۹ فروردین ۱۴۰۳ |۱۸ رمضان ۱۴۴۵ | Mar 28, 2024
Swiss Muslim umbrella group warns against stigmatization of Islam

The Federation of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland warned against associating crimes with a certain religion.

Hawzah News Agency (Bern, Switzerland) - In an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Tuesday, federation spokesperson Pascal Gemperli said that someone’s religious affiliation was not a determining factor in crime.

Muslim teenagers are not disproportionately represented in juvenile crime proceedings, according to Gemperli.

“We often observe that Muslims are quantified as a block, while Christians are split into their different churches,” Gemperli said in the interview.

If it were proven that people with a weaker sense of faith received heavier punishments than stronger believers, religion would probably even be classified as a violence-inhibiting factor, he said.

 Religion, like culture, was a very abstract concept, he added, so that drawing a direct conclusion from this factor to someone’s risk of violence was questionable.

Many phenomena, such as honor killings, could not be explained by a single reason but must be understood within the multi-faceted context of religious, historical and social influences, Gemperli said.

‘Islam belongs to Switzerland’

“Islam in its diversity is increasingly being reduced to problematic elements such as terror and radicalization,” Gemperli said.

He pointed out that since 2013 the number of cases of discrimination against Muslims had more than doubled.

Since 9/11, Muslims in Switzerland have had a reputation problem and it was sometimes even suggested that they cannot be “real Swiss”, he said. “It is therefore important to realize that Islam belongs to Switzerland.”

 

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