Neutrality is the Answer - They Didn't Attack Switzerland

[9sublime]

You believe the action is appropriate? Do you believe it would be equally appropriate for the British citizens to demand that the muslims stop doinig a thing or change iin some way because they are offended by the muslims?

Immigrants to a nation hardly have a right to expect for that nation to bend over backwards to accomodate them if something about said nation offends them. I would hardly be reasonable if I came to your home and demanded that you repaint, or dispose of some art work that I find objectionable. If I don't like your home and find its custom offensive, then I don't have to come.

Why are you so scared of change? As soon as Labour goes out of power and the Convervative party comes back in a lot of this will change but they will still accomodate and tolerate Muslims and the positive changes they may bring about to the society in the future. You seem like a person who wants the world to stay as it is, or even go backwards. A true conservative.

While there is anything wrong in any part of the world, nobody should object to ANY cultural change from a group.

Sure, hardline Muslims do some evil things, but most British Muslims are honest people.

 

[palerider]

and the positive changes they may bring about to the society in the future..

Describe for me any "postitive" changes that a large influx of muslims have brought about in any nation.

 

[9sublime]

Closer cultural and economic links with friendly Muslim countries?

For a patriot of a country that kisses the arses of most foreign countries with oil your pretty anti their occupants.

 

[palerider]

Closer cultural and economic links with friendly Muslim countries?

Joe Blow muslim has accomplished this how?

And your claim was that they bring positive changes to societies. Links to other countries could hardly be characterized as societal changes.

 

[vyo476]

You believe the action is appropriate? Do you believe it would be equally appropriate for the British citizens to demand that the muslims stop doinig a thing or change iin some way because they are offended by the muslims?

Immigrants to a nation hardly have a right to expect for that nation to bend over backwards to accomodate them if something about said nation offends them. I would hardly be reasonable if I came to your home and demanded that you repaint, or dispose of some art work that I find objectionable. If I don't like your home and find its custom offensive, then I don't have to come.

But you don't own my home. It is my personal space to do with as I choose. By that same token, no singular individual or small group of individuals own a nation's culture - it belongs to the people. By immigrating to a specific country Muslims make themselves a part of "the people," and thereafter what is public domain is up to them as well as everyone else. You constantly look on immigrants as outsiders when that is not the case.

And yes, there should be compromises between Muslim immigrants and native Britons. There are - the culture of Britain, as it stands, is about ten or twelve steps to the left of what an Islamic nation would allow. The measures enacted recently are compromises, not unilateral concessions.

 

[9sublime]

Tell me what good the white man did in colonising Northern America then if you do not approve of any kind of change in a culture if it is not from the native people?

 

[palerider]

But you don't own my home. It is my personal space to do with as I choose. By that same token, no singular individual or small group of individuals own a nation's culture - it belongs to the people. By immigrating to a specific country Muslims make themselves a part of "the people," and thereafter what is public domain is up to them as well as everyone else. You constantly look on immigrants as outsiders when that is not the case.

Muslims aren't looking to make themselves part of the culture. They are demanding that the culture accomodate their wants and to change anything that they find offensive. We have plenty of hispanics in this country, both legal and illegal but I don't see them demanding that items be taken off the market, etc., so as not to offend them. Ditto for immigrants of other countries as well.

And yes, there should be compromises between Muslim immigrants and native Britons. There are - the culture of Britain, as it stands, is about ten or twelve steps to the left of what an Islamic nation would allow. The measures enacted recently are compromises, not unilateral concessions.

And as the muslim population grows, watch it move to the right to accomodate them. How far have you moved towards accomodating them in the past decade? And exactly who are immigrants that they should place demands on your culture for compromize anyway?

 

[palerider]

Tell me what good the white man did in colonising Northern America then if you do not approve of any kind of change in a culture if it is not from the native people?

I never said that I don't approve of any kind of change in a culture. I don't approve of immigrants coming into a nation and telling the natives how it is gooing to be from here on out unless they (the natives) want trouble and you know as well as I that if anyone crosses islam, trouble is the inevetable response. Britan conceeded to the muslims on the ice cream and pigs to avoid violence in the streets.

I asked you to describe any positive societal changes that any nation has experienced as a result of an infusion of muslims. Is an answer forthcoming?

 

[vyo476]

Muslims aren't looking to make themselves part of the culture. They are demanding that the culture accomodate their wants and to change anything that they find offensive. We have plenty of hispanics in this country, both legal and illegal but I don't see them demanding that items be taken off the market, etc., so as not to offend them. Ditto for immigrants of other countries as well.



And as the muslim population grows, watch it move to the right to accomodate them. How far have you moved towards accomodating them in the past decade? And exactly who are immigrants that they should place demands on your culture for compromize anyway?

It's not my culture. Culture belongs to the people, the society as a whole. If they're coming to live in my country it is theirs too. They demand that the culture be changed to accommodate their wants just as any other member of a culture would do. People have, over time, insisted that I change the things I contribute to the culture for one reason or another. Those people didn't want to have to look at what I produced because it offended them. I didn't like it but I learned to deal with it.

Yes, as the Muslim population grows the culture will move to the right to accommodate them. Their culture will blend with ours which is how it has worked since people started moving around the world at all. Look at Louisiana - slaves brought to the New World created a number of amalgamations of their own native African culture and the culture of Native Americans and even their white slave masters - amongst other things we have them to thank for creating Jazz music. If former slaves oppressed by Jim Crow lows in the Deep South could stomach melding their culture with those of the people who had kept them in bondage for a few hundred years I think the Muslims moving to Britain can probably deal with blending their ideas with the native Britons.

Time goes on and societies change. We could either accept it and run with it or we can bury our heads in the sand and continue antagonizing a people who have been receiving the short end of the stick from the West since the end of World War I. Which would you prefer?

One other thing - wasn't this thread about Switzerland?

 

[9sublime]

I asked you to describe any positive societal changes that any nation has experienced as a result of an infusion of muslims. Is an answer forthcoming?

Do you support Israel? I imagine you do. Tell me what positive changes they have bought about by coming into a Muslim country.

 

[palerider]

Do you support Israel? I imagine you do. Tell me what positive changes they have bought about by coming into a Muslim country.

First off, they didn't come into a muslim country. They came into a largely uninhabited swamp that was a british territory. They drained the swamps, wiped out malaria, built a thriving economy which created literally millions of jobs for jews and arabs alike, and a government that doesn't go about attacking its neighbors because of their religion.

 

[Friendindeed]

First off, they didn't come into a muslim country. They came into a largely uninhabited swamp that was a british territory. They drained the swamps, wiped out malaria, built a thriving economy which created literally millions of jobs for jews and arabs alike, and a government that doesn't go about attacking its neighbors because of their religion.

A lot of historians seem to disagree with that version, too many to ignore.

 

[palerider]

A lot of historians seem to disagree with that version, too many to ignore.

19th century romantic authors aren't historians.

 

[Truth-Bringer]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/etc/status.html

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/swiss-kept-billions.html

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cach...zerland"+"nazi+gold"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/documents/eizen_nazigold.html

All of these commissions were formed prior to the Weisenthal's center report, which was shown to contain many errors and falsifications:

"Halbrook's is not the only voice being raised to correct recent misreporting. When the Wiesenthal Center's report came out in June, Switzerland's own Jewish community dismissed it as outrageous and ridden with errors. The Basel-based Juedische Rundschau criticized its "exaggerations and falsifications", while the head of the Swiss Confederation of Hebrew Congregations found the report "one-sided and exaggerated." "The Swiss Nazis were weak in numbers," pointed out Zurich's Israelitisches Wochenblatt. "In the parliament in Bern they had exactly one seat for four years." Most embarrassingly, Simon Wiesenthal himself, the famed Nazi-hunter after whom the center was named, disavowed the report as biased and inaccurate.

From: http://2asig.iqhost.net/2001/dec.htm

You'll forgive me for doubting reports involving the U.S. government, which doesn't exactly have a track record for honesty in international matters...

I didn't make any statement about individual swiss citizens. I made a statement about the swiss government's relationship with germany. The fact is that switzerland has just completed a very large restitution regime involving assets of prisoners of nazi camps and nazi loot from other locations.

And yet Swiss government officials deported German residents who promoted Nazism:

"Swiss authorities prosecuted and suppressed numerous Nazi-front organizations, arresting or deporting their leadership, who were often German nationals resident in Switzerland. The "bulk of news reporting in [Swiss] broadcasting and the press is anti-German," lamented one high Nazi official. "Germany has no good press in Switzerland." Dependent on coal from Germany, Switzerland went on trading with the Germans long after Hitler's evil had become apparent -- as indeed did the United States until Pearl Harbor. Much to the scandal of today's retroactive moralists, Switzerland also traded extensively in gold with both Axis and Allies. That led to some strange results, since in many cases the two sides were aware that, once the role of the Swiss as middlemen was stripped out, they were in effect trading with each other."

From: http://2asig.iqhost.net/2001/dec.htm

The same source also says:

"Hitler himself denounced the Swiss repeatedly as "despicable and wretched", "misbegotten", "renegades", "repugnant", "a pimple on the face of Europe" which "cannot be allowed to continue". (Stalin couldn't stand them either.)

The Fuehrer despised their purely defensive military philosophy: "An army whose only goal is to secure peace" is craven, he said. "In addition to all the other characteristics of the Swiss that Hitler disliked," Halbrook adds, "he hated them because of their free market capitalism, which he associated with Judaism." The ever-abusive Voelkischer Beobachter resorted to the epithet "Berg-Semiten": mountain Jews."

The bottom line is that the Swiss government was not pro-Nazi. Your second source above states:

"The study said the Swiss National Bank (SNB) did not know the source of the gold, but that it also made no attempt to find out if victim gold was being deposited."

My question is "how exactly were they supposed to find this out?" They had no legal authority to investigate the Germans, and no means to send bank investigators into a war zone. All they had to go by was the information provided to them by the depositors.

Again, there are some black spots on their record, they were far from perfect, but to say this is what kept the Nazis at bay is false.

 

[Truth-Bringer]

Sure, how about an apology from the swiss government with regard to turning away jews.

Did we ever hear an apology from FDR for turning away jews? No. There's no doubt the Swiss did turn some jews away, but some were saved, as I previously posted.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/558450.stm

You're own source says 20,000 were allowed in while 25,000 were turned away. That's almost half allowed to safety. (Not to mention those aided by private swiss citizens who ignored their government's policy.) Seems like a very generous allowance during an all out war when every country around you has been conquered. Why are you avoiding my question, shetland pony rider? I'll ask it again: Would you want America to accept 200,000 people during a war if you knew it would drain our resources to the point that we would be invaded and defeated?

Just the fact that jews were fleeing for their lives is evidence enough of the harshness of the government policy.

Why were they fleeing Germany in the first place? Why didn't they fight to the death? Why did they turn their guns in?

They were hitler's bankers and they turned away jewish refugees.

Hitler hated them, as I posted above, and he didn't need any bankers. The banks in Germany served him fully. And as your own source said, they allowed almost the same number of jews into their country as they turned away. I wonder if other countries could say the same. It's a fact FDR sent some jews to their deaths.

This effectively refutes the original premise of the thread that the swiss stayed out of the war because they were neutral.

No, it doesn't.

The fact is that they were not neutral.

The morality of their decisions is open for debate, but their neutrality, which is the premise of this thread is not. They were not neutral.

Yes, they were. Winston Churchill admits as much, and he has far more credibility on the issue than an ignorant fool like you.