Friday 11 February 2011

Tariq Ramadan: the lionized wolf in jackal's clothing; he speaketh with two tongues

Ramadan speaks with one tongue
to the west and with another
to the Arabic World.  See here.
I wrote about Ramadan’s dishonest piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago and then about the obsequious BBC interview with him the next day. Since then, more articles taking him and the New York Times to task.

Barry Rubin:[*]
In the Rubin Report:
I'm fascinated by the op-ed in the New York Times international edition by Tariq Ramadan. It is so amazingly false and puts forward such ludicrous claims that the whole thing seems to shout out: 
        You people in the West are so stupid and such huge suckers that you'll swallow anything!

Anyone who has studied modern Middle East history, certainly every professor of Middle East studies in North America, knows that Ramadan has told a series of whoppers.
How could the New York Times publish such nonsense? Couldn't the editors have told him privately: We don't mind if you prevaricate, but couldn't it be more credible so our readers won't laugh at us. This is on the level of how an 18-year-old Muslim Brotherhood street tough might explain these issues.
In the American Thinker:
… to pretend that the Brotherhood is about peace, love, and democracy is like watching a wolf dressed up as a sheep: you know it's up to no good.

But then, for the grandson of an antisemitic Nazi collaborator, and son of top aide to another Nazi collaborator, and who himself advocates a totalitarian state, Ramadan has done very well to be hailed as a man of peace by applauding Western intellectuals. 

Robert Spencer:

“Grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder whitewashes Muslim Brotherhood in New York Times”.

The French journalist Caroline Fourest has published a book-length study of Tariq Ramadan's sly duplicity, Brother Tariq. Fourest concludes that this much-lionized putative Muslim Martin Luther is actually anything but a reformer: in reality, Ramadan is "remaining scrupulously faithful to the strategy mapped out by his grandfather, a strategy of advance stage by stage" toward the imposition of Islamic law in the West.
References:

  •     "Whither the Muslim Brotherhood", Tariq Ramadan, New York Times, 8 Feb 11, OnlinePDF
  •     Brother Tariq: the Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.  Caroline Foureste, Encounter Books, 2008.  From the Editorial Reviews:

Tariq Ramadan is a global phenomenon. A Swiss-born Muslim activist, he is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical group credited with inspiring modern Islamic radicalism. Ramadan is fluent in English, French and Arabic. In Europe, he is the most quoted and circulated writer on Islam. His writings are a regular feature of major English-speaking newspapers, but his real message is revealed in his speeches to Muslim groups in France, Africa, and the Middle East. Caroline Fourest has carefully transcribed and translated those speeches and shows that Ramdan's ingenious rhetoric is a Trojan horse, fostering the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian values of fundamentalist Islam on its latest battlefield: Western civilization.
Caroline Fourest is a French feminist writer, journalist and editor of the magazine Prochoix 


[*] Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The GLORIA Center's site is www.gloria-center.org  and of his blog, Rubin Reports, www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.