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August 31, 2005
Mr Blair's myopia
Those who think the London bombings finally brought Tony Blair’s government to its senses should think again. Hard on the heels of the appointment of the less than moderate MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala to the new Home Office task force set up to combat Muslim extremism, we now learn that the government has also appointed to this same task force none other than Tariq Ramadan. This is beyond a joke. Ramadan, a smooth and sophisticated operator, is also anything but a moderate. He has been banned from America and France because of his seditious views – although he says the French ban was successfully challenged, and he has been invited to reapply for a US visa. If so, more fool them. Ramadan -- who has also just been appointed to a year's fellowship at St Antony's college, Oxford -- is more dangerous than the more rabid extremists because he is superficially more plausible, having taken care, particularly in recent times, to make statements opposing Islamic terrorism and antisemitism. But he has not, so far as is known, repudiated his stated goal to Islamicise the west. He just presents it in a way that shrewdly plays to the British government’s instinct for appeasement. The Guardian, which reports Ramadan’s appointment, also reports the reaction from those who have some expertise in reading the extremist directory: 'Mike Whine, spokesman for the Jewish Community Security Trust which monitors alleged Muslim extremists, said: "It's a strange choice given his past statements which some have viewed as being anti-Jewish. Some of our community view him as extreme. He speaks with two voices, one for his European audience which appears moderate, and one for his Arab hinterland where he voices many of the demands of Islamists. He is at the soft end of the Islamist extreme spectrum."'This is what the Islam scholar Daniel Pipes has revealed of Ramadan’s history: •‘He has praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi. Mr. Turabi in turn called Mr. Ramadan the "future of Islam." • Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris. • Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for Al-Qaeda activities, had "routine contacts" with Mr. Ramadan, according to a Spanish judge (Baltasar Garzón) in 1999. • Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris, stated in his 2001 trial that he had studied with Mr. Ramadan. • Along with nearly all Islamists, Mr. Ramadan has denied that there is "any certain proof" that Bin Laden was behind 9/11. • He publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as "interventions," minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement. And here are other reasons, dug up by Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer doing work for some of the 9/11 families, as reported in Le Parisien: • Intelligence agencies suspect that Mr. Ramadan (along with his brother Hani) coordinated a meeting at the Hôtel Penta in Geneva for Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy head of Al-Qaeda, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, now in a Minnesota prison. • Mr. Ramadan's address appears in a register of Al Taqwa Bank, an organization the State Department accuses of supporting Islamist terrorism.’ The government’s desperation to engage with ‘moderate’ Islam appears to mean that it is keen to embrace even those who believe in Islamicising the west, as long as they make ritual noises denouncing the terror that flows from such an agenda. At the root of this is its determination to avoid at all costs being thought to have a problem with the current state of Islam itself as opposed to a few ‘unrepresentative’ terrorists, whose motivation will therefore be ascribed to everything but. Such myopia spells cultural suicide. Posted by melanie at August 31, 2005
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