On Friday deputy head of the nationalist party SNS, Andrej Danko, expressed his party’s xenophobic concern about foreign cultures pervading Slovak society by calling for a ban on the construction of mosques in Slovakia.
The SNS party plans to file a motion in parliament that will prevent Islamic temples from appearing in Slovakia, even though the religion of Islam is not officially registered here and there have been no mosques built to date.
Danko said that it is not for them to disrespect any particular religion or race, or to say that one religion is better than another. Even so, the party wants to amend the Building Act so that the minarets of mosques are prevented in future, as they interfere with the appearances of the region and even pose a danger.
As a comparison, Danko pointed to how a kind of Chinatown has cropped up along Stara Vajnorska street in Bratislava, while blaming this on the coalition parties SDKU-DS and KDH. He noted that nobody knows the exact size of the the Chinese community there, or who brought them here or where they work.
In response to the proposed ban on mosques, the so-called Islamic Foundation in Slovakia, which affiliates around 5,000 Muslims, released a statement on the same day. In it, apart from pointing out how there are no mosques in Slovakia at present, the foundation accused the SNS of jumping on the bandwagon after interior minister Daniel Lipsic made some strong comments about how “multiculturalism” had failed in the country and how foreigners here should behave like guests.
The statement also pointed to how repeated attempts to create a mosque in Bratislava have been consistently rejected by the city council. It also made a parallel that there are many churches with towers and spires in places like Damascus, Beirut, Jakarta and Cairo.
These kinds of proposals and the statements made by the interior minister seem to support the assumption of Norwegian mass killer Breivik, who said that Slovakia is the least multicultural society in Europe. Time will tell just how right he was or not.