Tariq Ramadan: A Viper in Our Midst (Thanks to Hillary Clinton)

Tariq Ramadan: A Viper in Our Midst (Thanks to Hillary Clinton)

The stealth jihadist, once banned from the U.S., is welcomed back in to speak this month.

by
David Solway
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April 7, 2010 - 12:00 am

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Islamic scholar and stealth jihadist Tariq Ramadan is on the move again, having been welcomed to our shores as an apostle of moderation and a harbinger of reconciliation between Islam and the West. Ramadan had been banned from the U.S. under the provisions of the Patriot Act for having contributed to the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity with ties to Hamas which is listed on the U.S. State Department calendar of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Under an exemption issued by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Ramadan is now free to bring his message to the American people from within their own public institutions, addressing Cooper Union and CAIR-Chicago.
Later this month, Ramadan will be revisiting Canada, mounting his carefully calculated charm offensive in Montreal and Ottawa, explaining how Islam can be seamlessly integrated into Western culture. Ramadan is especially fond of Ottawa, Canada’s capital, a city with six official mosques, another 22 university and student mosques, and yet another four mosque-building projects currently on the books. What’s not to like? But this is only a sign of what’s to come. Under cover of Ramadan’s glabrous rhetoric, the Muslim Brotherhood’s campaign to subvert the West from within takes another giant step forward. And we are going along with it.

We have simply not understood — or stubbornly refuse to understand — that Islam is our “world-historical” antagonist. But it is also more than that. The welcome we extend to those who would subdue us is also an indication of what is wrong with us. How else to explain the warm reception we give to a crypto-Islamist like Tariq Ramadan, who passes himself off as a Muslim reformer but strongly implies in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam that Islam will envelop and, so to speak, outperform Judaism and Christianity? How else to explain how the author of an arguably anti-Semitic tract entitled Critique des (nouveaux) intellectuels communautaires can be celebrated by Time magazine as an intellectual innovator and invited by Notre Dame University to assume the Henry R. Luce chair in its International Peace Studies program? Ramadan has recently been appointed to the Sultan of Oman chair of Islamology at the University of Leiden, which does not appear to have objected to Ramadan’s presenting himself on the bookflap of his Radical Reform as “teaching in the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University” — there is no such position in Islamic Studies in the Oxford Faculty of Divinity and Ramadan has no formal appointment there.
Ramadan believes that Islam can infiltrate and conquer the West by initially peaceful means, continuing immigration, and the “duty for Muslims … to take Islam from the periphery of European culture to the centre,” to cite from an interview in the New Statesman. The warrant here is clearly Koran 9:33 in which Allah sends forth his apostle “to make the true faith supreme over all religions” — a mandate which may be dissembled but cannot go unheeded. Ramadan coquettishly advances toward his goal of disarming resistance via the rhetoric of ethical harmony and doctrinal alignment between the various faith communities. He even goes so far as to refer to Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, Averroes, and Ibn Khaldun as “European Muslim thinkers … who … confidently [accepted] their European identity” — a proposition as staggering as it is absurd. A cursory perusal of Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, a kind of Islam for Dhimmis, would quickly torpedo Ramadan’s strange notion of cultural, religious, and jurisprudential consonance. (In her last book, The Force of Reason, Oriana Fallaci also calls attention to the new and concomitant Islamic “design based on gradual penetration rather than brutal and sudden aggression.”)