[See related posts on Ramadan on TM: 34, 160, 162, 1236, 1383, 1416]
April 8th, 2010 9:28 pm
Islamist Takeover of Manhattan, No Bullets Fired
Tariq Ramadan at Cooper Union’s Great Hall near Cooper Square
Ramadan was received as a hero by a crowd of six hundred people in Greenwich Village. As a rock star, a jet-setting professor-orator, a demagogue — a smooth operator. He spoke in the Great Hall where President Abraham Lincoln once spoke. Words fail me on this one but I know I should say something. The death of our civilization comes to mind. The lines were huge.
Dalia Mogahed and Tariq Ramadan at the panel
Tariq Ramadan to Cooper Union
By Fern Sidman
On Thursday evening, April 8th, the vaunted hero of the American “politically correct” left made his appearance at Cooper Union in New York City. In a panel discussion entitled, “Secularism, Islam and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West”, Tariq Ramadan, the formerly “exiled” professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University took center stage at the forum sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, PEN American Center, the American Academy of Religion and Slate Magazine.
The audience of approximately 600 people consisted of those who call him “slippery,” “double-faced,” “dangerous,” and those who describe him as “brilliant,” a “bridge-builder,” and a “Muslim Martin Luther.”
Controversy has swirled around Ramadan for the better part of his adult life. He is the grandson of Hassan al Banna, who, in 1928, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He is the son of Said Ramadan who is credited with bringing the Muslim Brotherhood to Germany where it eventually spread throughout Europe.
Born in Switzerland, when his father was exiled from Egypt by Gamal Abdul Nasser, Ramadan studied philosophy, literature and social sciences at the University of Geneva and pursued a Master’s degree in philosophy and French literature. He received his Ph.D in Arabic and Islamic studies. He is best known for his dangerously duplicitous positions on Islamic radicalism. His passive and ostensibly reasoned posture while speaking to Western audiences hides his essentially bellicose commitment to the furtherance of Sharia law which he reserves exclusively for Muslim only gatherings.
The web site of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy says of Ramadan:
“Ramadan is a self proclaimed Salafi-reformist whose version of reform appears to basically be a modernization of the political system prevalent at the time of the Prophet Mohammed rather than advocacy for individual liberty and the separation of mosque and state. A ‘rock star’ among the many European Muslims, namely Islamists, Ramadan is considered the most cited individual on Islam in Europe. Ramadan uses language in a way that seems to support the precepts of non-violence and assimilation, yet he does not distance himself in any way or nearly adequately from the supremacy of political Islam and the concept of the Islamic State. His excuse is that he is speaking ‘from within Muslims’. But this prevents a real understanding of his ideas about political Islam, the Islamic state, and Sharia law versus constitutional republics and the establishment clause. It prevents a real understanding of his position on the Muslim Brotherhood and thus becomes actual tacit support of the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood. ”
Ramadan has been unacceptably deceptive on issues related to Sharia such as its laws against apostasy, proscribed punishments under Islamic law, state law versus Sharia law, and real and universal equality for women. His positions remain in line with the Muslim Brotherhood–which endangers both other Muslims and the world at large. Ramadan’s easy access to media suggests that other Muslims are all like him–which is not true. His larger-than-life media presence silences and hides other kinds of Muslim voices.
(snip)
On January 20, 2010, the American State Department, under a different administration, decided to lift the ban which prohibited Ramadan (as well as Professor Adam Habib from South Africa) from entering the United States. Our very own Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, signed this document.
At Cooper Union, Ramadan was introduced by Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, which litigates cases concerning dissent, discrimination, detention, surveillance and due process. Jaffer was counsel to the plaintiffs in American Academy of Religion v Chertoff, the lawsuit that ended the ban on Ramadan. Hailing him as the sacrificial lamb of the Bush administration’s anti-Islamic agenda, Jaffer said this evening was dedicated “to creating a safe political space for the exchange of ideas”.
The panel was moderated by Jacob Weisberg, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of The Slate Group, which publishes Slate Magazine and other web sites. Weisberg introduced the other members of the panel, but noted that the evening would focus on the philosophies of Tariq Ramadan, and that he’d be asking some hard hitting questions.
The other panel members included Dalia Mogahed, a Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies; Mogahed is the co-author of a book entitled, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think; George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq; feminist Joan Wallach Scott, professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and the author of The Politics of the Veil. Wallach has also been a strong advocate of boycotting and divesting in Israel. She is also a gender theorist.
Ramadan took the lectern and thanked the sponsoring groups for championing his rights and then went on to say that while he is sharply critical of American policy vis-a vis Iraq and Afghanistan, he is not anti-Western and feels that Muslims in Europe can maintain a pro-Western lifestyle while closely adhering to their Islamic beliefs. He said that Islamic women were now taking their place in the forefront of those who frame the debate about the dual role of Muslims in a secular European culture and those who remain faithful to Koranic principles.
(snip)
Ramadan’s detractors view his rhetoric quite differently. “Tariq Ramadan’s entry into America needs to be met with open dialogue from the Muslim Community, non-Muslim organizations and the media on the real threat of Political Islam,” says M. Zuhdi Jasser, the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). “It is incumbent on all Americans, especially American Muslims, to engage Ramadan at any opportunity to demonstrate that the US Constitution trumps the construct of the Islamic State.”
He went on to say, “To give Ramadan an unfettered platform for his dissimulation while also perpetuating his message of victimization is to give him and his clerical colleagues a status which will forever retard real reform within Muslim thought. Real reform comes from those Muslim leaders with the personal strength of character to call for an end to the Islamic state and the separation of mosque and state. Ramadan has not. Rather he is a soft tongued global instrument of political Islam against the bulwark of real freedom and liberty as we know it in the United States.”
Panelist George Packer asked Ramadan why he never condemned his grandfather, Hassan al Banna for strongly supporting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent years in Nazi Germany and advocated the mass extermination of the Jews. Ramadan danced around the question saying that his grandfather was misquoted and that he never supported a fascist regime, but only supported the Mufti in terms of his fierce opposition to the creation of the State of Israel. Packer pressed Ramadan on this point and asked how his grandfather could support and work with someone who advocated such a pernicious philosophy of classical anti-Semitism. Ramadan refused to admit that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was anti-Semitic, but rather claimed that he was righteous in his beliefs that Palestine should not be colonized by the Jews of Europe or the West.
Pajamas Media columnist and prolific author, Phyllis Chesler, stated in a March 25, 2010 article entitled, “Bin Laden Threatens America, NYC Welcomes Tariq Ramadan”, “Ramadan is not my problem, I know him for the snake he is. Rather, it would be the sight of so many Americans who’ve glamorized him, who are fooled by him, who have come to worship Death at his feet.”
Charges of anti-Semitism have dogged Ramadan since he penned an article in 2003 entitled, “Critique of the (New) Communalist Intellectuals.” Ramadan’s main argument was that “French Jewish intellectuals” — like Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann and Pierre-André Taguieff (in fact not Jewish at all) — who used to be “considered universalist intellectuals” had become knee-jerk defenders of Israel and thus “had relativized the defense of universal principles of equality and justice.” Ramadan was trying to turn the tables on those who accuse Muslims of obsessing about their victimhood by accusing “Jewish intellectuals” of doing precisely that, thinking of just their own tribal concerns, while Ramadan’s pursuit of justice for Palestinians was supposedly part of a universalist project.