Fraumunster Church, Zurich

Source: Bigstock

“I didn’t realize repeatedly shooting Jesus in the face could be considered religiously offensive,” Says Swiss Muslim Politician.

How’s that for clickbait? Well, as this piece is about a truly abysmal clickbait European politician, I’m afraid I just couldn’t help myself.

Last June, Swiss soldiers took a break from defending their country from external enemies to pander toward the interests of the nation’s chief enemies within instead, being led by an army imam in a prayer toward Mecca to mark the highly important (and highly imported) Muslim Feast Day of Kurban Bayrami. This stunt sparked much annoyance, with the anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party (SVP) asking, “What’s next? Child marriages, Sharia courts, stonings?”

One Muslim only too happy to begin stoning the SVP in the court of public opinion immediately was Sanija Ameti, a prominent left-wing female politician. Ameti announced, “This is a textbook example of racism,” before implying the soi-disant “Swiss People” of the Swiss People’s Party were infinitely less Swiss than she herself was, despite the fact she was not truly Swiss at all, having been brought to the country as a 3-year-old Bosniak asylum seeker from the former Yugoslavia in 1995.

Ameti’s family had actually wanted to enter Germany illegally, not Switzerland, but their chosen people-smuggler had demanded more cash to take them on the final leg of the journey, so they ended up dumped disappointingly in the inferior cut-price Alpine version of Deutschland instead. But never mind, the distinctly ungrateful Ameti was here now, and all the bigoted white burghers had to accept she had much more of a right to define what truly constituted Swiss citizenship than they did.

As “tolerance” and “diversity” were now the chief values of Swiss public life, at least in her own swollen head, for the SVP to openly reject such things was for them to simultaneously reject being true modern-day multi-culti-loving Schweizer at all. “How integrated are the SVP members [into Swiss society]?” Ameti asked, turning her opponents’ usual critique of unassimilated Swiss-resident Muslims against them. “They are trampling on the constitution and the freedom of religion enshrined in it.”

Sanija Ameti would never trample upon matters of religious import herself, of course…would she?

Shooting Gallery
Like a latter-day William Tell, Ameti is a dab hand at shooting, and over the weekend of 7–8 September chose to demonstrate this by posting exciting (but since-deleted) photographs on Instagram of her peppering a large image of Madonna and Child full of Swiss-cheese-style bullet holes, something that subsequently proved an act of accidental self-assassination.

Although only having ever been successfully elected as a mere city councillor for the Green Liberal Party (GLP) in Zurich, Ameti has managed to become a prominent figure in Swiss political life nonetheless, due to her obsessive online publicity-seeking, which in 2021 saw her appointed to co-leadership of Operation Libero. This is an equally click-hungry liberal pressure group devoted toward ensuring closer relations between the E.U. and its neighboring non–member state of Switzerland, by using what British pro-E.U. rag The Guardian has called “fun but hard-hitting messages to tackle fear and pessimism”—i.e., handing out fluorescent pink condoms to students dancing in nightclubs in the immediate lead-up to immigration referendums.

Fame quickly translated into infamy for Ameti after her unwise September act of iconoclasm, however. Following widespread condemnation, the GLP instituted procedures to expel her, saying they “would welcome it if Sanija Ameti would take responsibility and leave the party of her own accord”—which she promptly did. She was also fired from her day job at, ironically enough, one of Switzerland’s leading PR and consultancy firms, Farner Group. Only Operation Libero kept her on regardless, although they did call her actions “absolutely stupid.”

Meanwhile, the youth wing of the SVP, delighted to expose the hypocrisy of the very same young fräulein who had accused them of Islamophobia for doing far, far less the previous year, filed a criminal complaint against Ameti for engaging in “inexcusable mockery of our Christian-Western culture” and scorning “Christianity in an unspeakable way [that] speaks the figurative language of Islamist terrorists.”

Nonetheless, speaking with her PR hat on (if she ever takes it off), Ameti still chose to play the victim, complaining of death and rape threats, before implausibly claiming she had not understood her actions may have contained the potential to offend people. Despite the fact the poster she had shot bore the highly self-explanatory title Madonna With Child and the Archangel, and clearly showed Mary and Jesus with large glowing golden halos around their heads, Ameti said that “I didn’t pay attention to the content of the pictures,” had not realized they depicted anything of a holy nature, and had only used the print as it happened by pure coincidence to be the correct precise size required to act as a shooting target from her chosen specialist distance of 10 meters away.

I know they have a long tradition of maintaining armed civilian militias over there, but are the Swiss authorities really so generous in handing out gun licenses that they now even distribute them to the functionally blind?

Picking the Wrong Target
I suppose, to wind-up merchants of the agnostic Ameti’s unimpeachably “progressive” outlook on life, such iconography must represent the very definition of empty symbols, unlike those relating to her own ancestral creed of Islam. For her, I suspect, Christian images are now little more than dead letters, meaningless fairy-tale cartoons that should no more provoke emotional reaction from the rational-minded observer than shooting at an image of Little Red Riding Hood and her wolf would do.

Islam, however, is a different thing by far—that is clearly still a living religion, one that has far more life in Europe today than it has done at any point since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella. Had Ameti pinned up and then shot at some handily target-size verses from the Koran, all those death and rape threats she claimed to have received might just have found themselves actually being followed through on.

Contemporary European Christians, though, are made of softer stuff. Most Toblerone-spined Swiss religious authorities simply turned the other cheek and begged mildly for her to blast yet another bullet through it. The Bishop of Chur, Joseph Bonnemain, guided his flocks that “Forgiveness is a gift from God that makes us approach each other again and again.” Yes, but what if you do approach such people “again and again” and all you get are more and more direct slaps in the face? It’s a good job European Christians of old like Charles the Hammer never thought (or fought) like that.

A Refugee From Reality
Being a former child refugee, Sanija Ameti herself is precisely the kind of natural open-borders ideologue who stands ready-primed to step into and exploit this civilizational void to opportunistically reshape her adopted host culture in a fashion she sees most fit.

In a 2023 interview with a Swiss newspaper, billed as being with “the phenomenon, Sanija Ameti,” the human marvel provocatively boasted of having “the self-confidence of an average white seventy-year-old.” Personally, I think she actually possesses the colossal arrogance of a 32-year-old neo-Ottoman settler-colonialist.

Once her parents arrived safely from the ongoing anti-Muslim genocide of Slobodan Milosevic’s rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia, Ameti’s interview revealed, her admirably appreciative parents made it their main principle to keep their heads down and assimilate with the ways of their kind Helvetian hosts. Their daughter, sadly, was rather different: “I’m the complete opposite of my parents. I want to take up space. I want to be visible and thus free.”

That’s not freedom, it’s egotism. In a certain sense, therefore, perhaps Ameti has successfully assimilated into some of the core values of the always online 2020s West after all?

“I see authority as something restrictive,” she continued, another diagnostic sign of her possession by the destructive “Look at me, Look at me!” spirit of our times. “I make demands, I break stereotypes. That triggers hatred. It’s the same every time. It bores me,” she added. Stop doing it, then.

An Excessively Self-Made Woman
A constant theme of Ameti’s whining rhetoric is how, as immigrants and refugees, her core political constituents “have to reshape the country” that gave them safe shelter, so as to render it utterly unrecognizable to those naive enough to have let them waltz into it in the first place.

Her main chosen vehicle for performing such demographic gerrymandering is, naturally, the nearby borderless zone of the E.U. that, via her co-leadership of Operation Libero, she seeks to force Switzerland into “enjoying” a state of ever-closer union with, whether the intended bride wishes to undergo any such Islam-friendly arranged marriage or not.

She seems to see the E.U. as some federalist clockwork empire that acts for the greater civilizational good by keeping its constituent member parts in a state of enforced perpetual union, as with the former Yugoslavia prior to its civil war: This would make Ursula von der Leyen Marshal Tito in a dress. As Ameti explained in a 2021 interview: “For generations, we have forgotten that European policy is holistic security policy. The EU is a peace project. It is the world’s only successful [sic] answer to the central question of modernity: What comes after the Empire?”

What indeed? Another Empire, only one falsely disguised as an alleged “participatory democracy,” Brussels-style, a postmodern “Empire of the Self”:

“Because nothing erodes personal freedom as much as violence and armed conflict—I say this from my own experience—the EU is also a freedom project. All the cucumber curvature norms and other annoyances in the world about the EU cannot call into question this achievement of freedom. Switzerland must have an existential interest in being involved in this institutional project. It is our only chance for a world further away from the abyss, where we can tackle challenges such as climate, digitalization and geopolitics together [i.e., without any of this stuff actually being voted on—Switzerland has an awkward national tradition of public referendums on such matters, which elevated persons like Ameti often unacceptably lose]…. Is the most important raison d’être of the state the security or the freedom of the individual? Security is important. But only if it serves individual freedom.”

Non-Swiss Miss
But what if your own personal definition of freedom happens to include quaint, Westphalian obsolescences like national sovereignty, away from such centrally mandated horrors as dreaded E.U.-imposed “cucumber curvature norms”? In that case, Ameti told Le Monde in 2022, collective freedom suddenly no longer counts, and “isolationism” becomes nothing but “a fatal illusion” that has fraudulently “established itself as the expression of the so-called popular will.” The “so-called popular will” here is what we used to call “European democracy.”

Freedom for individuals, but not for nations, then? That sounds like a recipe for complete civilizational disaster: for infinite social Balkanization, in fact, a truly fatal danger you may have thought a runaway former Yugoslavian like Ameti would have been all too aware of.

Rather than realizing how fragile and precious nation-states are, in her unlimited lack of wisdom Ameti does the precise opposite. By spewing bullets at Jesus and then boasting about it online, she instead sets about trying to destroy her adoptive homeland’s main historic motivating civilizational basis in the shape of Christianity, which, if it can successfully be blown away, might well indeed help render Switzerland into the empty, blank liberal canvas her kind so richly desires.

But will those real ethnic and cultural Swiss who still remain all just lie down and let her? According to one adulatory 2023 profile, what the self-loving liberal provocateur wants to achieve above all by provoking anger through her endless conservative-trolling stunts is to become “a target.” Ameti has certainly become one of those now.

But her angry critics had better watch out: She does demonstrably possess a large gun, after all. Helvetia hath no fury like this woman scorned.