The hills are not alive with the sound of muezzin. The Swiss have voted against the further construction of minarets in their tidy little country. This vote applies not just as a regulation, but as an amendment to the Swiss constitution. The Swiss Constitution, based on what I have learned about Confederate govenment, probably does not possess the sanctity of that of the United States of America, but it is no doubt a serious matter to amend it if it requires a majority vote by population and canton. The resident right-wing party celebrated, as one might expect, and the media have forgotten that Swiss neutrality never meant Swiss tolerance or niceness.
What do the Templars have to do with this matter? There is no doubt that the Templars vanished quickly and quietly away in the aftermath of their dissolution, since many of those that did not were slaughtered by their creditor, the King of France. One possible destination of the missing Templars was the Alpine mountain range, a region whose importance derived from the limited number of passes between Germany, France, and Italy thorugh which armies and merchants traveled. I would never equate probability with certainty, but the presence of Templars in that region would explain the sudden appearence of a local sophisticated and secretive banking industry and a sudden rise in regional military success, both of which were specialties of the Templars. The military successes of the Templars, however, were never long-term, and their history was a series of stepped strategic retreats.
If the Swiss hypothesis be true, then the growing presence of Muslims in the last redoubt of the Knights Templar indicates the final defeat of the order which started in a Christian Jerusalem, an ultimate insult after the recent breaking of their banking secrecy under American pressure.
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