A Swiss court ruling against exempting Muslim students from compulsory, mixed swimming classes has sparked a hot debate over respecting the religious beliefs of minorities.
"Muslim students in Europe should be granted the right to take swimming lessons that fit their religious beliefs," Chakib Benmakhlouf, head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE), told IslamOnline.net.
"Some Western countries violate the principles of freedom by laws and court rulings that transgress on the rights of their minorities."
A Swiss court turned down on Friday, October 24, a request by a Swiss Muslim father to exempt his two sons from attending mixed swimming classes.
It argued that exempting students from mixed swimming classes for religious reasons must be very restricted.
Equality between the two sexes and the success of the integration process should be given priority over religious considerations, argued the court.
The verdict runs counter to a 1993 court ruling which allowed the exemption of a Muslim schoolgirl from attending mixed swimming lessons that violate her religious tents.
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Some Swiss schools have taken measures to encourage Muslim students to attend swimming classes by allocating separate pools and changing rooms for boys and girls.
But many Muslim students had to dropped out from the mixed swimming classes when such accommodations were not make.
Sheikh Ounis Guergah, the head of the fatwa section of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), said people should strike the right balance.
(more)
Source: IslamOnline (English)
See also: Germany: Muslim girl can't skip swimming lessons, Oslo: Debate about segregated swimming classes, Sweden: Debate about swimming and sexual-education classes
"Muslim students in Europe should be granted the right to take swimming lessons that fit their religious beliefs," Chakib Benmakhlouf, head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE), told IslamOnline.net.
"Some Western countries violate the principles of freedom by laws and court rulings that transgress on the rights of their minorities."
A Swiss court turned down on Friday, October 24, a request by a Swiss Muslim father to exempt his two sons from attending mixed swimming classes.
It argued that exempting students from mixed swimming classes for religious reasons must be very restricted.
Equality between the two sexes and the success of the integration process should be given priority over religious considerations, argued the court.
The verdict runs counter to a 1993 court ruling which allowed the exemption of a Muslim schoolgirl from attending mixed swimming lessons that violate her religious tents.
(..)
Some Swiss schools have taken measures to encourage Muslim students to attend swimming classes by allocating separate pools and changing rooms for boys and girls.
But many Muslim students had to dropped out from the mixed swimming classes when such accommodations were not make.
Sheikh Ounis Guergah, the head of the fatwa section of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), said people should strike the right balance.
(more)
Source: IslamOnline (English)
See also: Germany: Muslim girl can't skip swimming lessons, Oslo: Debate about segregated swimming classes, Sweden: Debate about swimming and sexual-education classes
17 comments:
"Muslim students in Europe should be granted the right to take swimming lessons that fit their religious beliefs." - Why? If you want swimming lessons that fit your religious beliefs, take them in a Muslim country. Problem solved.
"Some Western countries violate the principles of freedom by laws and court rulings that transgress on the rights of their minorities." - What outrageous hypocrisy, for a Muslim organization to lecture Western countries on the principles of freedom and the rights of minorities.
"Equality between the two sexes and the success of the integration process should be given priority over religious considerations, argued the court." - Exactly. Case closed.
Suppose Swiss classes were like those in the prep school I attended (Pingry) and students swam in the nude.
Would the Muslim request be reasonable then?
From a Muslim standpoint, with which I agree, Western bathing suits often leave little to the imagination and swimmers may as well skinny dip.
If the Muslim request were reasonable (a similar situation came up at my Harvard House) in the case of skinny dipping, why is it not reasonable in the case of 90-99% skinny dipping?
Joachim Martillo,
In several European countries nudity is quite acceptable. Muslim demands to bathe wearing trunks, are not considered 'reasonable' at all. They're considered forcing people to follow other people's traditions. A recent article in Norway, for example, brought the story of a Norwegian student who's the only non-Muslim in his class and therefore forced to either shower with trunks, or go home for that.
I googled for European schools where mixed sex nudity was part of the swim program. I found one, a Manchester grammar school. While adult group nudity may be common in some parts of Europe. It is not in others.
I simply see no reason to force nudity or mixed sex swimming in the public schools. A person not raised with group nudity or mixed sex swimming as I was is likely to be stressed when subjected to such practices. Why add more stress to adolsescence?
The desire of Muslims and other groups (religious Christians, observant Jews) for unisex swimming in school hardly seems unreasonable or difficult to fulfil.
BTW, I remember the incident at Harvard Adams House which put the kibosh on mixed nuded swimming.
Steve A. was showering after a swim in the Adams House pool, and he was chatting with Jill R. if I am not mistaken, and he had an erection. With his usual aplomb, Steve told Jill, "Don't mind my friend here; he has a mind of his own." It was a good try but did not salvage mixed swimming.
If 20 year olds cannot control themselves, why should we believe teens can?
In any case the issue is hardly unique to Muslims, I have talked with Chinese women from SE Asia. They are unused to and often have problems with same sex group nudity.
Joachim Martillo,
How do you google for something that is culturally acceptable? Schools who have nude showering in a country where such showers are the norm wouldn't mention it.
Americans are shocked by a woman walking topless, but in north-eastern Europe especially, kids grow up seeing this as completely normal. You can't take one culture's standards and force them on another.
Would you say the same about African tribes who walk about in the nude? They do have their own standards of modesty, in order to prevent social sexual disorder.
"Some Western countries violate the principles of freedom by laws and court rulings that transgress on the rights of their minorities."
That's pretty funny, considering how HIDEOUSLY Muslim countries treat their religious and ethnic minorities.
What a bunch of lying hypocrites. In Islam, we are besieged with evil.
At least Switzerland is standing up to these sociopaths.
Acharya S
TruthBeKnown.com
TBK News
Anyone that looks at the history of Europe and N. America in the 20th century and states, "That's pretty funny, considering how HIDEOUSLY Muslim countries treat their religious and ethnic minorities" is a complete historical ignoramus.
When I was a kid, it was hardly unusual for an African American to be killed for whistling at a white woman, and today even in the 21th century, the US government is allied with the murderous genocidal Eastern European racists that stole Palestine from the native population.
The Magnes Zionist: Kristol and the Shikse discusses one facet of the racism, perversion, and corruption shared by both ethnic Ashkenazi Zionism and ethnic Ashkenazi Bolshevism.
Joachim Martillo,
You love talking about history and theory. I notice also that you did not answer my reply. I suppose it is difficult to actually keep to topic.
Do you deny that right now minorities are treated badly in Muslim countries?
Dear Esther, I have reviewed the efforts of Harvard Kennedy school scholars and students to quantify mistreatment of minorities throughout the West and the Islamic world (as well as in non-Western non-Islamic countries). There simply is no indicator that suggests treatment in Islamic or Arab countries is exceptionally bad by comparison with Western behavior, but there is a lot of statistical and anecdotal evidence that suggests Jewish journalists, facilitators and gatekeepers in the media as well as Jewish NGOs are producing a lot of anti-Muslim anti-Arab propaganda. Phil Weiss often discusses the negative role that media Jews are playing in controlling information at his Mondoweiss website .
Human rights and wrongs discusses the ongoing poisoning of human rights discourse. If the article had delved deeper, it would have found that Save Darfur is wholly a creation of the American organized Jewish community.
Jewish organizations like EMET, The Clarion Fund, and Aish haTorah are probably the chief purveyors or racist hate literature in the USA and the world. I provide lots of information on all these groups on my blog, which I originally created because anti-racist Jews and other activists in the Boston area asked me address the need for website to provide Jews and non-Jews with the intellectual tools to stand up to Zionist intimidation and manipulation that promotes hatred, mass murder, genocide, war, ethnic cleansing, and population dislocation throughout the world.
Joachim Martillo,
I am glad I finally got a straight answer from you. You don't live in the same reality I do. You see, in the world I live in, non-Muslims are persecuted in Muslim countries. The Zionist entity, if you haven't noticed, is full of refugees from such Muslim countries. In fact, the entire western world is full of refugees from such countries.
Dear Esther,
Let me get this straight.
Genocidal racist Eastern Europeans murder Arab Palestine and drive out about 80-90% of the native population. Then these selfsame racists realize that they cannot hold stolen Palestine without cannon fodder and an ersatz native collaborator population.
These racists that previously had no interest or even hostility toward Jewish Arabs start campaigns of incitement, bribery or sabotage to force these Jewish Arabs to emigrate from their native lands to stolen Palestine, and you want to blame Islam for this situation?
Is it any wonder that Jewish Zionists are probably the most hated group on the planet?
The Jewish Zionist attempt to blame Islam for the destruction of Jewish Arab communities is rather like the belief of Southern Whites during Reconstruction that former slaves caused the destruction of the Old South but is probably even more hypocritical.
Without the Zionist invasion, Jewish Arabs would almost certainly be part of the educated political economic elite of the Arab world and would have produced a disproportionate share of political and economic leaders while Jewish Arabs as a whole would enjoy higher incomes and better health than non-Jewish Arabs as was the case before the Zionist invasion.
Joachim Martillo,
Jews were hated long before they became 'Zionists'. In any case, I am not going to debate this topic with you. You live in a different reality, some sort of parallel universe, apparently, since the history and reality I know is very different.
I have studied the statistics on C. and E. Europe for approximately 40 years. Judeophobia, which differed in no major way from the other xenophobias of the region, was like other xenophobias on the decline until Russian ethnic Ashkenazim went on a binge of assassination, terrorism, sabotage and violent revolutionary activity in Czarist Empire. This violence culminated in the overthrow of the Czarist Empire and the establishment of the Soviet state, whose consolidation would not have been possible without the efforts of Soviet Ashkenazim, who predominated in the upper ranks of the party and who took the lead in the planning and execution of Soviet crimes including mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide from the revolution through the late 40s.
From the 1920s onward we see an increase in hatred and fear of Jews because of identification of the Soviet Union and its crimes with Jews. Now that we have obtained access to Soviet archives, we have learned that it was completely wrong to dismiss such identification as baseless bigotry and prejudice, and scholars have also realized that there is a common pattern of Soviet and Zionist Ashkenazi crimes that decent and honest Jews must admit to themselves and to others.
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When I was taking Jewish studies courses at Harvard, a group of us undergraduates realized that there were four basic principles that we had to apply to evaluate the truth of Jewish historiography about Jewish communities.
For the rest click Jewish History: Facts versus Delusions.
The vast majority of Jewish or (especially) ethnic Ashkenazi people believe completely self-serving mythology (the so-called pogrom and persecution version) that has no connection to actual history, that justifies crimes and exploitation against non-Jews, and that allows Jews to absolve themselves of the crimes that have arisen out of Jewish politics.
In this ethnic Ashkenazim are very much like other E. Europeans except that more education and greater presence in academia has made the Jewish hypocrisy much greater, more polished and more apparently scholarly than the nonsense that other E. Europeans disseminate in the same vein.
The ethnic Ashkenazi approach to Jewish history is particularly irritating because Ashkenazim are so quick to attack Germans that attempt to dissociate themselves from the results of German politics.
Joachim Martillo,
As I said, I think we live in two parallel universes. I would love to live in your universe, where people all live happily except for those insidious Jews who want to ruin it all, but sadly I don't.
I ask that you don't use my blog as a platform for yours. You did notice I don't post on your blog? Must be part of that vast conspiracy theory Jews practice over there in your universe. Any further post discussing antisemitic conspiracy theories will be deleted from this blog.
"Feel free to post on my blog. I will let almost anything go through except for obscenity, and I will give a pass to obscenity if it is interesting"
You sound desperate for someone to post on your blog. Is it that bad?
Well, you can always judge for yourself.
Usually about 500 to 1000 people read my blog a day, and I receive a lot of private correspondence on the subject matter, whose importance the general public is only just beginning to realize.
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