On Tariq Ramadan and Eurabia

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

[A note from the Baron: Dymphna reminds me that she refers to Tariq Ramadan as “Taqiyyah Ramadan”.]


Tariq Ramadan is perhaps our most dangerous enemy right now. I consider a person such as Mullah Krekar to be an ally. He wants to crush and subdue the West, supports Osama bin Laden and says so openly. It’s the Tariq Ramadans we have to watch out for.

Notice how slick and clever he is at reaching out to the Western Left. I sometimes get criticized for having a conservative bias when writing about Islam. Right-wingers can be very naïve and short-sighted when it comes to mass immigration, including by Muslims, and even so-called “conservatives” keep parroting the “Islam is peace” mantra these days.

However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that by far the most eager allies Muslims find in the West tend to be among the hard-Left groups. There’s a reason why Ramadan reaches out to them by talking about “Islamic Socialism” and capitalist oppression. They have become ideological orphans after the Cold War, and are searching for a new Cause. Muslims see this as an opportunity.

Notice also that Tariq Ramadan systematically talks about how “Islamic values” are identical with “universal values.” I personally think all Europeans who still believe Eurabia is a conspiracy theory should read the Algiers Declaration for a Shared Vision of the Future and A Common Action Plan issued at the Algiers Congress, both from 2006 and available online as pdf files.

Here’s a quote from the Algiers Declaration for a Shared Vision of the Future from 2006. It states that: “It is essential to create a Euro-Mediterranean entity founded on Universal Values.” “Universal Values” sounds ok, doesn’t it? Well, the problem is, for Muslims the only universal values are Islamic values. As Tariq Ramadan has said, “Muslim identity is the only true source of universality.”
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In other words: Arabs will see this as an admission by their EU counterparts that Europe should in the future be based on Islamic values. So a betrayal of breathtaking proportions, which is selling out an entire civilization and the freedom of half a billion people, is made to sound entirely innocent, and is tucked away in boring-looking documents that 99.99% of EU citizens have never heard of. In the odd chance that an outsider might read one or two of them, he would still have to penetrate layers of incomprehensible Eurabian Newspeak to decipher their true significance. It’s clever and it works, especially if the most plainspoken agreements are not made public or put in print. It then takes a person of Bat Ye’or’s intellectual stature and trained eye to connect the dots.

Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue

By IAN BURUMA

Some of Ramadan’s critics, most notably the French journalist Caroline Fourest, who wrote a sharp attack on him titled “Frère Tariq” (Brother Tariq), draw a direct line from Hassan al-Banna, through Said Ramadan and Tariq Ramadan himself, to the militant Islamism threatening the West today. Such was the disquiet in France about Islamist violence that Ramadan was barred from that country in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted. Ramadan prefers to see the family legacy in terms of “Islamic socialism, which is neither socialist, nor capitalist, but a third way.” In this reading, his father’s friendship with Malcolm X is much more significant than any Saudi Arabian connection. This is why Ramadan was a popular speaker with African-American Muslims before his visa was revoked.

“Western Muslims and the Future of Islam” throws some light on Ramadan’s idea of “Islamic socialism,” an ideology, combining religious principles with anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist politics, that goes back to the time of the Russian Revolution. (Libya’s strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is one who claims to rule according to these principles.) The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan’s book, is “the northern model of development,” which means that “a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive.” For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the “abode of war” (alam al-harb), for “when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance.”

The question is how far secular society should be pushed to accommodate Islamic principles. “We are in favor of integration,” Ramadan says in a recorded speech, “but it is up to us to decide what that means. … I will abide by the laws, but only insofar as the laws don’t force me to do anything against my religion.” A Muslim must be able to practice and teach and “act in the name of his faith.” If any given society should take this right away, he continues, “I will resist and fight that society.”