Interview With Wormtongue

Anjem Choudary is the best friend the Counterjihad ever had. Whenever he opens his mouth, he does a service to our cause — you know exactly where he stands, which is with his foot planted firmly upon the neck of the filthy infidel. I always want to urge him to get back in front of the microphone — “Come on, Anjem! Tell us some more!”

He’s the best recruiting tool the EDL could ever hope for.

Australia has its own version of Mr. Choudary in the person of Ibrahim Siddiq-Conlon, who wants to replace Australia’s democracy with sharia, using violence if necessary. We can only hope that similar fellows will pop up all over the Western world so that our clueless citizens might finally gain an inkling of what the real Islam is all about.

The really dangerous Muslims in the West, however, are the silver-tongues: suave, well-dressed, well-educated fellows who speak flawless English, French, or German. Men like Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who are adept at delivering the honeyed bromides that gullible Westerners are eager to hear. These pillars of society are the chosen spokesmen for the “Muslim community” on television and in the press. Their soothing doubletalk supplies the anesthetic required to make Islamization a relatively painless process, so that no one wakes up screaming on the operating table before the most important political and cultural organs have been fully subverted.

The “Swiss philosopher” Tariq Ramadan is the most dangerous of them all. No one is more skilled at telling Europeans what they want to hear. He knows exactly how to push all the right buttons in the elite European psyche. Tolerance, guilt, racism, sexism, self-satisfaction, complacency — every vulnerable trait is expertly manipulated by the Alpine heir to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr. Ramadan recently gave an interview to Deutsche Welle. To say that the interviewer threw him softballs for questions is an injustice — halal cream puffs would be a better description.

First, the treacly intro from Deutsche Welle — notice the absolutely unequivocal statement about a “tide of Islamophobia sweeping Europe”. No “alleged”, no “some observers believe”, no need to verify any empirical facts — if Baroness Warsi said it, it must be true:

One of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential thinkers of the 21st century, Tariq Ramadan says Islam in Europe needs to be redefined. With Islamophobia passing the dinner-table test, his message is more urgent than ever.

According to a recent study carried out at the University of Leipzig, more than a third of Germans believe Germany would be better off without Islam. Last week Europe’s foremost Muslim thinker, Tariq Ramadan, spoke to a captive audience in Berlin about the tide of Islamophobia sweeping Europe and his own vision of a “shared pluralism.” A professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University, Ramadan is also president of the European Muslim Network. He is a polarizing figure, seen by some as the “Muslim Martin Luther” and by others as a master of doublespeak. He spoke to Deutsche Welle about western perceptions of Islam today and the need for Muslims to become full partners in democratic societies.

Below are some excerpts from the DW interview, with my interpolated commentary:

In your book “What I Believe,” you say that the debate about integration borders on the obsessive and that what we need now is a ‘post-integration’ approach based on contribution.

We need to stop referring to integration. By ‘post-integration,’ I mean that we need to come to an understanding that the success of integration is to stop talking about it. If we keep on repeating year after year, generation after generation, that ‘they’ need to integrate, we imply that there is a host country, and they are its immigrants.

What Mr. Ramadan is attempting here is to expand the definition of “Islamophobia” to include any discussion of integration. Those who keep talking about integration then become Islamophobes by definition. Since Islamophobia has already been successfully identified as a form of racism, discussing integration is also racism, and may thus be prosecuted.

Criticizing Islam is already forbidden by law, as Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff have discovered. If Tariq Ramadan has his way, referring to the lack of integration among Muslim immigrants will become just as punishable.

Besides, immigration is over. It’s a done deal — Europe is Muslim. The matter is as settled as climate-change science:

It’s over! Muslims are not immigrants in Germany. They are German, they are European.

And then he moves in with some of those soothing bromides to dull any lingering pain from what he just said:

Then, what we need to do is ask: as a member of this society, what is my contribution going to be? If you are always perceived as ‘to be integrated,’ the question is: where do you come from? We have to stop asking: where do you come from and ask: where are we going — together?

Actually, that’s a good question: where are we going?

And who says we’re “together”? Oh, wait: mustn’t talk about it; that would be a reference to “integration”.

Islam in fact contributes all the warm, fuzzy things that good Europeans love so much. Architecture! Books! And most important: ethics!

We have to be visible and vocal not only in the religious field but everywhere. Our contribution can be philosophical, artistic, and as I advocate in my book, creative! To be a Muslim isn’t just to say: Islam is not violent, it is not discriminatory — no, it’s more than that. It is architecture, books, imagination, ethics. And the more you give to society, the less you will be perceived as a negative factor.

Now it’s time to poke at Thilo Sarrazin, the bête noire of the moment in Europe:

What [controversial German author] Thilo Sarazzin [sic] basically said was: look at these Muslims, they are a problem and they are lowering our level of intelligence. He is wrong, of course, and this was a racist stand.

Mr. Sarrazin is “wrong” in what sense? Is not the IQ of Muslim immigrants demonstrably lower than that of native Germans, even after several generations? Is this not an established statistical fact?

It doesn’t matter, of course. Where “Islamophobia” is concerned, truth is not a valid defense.

DW, of course, lets the “racist” canard pass without comment or quibble. In fact, the interviewer goes on to ask even puffier questions, as we will see in a moment. But first there’s this:

But the only way to answer it is to point to contribution. The only right answer is practical: we have to be witnesses of the potentialities we have in our societies to express ourselves in a positive way.

But that is exactly what Thilo Sarrazin did — he pointed to the contributions of German Muslims. Or, rather, to their lack of contributions.

But Mr. Ramadan doesn’t require actual contributions, as his second sentence makes clear: Muslims are to be recognized and esteemed for their potentialities — that is, we are to believe that somehow, someday, they might, just might change their ways and actually contribute something of value to German society. No evidence is required, of course. We have to take it on faith.

And besides, discussing the lack of evidence would be obsessing on “integration”, yet again.

Next comes a softer-than-soft question:

But when you have public and institutional hostility to Muslims, it restricts the scope of their participation in social, economic, political and cultural life. How can we break this deadlock?

When I come to Germany and other European countries I can see that, yes, there is a trend to Islamophobia, racism and a rejection of Muslims, but lots of people are not happy about it and know there’s something wrong.

So now it’s time for a little flattery: “Yes, it’s true that a lot of Europeans are evil racists. But not all! Some of you are decent and enlightened people, and would never harbor Islamophobic thoughts! In this latter group I include present company, of course…”

So you are right, a fracture within society is possible. But what I see behind the scenes at the local level are a lot of Europeans willing to listen.

Muslims instruct, Europeans listen. How could it be any other way?

But enough with the flattery. Now it’s time to pull out the big club: NAZIS!

This should be the driving force of change: not Muslims on their own, but Germans from different backgrounds sharing the same principle: we are not going to allow racism to return to this country in a way that is very, very damaging for all citizens.

In other words: “If the anesthesia fails to work properly, and the patient becomes agitated and upset as the Islamization operation proceeds, we hit him on the head with the Nazi club.”

That will put him out for the duration.

Now for the hardest question Wormtongue will get — Islam and women. Watch him dance around this one:

According to the surveys, what Germans are most bothered by is the way they see women treated in Islam: You believe that a woman can find liberation in Islam, that Islam was originally a feminist religion. Germans see it as patriarchal and oppressive in its practice. How do you explain this gulf?

Because both are right. When you study the scriptural sources then you understand that there is a message of equality and liberation. But when you look at what Muslims are doing, Germans are not completely wrong to see a problem. In Muslim communities, I can see myself that there is a lot of discrimination; women are not involved in education, the mosque, not always respected as human beings and within marriages. There is a problem. I constantly repeat: Islam has no problem with women, but Muslims do. This is why I train Muslim women in the way they deal with the scriptural sources and they way they deal with the community.

So Islam has no problem with women, you say? Uh-huh. Right.

It just happens to find a woman’s testimony worth half that of a man. And instructs a man to beat his wife if she is disobedient. But not too hard, mind you.

A competent interviewer would have had a copy of the Koran, the authenticated hadith, and Reliance of the Traveller on hand so that he could quote relevant passages and ask meaningful questions designed to draw out Mr. Ramadan’s opinion about them. But Doubletongue knows very well that no one in the media is that diligent or well-informed.

Besides, it would be Islamophobic to ask such questions, so they will never be asked.

Next comes more meaningless boilerplate:

The missing discourse in Islam is about women: not as mother, not as daughter, not as sister, but woman as woman. What does spiritual liberation of the being mean? What do we mean by femininity and liberation? As a woman, I don’t want to be reduced to my body but you have to accept that I have a heart, I have a soul.

Then there is the question of commitment within the community, in mosques, in the scholarship and the legal Islamic authority. Women need to be involved. We can’t just repeat: we are equal before God and complementary in society. The relationship between the master and the slave is complementary, but the master is the master, and the slave is the slave.

And the final warning:

But our fellow citizens also have a responsibility not to essentialize the Islamic discourse and say: all Muslims are like this or this.

In other words: No discussing the characteristics of Muslims!

There must be no discussion of the integration of immigrants. No examination of Islamic doctrine is permitted. No one is to criticize Islam, nor may we characterize Muslim behavior.

Any of the above actions constitutes Islamophobia, and Islamophobia is a form of racism. And we all know what racism means, don’t we?

Nazi! NAZI! NAZI!! NAZINAZINAZINAZINAZINAZINAZINAZI!!!

OK, that’s enough — the patient has gone back to sleep.


Hat tip: DF.