Tolerance yes! But for everyone?

Bürglen is a municipality in the canton of Thurgau, not far from Weinfelden, with around 3,000 inhabitants, including families who practice the Islamic faith. Around 50 Muslim schoolgirls are said to attend school in the community. Around two years ago, two 14-year-old girls applied to wear headscarves to school. The school board rejects the request, based on the school regulations. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that this rejection could not be based on a sufficient legal basis and that the case was not suitable as a "landmark judgment". Daniel Vischer, lawyer for the two schoolgirls and a member of the National Council of the Greens, gained the impression during the public discussion of the ruling that "a general ban on headscarves will have a very difficult time", but the question remains open.

The verdict is the news of the day. Most of the media - with the exception of the NZZ and NZZ am Sonntag - acted as the Blick editorial team once did in the 1960s, in the early years of the National Action NA. The tabloid didn't want to scare off the Italophobes, so the editors decided to give the xenophobes the floor and back it up with a "sharp commentary". This is how Turi Honegger, editor of Blick at the time, describes it in his novel "Nightmares". Kari Kälin, editor of the Neue Luzerner Zeitung NLZ, once editor of Weltwoche for a short time, is a good example. He sees "no good reason to curtail the religious freedom of Muslim schoolgirls". Kälin publishes a total of three reports, all of which are "a steep pass for opponents of the headscarf", with only one left-wing dissenting vote. On the other hand, he gives a detailed interview to Necla Kelek, a leading critic of Muslims, and later acts as a mouthpiece for those anti-Muslim national conservatives who are about to launch an initiative for a general ban on veils.

The tabloid takes a different approach today. It lets lawyer Vischer and a federal judge have their say, with Britta Krauss' commentary ending: "Ultimately, integration is the goal. And the headscarf gets in the way." She thus confirms a well-known observation: the demand for "integration" provides the pretext for discrimination or for the propagation of conventional patterns of behavior. Integration appears - as the NZZ commentator Christoph Wehrli fears - as "complete assimilation to a supposed majority culture and average secularism".

The selection of quoted voices also confirms the widespread distorted image. The fundamental rights ignoramus Christophe Darbelley and well-known Islamophobic voices such as Alice Schwarzer and Necla Kelek make appearances, as do the SVP men of the minaret ban initiative and the women of the "Forum for a Progressive Islam", who want to enforce an enlightened religion through secular bans. Always popular as defenders of the headscarf is the fundamentalist convert group of the Islamic Central Council, as if to give the impression that Islam is fundamentalist in itself. Only the St. Galler Tagblatt inquires with a representative Islamic umbrella organization, no one inquires with those Muslims who - like the majority of members of Christian denominations - belong to the community but do not or hardly practice the faith.

Discriminatory proposals against Muslims enjoy majority support in Swiss society, as was previously the case against other minority religions. Political scientist Adrian Vatter noted shortly after the adoption of the minaret ban initiative: "The popular decisions on religious minorities over the last 160 years are, in short, a cascade of decisions to delay, reject and tighten." The Swiss-German media are currently doing a lot to ensure that this remains the case.

Andres Büchi, editor-in-chief of the Beobachter, demonstrates what is in store for us. Just a few hours after the decision, he was already spreading a line of thought on his homepage that is commonplace among Muslim enemies. He refers to intolerant Muslim countries and the "fundamental interpretation of Islamic values" to then call for intolerance here, all in the tone of a concerned citizen.

Hans Stutz lives in Lucerne. He is an atheist, journalist and Green cantonal councillor.