Swiss politician loses post, job after urging ‘Kristallnacht’ against Muslims
Well this guy’s a real class act.
Right-wing Swiss politician Alexander Müller is out of a party post as well as his private job after using Twitter to call for ‘Kristallnacht … this time for mosques.’
The Zurich man also faces a criminal investigation and police searched his home and confiscated his computer, according to media reports and his own blog.
The prosecutor’s office said Müller, 37, admitted tweeting in response to the May acquittal on hate-speech charges of a Muslim man who said it was “Sharia-compliant’ for a man to beat his wife if she refused to have sex with him, the newspaper Tages Anzeiger (Daily News) and others said. Otherwise, Aziz Osmanoglu had said, the man might be unfaithful.
Müller tweeted from his @dailytalk account, ‘Maybe we need a new Kristallnacht … this time against the mosques.’
The tweet was erased, but newspapers, including 20 Minuten, recovered it and other posts.
Müller also had tweeted that ‘we should take this pack out of the country. I do not want to live with such people’ and ‘I would like to stand certain people up against the wall and shoot them. Less dirt on the earth would be good.’
Müller’s tweets now are open only to confirmed followers, according to his Twitter profile page.
On Wednesday, Müller held a news conference in which he apologized and resigned from the Swiss People’s Party executive committee for Zurich districts 7 and 8 and from his seat on the local school board.
Roger Liebi, the party’s Zurich leader, said the comments were ‘unacceptable.’
Müller said in his blog that he was fired from his job at a credit insurance firm after his employers learned of his tweets through the media.
Abdel Azziz Qaasem Illi, spokesman for Islamic Central Switzerland, was quoted in Islamaphobia Today as saying that Müller’s party is no friend to religious Muslims. In 2009, the party had supported a constitutional ban against the construction of minarets in Switzerland.
Islamaphobia Today reported that Illi said statements against Jews are avoided in Switzerland, but “it is more common to hear anti-Muslim hate speech.’