symbols and that Islam is not really a religion, but rather an ideological "system".   For the right-wing author Ralph Giodarno Gerhard Schröder is simply another cowardly German politician („feige, deutsche Politiker) who refuses to face the truth about Islam. And last not least, Leon DeWinter took time out from his racist criticism of President Obama to attack all Muslims (in tne NZZ).

«Viele Menschen haben genug davon zu hören, dass der Islam eine
Religion des Friedens und der Toleranz sei, während ein großer Teil der
islamischen Welt aufstöhnt unter Tyrannei, Rückständigkeit, Frauenhass,
Armut» (Many people are fed up with hearing that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance when a large part of the Islamic world is groaning under tyranny, backwardness, misogyny and poverty) 

As usual, it is the voices of hate and intolerance that receive most of the media coverage, while the ex-chancellor's reasoned argument is largely ignored.