What struck me is that this is something of the opposite public relations expected by Juan Cole on his Informed Comment blog

What struck me is that this is something of the opposite public relations expected by Juan Cole on his Informed Comment blog. At the time of the Swiss vote, Cole wrotethat he anticipated a slew of Islamophobes to support banning minarets by making comparisons to the straw-man intolerance of the Muslim world. His point is rather the same as I’m making here: that the comparisons shouldn’t exactly make you proud.Among the nearly 60 Muslim-majority states in the world, only one, Saudi Arabia, forbids the building of churches. Does Switzerland really want to be like Saudi Arabia?[...]The other Wahhabi state besides Saudi Arabia, Qatar, has allowed the building of Christian churches. But they are not allowed to have steeples or bells. This policy is a mirror image to that of the Swiss. So Switzerland, after centuries of striving for civilization and enlightenment, has just about reached the same level of tolerance as that exhibited by a small Gulf Wahhabi country, the people of which were mostly Bedouins only a hundred years ago.So now I guess we have to ask Israel: Do you really want to be held to the basement-level standard of tolerance set by Switzerland?