The charismatic Tariq Ramadan is the British establishment’s favourite Islamist radical. In a magisterial piece of writing in New Republic Paul Berman, author of ‘Terror and Liberalism’, reviews a clutch of books by Ramadan and not only manages to disinter the extremism that Ramadan goes to such lengths to conceal but he also comprehensively shreds the various useful idiots who have sanitised Ramadan’s thinking for public consumption – the people who, in Berman’s cutting terms,

in applauding or merely in growing pensive, seemed to have accepted his categories of analysis, as if in a stupor.

So great is this collective stupor that, despite the fact that Ramadan was excluded from the US because of his suspected links with extremism, Oxford university has given him an academic berth – and the British government appointed him as one of its advisers on how to deal with… Islamist extremism. Berman’s article shows just how deeply the west’s collective brain has been put to sleep.