Leftists always stand by their friends and allies, while demanding that conservatives denounce each and every one of their own who transgress the perceived limits of acceptable discourse. This will be demonstrated again on January 21, when Tariq Ramadan, the once-renowned self-proclaimed Muslim reformer who is now under a cloud of rape allegations, speaks in France about Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet and Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. Accused rapists are rarely praised by the intelligentsia, but for Tariq Ramadan, as has been the case so many times during his tumultuous public career, the usual rules simply do not apply.
Once the West’s great hope for Islamic reform, Ramadan has been accused by several women now of violent rapes. In a video that uploaded in December 2019, he acknowledges some nebulous misdeeds, but then claims that all the accusations against him are an attempt to discredit him and thus to “neutralize Muslims.”
“We have to be clear,” Ramadan said, “that there is discrimination, stigmatization, racism that is at stake in the whole thing.” Of course! What else could the multiple rape charges be against you? He continues: “And I was a symbol. Destroying me meant letting people understand: if you want to be eloquent, you have to face reality. It happened to Tariq Ramadan now, it could happen to anyone in the future. “
Anyone who is supposedly a violent rapist, sure. But RFI reported at the same time that “supporters of Ramadan, who is a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, have branded the accusations against him as part of an ‘international Zionist plot’ to smear his name.”
Ah yes, the Jews. Of course! It cannot be that a Muslim scholar pampered, acclaimed and entertained throughout Europe and America despite the abject emptiness other sinister insincerity From his thought, he began to indulge his worst urges, now, did he? He could not have been tempted to do so when it became clear that, in light of his courage to Western authorities as a “moderate Muslim” who seemed to shore up his fantasies about the threat of jihad, he would be allowed to get away with it. pretty much anything, could you?
“Pretty much anything” is actually an understatement. The accusations against Ramadan are particularly disgusting; if they are true, he is a monstrous sadist. One of his accusers said subjected her to “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, object rape and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair into the bathtub and urinating on it.”
Her sadism, however, appears to be, if the allegations are true, closely intertwined with her celebrated Islamic piety: another of her accusers said he told her he was raping her. because she didn’t wear a hijab.
He would have gotten away with being too valuable to Western political and media elites, had it not been for the #MeToo movement. Problems arose for Ramadan only in 2017, when that movement began to gather steam and its accusers began to come forward, at which point the great reformer’s remarks in response were decidedly unsatisfactory. “His last hearing,” notes RFI, “dates back to 2018 when he surprised the public by admitting to having had ‘consensual’ sex with his accusers, months after denying that he had not had sexual contact with them.”
Ramadan has since claimed that he suffers from multiple sclerosis and has been released on bail. Meanwhile, one of his accusers has has already been beaten and threatened. It would not be surprising, given his connections to all kinds of powerful people, if Ramadan were cleared of all charges. If this happens, it would be in keeping with the duplicity that has characterized his entire career. The enlightening book of French journalist Caroline Fourest Brother Tariq: Tariq Ramadan’s Double Talk concludes that this so-called “Muslim Martin Luther” so idolized is in reality anything but a reformer: in reality, Ramadan is “remaining scrupulously faithful to the strategy outlined by his grandfather, a strategy of advancing stage by stage” towards the imposition of the Islamic law. law in the West.
Ramadan, he explains, in his lectures and public writings inverts words like “law” and “democracy” with subtle and carefully crafted new definitions, allowing him to engage in “a seemingly harmless speech while staying true to an eminently Islamist message and without have openly lying, at least not in their eyes. “Ramadan, he said,” may have an influence on young Islamists and be an incitement factor that could lead them to join supporters of violence. “
Fourest was also the first to reveal, back in 2017Long before these new charges were imposed, that Ramadan had at least four other victims in addition to the first woman to come forward, Henda Ayari. “A request for religious advice turned into a compulsive, sometimes consensual, often violent and highly humiliating sexual relationship, before ending in threats.”
Fourest had proof. “I presented it to a judge. But Tariq Ramadan scared him too much.... I am well placed to learn of the violence of the Muslim Brotherhood networks when confronted with ‘Brother Tariq.’
Those violent networks may still prevail. “It was a plot,” insists Ramadan. “It was a political setup. And this could happen to anyone.” The worst part of this deceptive whining is that there are hordes of deluded leftists who will fall for it. And now they are making him talk.
If Tariq Ramadan were a non-Muslim conservative, rape allegations would have been the end of his career and he would never be invited to speak anywhere. If it were, there would be a media outcry that would force a cancellation. But Tariq Ramadan is a privileged man. Things just don’t work out that way for him.
