Inciting fear

See the poster on the right? This is the latest offering from the UDC - the Swiss political party that hit headlines recently for what I think was inciting racial and religious prejudice by depicting minarets as weapons of mass destruction. Well now they are doing it again, playing on people's fears that "the bad dirty foreigners" are en masse invading clean, lovely Switzerland!

Most of you will shudder at this evil genius of manipulating people's fears but then I wonder how is this poster any different to my very intelligent, middle class British colleague's comment today at work when discussing why the riots in the Uk were happening. He said, "well it's the immigrants ain't it! it's the Polish, the East Europeans, the Blacks and Asians all those lot that have flooded the UK" (said with a straight face to me - a British with half Bengali, half Italian parents both residing for over 30+ years in England).

I shudder at the intolerance of it all and pray that somehow we can all do better.