Our friend Noah Marcel Sudarsky, former New York correspondent for the largest circulation French newspaper, has written us his thoughts about the Swiss minaret ban. Sudarsky grew up in France, Switzerland, and New York. He is a freelance writer and correspondent now living in the Bay Area. His articles and reviews have appeared in The NY Press, The Village Voice, The Onion, New York magazine, Salon.com, Citimag, Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Times, and other publications.

While interpretations concerning the Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets will occupy pundits for a while, the recent vote has already given an undeniable boost to the European far right. Cast as a decision to impede the further development of Islamic extremism, the ban actually accomplishes only one thing: to further marginalize Muslims in a conservative Western European bastion which, historically at least, was a center of Enlightenment thought. Christian reformers made Switzerland their home, but also progressive thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when his universalist doctrines founded on the principle of inalienable human rights forced him to flee pre-revolutionary France or face execution.

The Swiss take great pride in Rousseau’s residency in the charming little town of Coppet on the banks of Lake Geneva, where placards commemorate France’s most famous expatriate – forgetting that he too was an immigrant. Many of the Kosovars and Bosnians (now Bosniacs) who constitute a big percentage of Switzerland’s Muslim population are also political refugees. While it’s more than unlikely the Swiss ban will degenerate into the kind of genocidal horror we witnessed in ex-Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing, one way or another, always starts with the effort to make one group into a pariah by rendering their belief system suspect.

In France, the ban has already provided fodder to the xenophobic National Front, which pundits declared dead after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. The movement of Jean-Marie Le Pen (now run by his daughter) has experienced a veritable resurgence in recent weeks, and is now projected to do well in the upcoming regional elections. Moreover, an official, Government-sponsored debate is underway in France concerning the hot-button topic of the “National Identity,” and the idea of an outright ban on the Muslim veil has been floated publicly by elected officials. Since 2004, headscarves and other highly visible religious symbols have already been prohibited in public schools. While a serious debate is certainly possible concerning what a secular regime should be allowed to enforce in its own state-funded schools (the argument being that students shouldn’t be flaunting their religious beliefs in a system founded on Jacobin egalitarianism, which was built in large part against the Church – a fervent supporter of the Monarchy) the possible ban on the veil goes one step further, and isn’t that different from banning minarets. The French National Identity debate (debacle would be a more appropriate term) has already paid off huge dividends to the National Front, and plays right into the hands of the extreme right.

Xenophobic political parties like the National Front, the Swiss People’s Party, and their equivalents in Holland, Denmark, and Germany have become more mainstream, more legitimate because their themes have infected the public debate. Gone is the stigma of voting for these openly racist political formations or at the very least, their ideas. The bottom line is that targeting one particular segment of the population, by instituting methodical bans on its most obvious religious symbols, has become, once again, common practice in Europe. Where this will lead no one can tell.