The State Dept. Was Right
Guitta, olivieR
The State Dept. Was Right To deny Tariq Ramadan a visa. by Olivier Guitta On September 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed...
...Ramadan cultivated a "moderate" reputation by taking part in interfaith seminars and sitting on a commission on "Islam and Secularism...
...I believe he is not at all a man of dialogue...
...The European Union has made him an adviser on religious issues...
...Sylvain Besson of the Swiss daily Le Temps quotes court papers showing that Beghal "was a speechwriter for Tariq Tariq Ramadan Ramadan...
...For starters, Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the highly influential Islamist organization born in Egypt in 1928...
...When Ramadan faced off with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister and presidential hopeful, in 2004 on French TV, he repeatedly called the minister "Sarkozy" instead of the usual "Mr...
...In an interview with the French newsmagazine Le Point, Ramadan used the neutral term "interventions" when speaking of the major terrorist attacks in New York, Bali, and Madrid...
...Her conclusion: "Ramadan is a war leader...
...This is handy, from his point of view, as the United Kingdom is the ideal launching pad from which to reach the main objective: For the Muslim Brotherhood, the big prize has always been the United States...
...It can be read at www.frontpage-mag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=22 416&p=1...
...On the contrary, he presents him as a model to be followed, a person beyond reproach, nonviolent and unjustly criticized because of the "Zionist lobby...
...by Olivier Guitta On September 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed around 600 euros to a French charity classified as a terrorist organization since 2003 because of its relationship with the palestinian terrorist group Hamas...
...This is an argument used by Islamist conspir-atorialists who accuse Israel of perpetrating 9/11...
...When an interviewer from the weekly L'Ex-press asked Fourest how she could be so sure that Ramadan was indeed the "political heir of his grandfather," Hassan al-Banna, here's how she replied: Because I've studied his statements and his writing...
...His charisma and gift for public speaking made him a hit in the French suburbs, where high-rise public housing projects have become Islamic ghettos...
...By 2004 Ramadan was de facto spokesman of the French Muslim community, spending most of his time in Lyon, France's second-largest city, instructing the young Muslim population...
...Prominent moderate Muslims also accuse Ramadan of double talk...
...This latest exclusion follows on the revocation of Ramadan's visa to live and work in the United States while teaching at Notre Dame in 2004, a step taken at the express request of the Department of Homeland Security...
...In 1995, Alaa el-Din Nazmi, an Egyptian Secret Service agent assigned to watch the Ramadan family, was murdered in Geneva...
...And when asked recently by an Italian magazine whether car bombings against U.S...
...His objective was to reach Muslim youth by Islamizing modernity rather than modernizing Islam...
...the largest Saudi charities and global missionary groups...
...But Ramadan has learned from his mistakes and is taking ever greater pains to conceal his true identity...
...Tariq's father, Said Ramadan, was a major figure in this organization, expelled from Egypt by Gamal Abdul Nasser for Islamist activity...
...Like all the Muslim Brothers . . . since it's a fraternity which is three-quarters secret____A Muslim Brother is above all someone who adopts the methods and the thought of Banna...
...It was the Brotherhood that invented the now-familiar Islamist modus operandi of covert organization, assassination, and extremist theology...
...Sarkozy" or, as the French say, monsieur le ministre...
...Commenting on the September 11 attacks ten days after they occurred, he explained that one couldn't say for sure that bin Laden was behind them...
...The first indication of his fundamentalism came in 1993, when he lobbied to outlaw a play called Mahomet, being produced in Geneva, which represented the prophet in a light that did not fit with Ramadan's views...
...His notion of Islam as the solution was favorably received by many French Muslim youths and partly explains the radicalization of this community...
...Ramadan is the man who has done the most to disseminate this method and this thought...
...He then moved to Geneva, where in 1961 he created the Islamic Center, a combination mosque, think tank, and community center...
...authorities of intolerance, the background and views of Tariq Ramadan suggest the government's move was entirely justified...
...But his popularity really took off when he threw in his lot with the antiglobalization crowd...
...Tariq Ramadan claims that he is not a Muslim Brother...
...Ramadan's views about Israel are unsurprising: He strongly favors the elimination of the Jewish state...
...As one French DST (equivalent to the FBI) agent told the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Ramadan's long-term goal is to bring about the legal extinction of the state of Israel through a major Muslim lobbying campaign, first in Europe, then in the United States...
...Upon his return to Switzerland, he founded the Movement of Swiss Muslims...
...Predictably, as soon as her book was published, an Islamist website threatened Fourest and posted her address and the pass code to get into her building...
...Ramadan is also a pragmatist...
...Said Ramadan took refuge first in Saudi Arabia, where he was a founder of the World Islamic League, one of Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs and counter-terrorism consultant in Washington...
...In response to her book, Ramadan calls Fourest an agent of Israel but doesn't refute her findings...
...While the American Civil Liberties Union and the leftist literary group PEN, among others, present Ramadan as a moderate and accuse U.S...
...Thanks to this alliance, he quickly became a media star in France...
...In 1991, he went to Cairo to study with Islamist professors...
...I was struck by the extent to which the discourse of Tariq Ramadan is often just a repetition of the discourse that Banna had at the beginning of the 20th century in Egypt...
...According to Roland Jacquard, who runs a terrorism watchdog website, Ramadan is not directly involved in terrorist activities, but many of his supporters are...
...Indeed, some view him as a brilliant intellectual preaching a modern and tolerant Islam...
...Ramadan's stint in England has refurbished his credibility and given him a new start...
...I am convinced that Tariq Ramadan deeply hates the West...
...After toying with a career as a professional soccer player, he settled into the family business as an Islamic scholar...
...Its goal was to overthrow the Egyptian regime, install a fundamentalist Muslim government, and impose sharia (Islamic law) as the new constitution...
...Fourest is not the only one who has seen through Ramadan's game...
...forces in Iraq were justified, he was quoted as saying: "Iraq was colonized by the Americans...
...In 1995, in the midst of terrorist attacks in Paris orchestrated by the Algerian Islamist group GIA, Jean-Louis Debre, French interior minister, denied Ramadan entry to France because of his links to the group...
...Profiled in the New Yorker in 2002, Salahuddin confirmed that Ramadan remained his adviser and spiritual guide until Ramadan's death in 1995...
...connections: He had a close relationship with Malcolm X and was personal mentor to Dawud Salahuddin, a black convert to Islam who murdered an Iranian dissident, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in Bethes-da, Maryland, in 1980...
...He is probably the author of "The Project," a 14-page document dated 1982 found by the Swiss secret service in 2001...
...More to the point, Ramadan has multiple links to terrorism...
...In fact, his writings over the past year have been almost above reproach: He has even gone so far as to criticize some of the excesses in the Muslim world after the pope's recent remarks about Islam...
...There he won the support of one of the main Muslim organizations linked to the Brotherhood, the UOIF (Union des Organisations Islamiques de France), along with the main Muslim youth organization, the UJM (Union des Jeunes Musulmans...
...He became a teacher of philosophy and theology in Swiss universities...
...No one has been arrested for the crime...
...He then asked, "Who profits from the crime...
...Ramadan, you are a fascist...
...embassy in Paris and sentenced to 10 years in jail in March 2005...
...Tariq Ramadan was born in 1962 in Switzerland...
...Ramadan denies ever meeting Beghal, although Beghal was living in Leicester in 1998 while Ramadan was studying there...
...This sends chills down one's spine when one knows the extent to which Banna was a fanatic, that he gave birth to a movement out of which the worst Jihadis (like Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number 2 man of al Qaeda) have emerged, and that he wanted to establish a theocracy in every country having a single Muslim...
...Interestingly, Said Ramadan also had U.S...
...Ramadan is an opportunist, and saw the appeal of this growing movement...
...He never criticizes his grandfather...
...He calls Arabs "my brothers and sisters" while addressing all others as "madam," "sir," or without any honorific...
...When he realized that his Swiss venture was leading nowhere, he turned to France...
...But while the French have come to see Ramadan as one more Islamist, the British have honored him with a fellowship at Oxford University and, more important, a seat on the Blair government's committee tackling extremism...
...Christian Delorme, had this to say in 2001: I am today convinced—and it took me time to understand it— that Tariq Ramadan's thinking and actions are dangerous...
...For instance, the head of the largest French antiracism association, SOS Racisme, Malek Boutih (an Arab Muslim), told Ramadan after talking with him at length: "Mr...
...Resistance against the army is just...
...For her 2004 book Brother Tariq, Caroline Fourest, a French expert on Islamic fundamentalism, studied Ramadan's 15 books, 1,500 pages of interviews, and— most important—his 100 or so tapes, which sell tens of thousands of copies each year...
...For all his interfaith zeal, an examination of Ramadan's work fails to turn up any positive discussion of Christianity or Judaism...
...As one stunned European diplomat told Radio France Internationale, "It's like putting a diabetic in the middle of a pastry shop...
...Charming and smooth, Ramadan holds out Islam as the solution to all the problems of Muslim youth—in keeping with the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, "Islam is the solution...
...But not all who know him are buying...
...One of Ramadan's interfaith partners, Fr...
...The philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood influenced a generation of wealthy Muslim kids, including Osama bin Laden...
...Said Ramadan was one of the most important Islamist thinkers of the 20th century...
...For example, Ramadan greatly influenced Djamel Beghal, a French citizen arrested for plotting to bomb the U.S...
...noting that no Arab or Muslim cause was the better for it...
...During this debate, Sarkozy pressed Ramadan to condemn the stoning of adulterers, a form of capital punishment endorsed by his brother, Hani Ramadan, head of the Islamic Center in Geneva...
...After fleeing the United States, Salahuddin spent a few days in Geneva visiting Said Ramadan before taking refuge in Iran...
...And Ramadan often speaks equivocally...
...He knows how to charm his audience, but in reality, he wants a total separation between Muslims and other communities...
...Tariq declined to go beyond his previous call for a moratorium on corporal punishment and the death penalty while Islamic scholars study the matter...
...The Project" is a roadmap for installing Islamic regimes in the West by propaganda, preaching, and if necessary war...
...Most European secret service agencies are convinced that, at the end of the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood chose Tariq Ramadan to be their European representative...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 5
