I have recently finished reading Paul Berman’s latest book, ‘The Flight of the Intellectuals’. It’s terrific. The first part is an evisceration of that Islamist in westernised clothing, Tariq Ramadan. By the time Berman has finished with him, there’s not much left of his reputation as the western establishment’s poster-boy for modernised Islam. The second part is an evisceration of two prominent western intellectuals who fell for Ramadan’s propaganda, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. There’s not much left of them either.
What Berman shows up so brutally about Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al Banna, is that he is the direct heir – both familially and intellectually – not only to the ideologues of jihadi Islamism but also to the axis of European fascism. Drawing on accounts already published of the alliance between the Brotherhood and the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s -- an alliance centred in the person of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini -- Berman emphasises the shared aim of both the Nazis and the Brotherhood of destroying the Jews. While a number of Arabs and Muslims condemned the Axis and even fought on the side of the Allies, Hassan al Banna supported the Mufti, calling upon the Arab League in 1946 to welcome the Mufti’s escape from his enemies in Europe as having a divine purpose – namely to defeat ‘Zionism’ just as Hitler had attempted to do.
And as Berman points out, whereas in other parts of the world the supporters of the Axis went down to defeat after World War Two, the Arab zone
ended up as the only region in the entire planet in which a criminal on the fascist side of the war, and a major ideologue to boot, returned home in glory instead of disgrace. In that one region of the world, the old categories of supernatural phantasmagory about Jews and conspiracies continued to reign over the political imagination of huge and powerful political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, and other movements as well.
‘the enemy of Israel and the Mufti of martyrdom operations’
‘shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews’.
The whole problem lies in the terrible fact that his personal milieu – his grandfather and his father, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition – is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theory of religious suicide-terror.
...Ramadan’s final message, therefore...is a message in four parts. To wit: 1) Ramadan condemns terrorism. 2) he wants to understand terrorism, though not to justify it. 3) He understands terrorism so tenderly that he ends up justifying it. 4) He justifies it so thoroughly that he ends up defending it.
how systematically Ramadan’s avoidances are themselves avoided in the friendly publicity that comes his way
This book should be compulsory reading, not only for British politicians but for the security establishment which has also been bewitched by the talented Mr Ramadan, to such disastrous effect.
