Tariq Ramadan, the “towering intellect” and “leading Islamic scholar” whom Time magazine in 2004 called one of the world’s “100 most influential thinkers,” but who has also been charged with multiple rapes involving “extreme sexual violence,” had a brief but characteristically mendacious comment on Mikael Harpon, the Muslim who killed four people – three policemen and one administrator – in Paris on October 3.
Here is what he wrote, in his comment to the world:
The man who killed four police officers had converted to Islam. His wife claimed that he had hallucinations and was not psychologically in his normal state. We were first told that he acted under “the blow of a crisis of a psychotic nature."Now, we are told that during this crisis, he “heard Allah speak to him” ... So we come back to the first conclusions: the man was a potential terrorist, radicalized during a sudden psychological crisis. After he “radicalized” in one hour, one night or “without knowing it,” here comes the time of psychotic “radicalization.” Even having lost control of themselves, even unstable or under the influence of a blow [sic] madness, they are first, always and above all Muslim, radicalized and terrorists ...
It was understood, we understood.
The essential remains here, to show our sympathy to the families of all the victims. All victims, without exception or selection. Even the family of this man who has lost his reason and whose memory has begun to be sullied today.
But we know now that this sudden “psychotic state” was made up by his wife. Harpon had not had a sudden crisis. He had long ago – not 18 months ago, as first reported – converted to Islam. He had been very observant, attending his mosque twice a day, for the first and last prayers. The imam at the mosque he chose to attend was known to be extreme. He was also in frequent touch with a preacher who, for the violence of his views, was under police surveillance. Four years ago, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Harpon defended the murderous perpetrators, the Kouachi brothers, alarming some of his coworkers, who reported his worrisome views, but they all refused to file an official complaint, no doubt out of fear of being branded as “islamophobic"and possibly discharged. He had been defending Muslim terrorists ever since. It is known that he frequented the company of known Salafists, and Salafist videos were found in his apartment. Clearly his own attack was consonant with his longstanding beliefs, and not a sudden breakdown, explicable only as “psychosis.”
The only suggestion that Harpon’s behavior was the result of a sudden mental lapsus comes from his Muslim wife’s description of his “acting strange” and “hearing voices” during the night of October 2. Since she was deaf, he could not have told her he was “hearing voices.” Did he text-message her a note to that effect, in the middle of this supposed “psychotic episode”? And if he did, why didn’t his wife promptly call the police, or at least do so on the morning of October 3? She was, we now know, lying. She wanted to make it appear that Harpon had suddenly gone mad, rather than been led by his faith – by commands in the Qur’an – to “kill” and to “strike at the necks” of Infidels (as he did by slitting the throat of one of his four victims).
His behavior on the morning of October 3 bespeaks premeditation, not the madness that Ramadan wishes us to believe. Harpon went, as he always did, to the mosque for morning prayers. He wore a djellaba, as he had in recent months taken to wearing, an outward sign of his ever-deepening faith. He may have been accompanied by two fellow Muslims, whose role is still unclear. Did they know that he was planning to attack his Infidel coworkers? If so, did they try either to discourage, or to encourage him?
He then went to his place of work but, still in the morning, left to buy two knives. We know that after buying the knives, he was furiously text-messaging his wife, some 33 messages between 11:21 and 11:50 — about one a minute. They were talking about his planned attack; her last words were “Only Allah can judge you.” She did not call the police to warn them of his intentions. He was in his office shortly after noon, where he began his attack. It took only seven minutes for him to murder four people, three police and one civil servant.
Tariq Ramadan mocks those who would blame Islam for Harpon’s actions. They can’t have it both ways, he insists: the “psychotic episode” undercuts the attempt to blame inoffensive Islam for his acts. But we know that the “psychotic episode” that his wife described never occurred; he had for years been a devout Muslim, a Salafist, and a defender of Muslim terrorists; he had been in frequent touch with a radical preacher who was under police surveillance; he was not “deranged” but ready to behave as the Qur’an commanded.
Ramadan ends characteristically with calling for sympathy for the families of “all the victims.” He puts it, intolerably, thus: “The essential remains here, to show our sympathy to the families of all the victims. All victims, without exception or selection. Even the family of this man who has lost his reason and whose memory has begun to be sullied today.”
So he wants us to think of Harpon, the Muslim murderer, as a “victim” and not a killer. A “victim” of his own madness. He insists that Harpon had “lost his reason.” Ramadan wishes us to ignore all the signs of premeditation – the years of defending Muslim terrorists, Harpon’s Salafist sympathies, including the videos found in his apartment, the information – also in his apartment — about dozens of policemen, that suggest he might have been plotting other attacks. Harpon was not a madman any more than Major Nidal Hassan, or Mohamed Atta, or the Kouachi brothers were madmen. He was following the dictates of the Qur’an.
And Tariq Ramadan was also following, in his comment that attempts to present Harpon as a madman and “victim” who suffered a “psychotic episode,” not the Qur’an, but Muhammad in the Hadith: “War is deceit.” Judging by the more than one hundred furious comments (in French) following Ramadan’s own posting at Dreuz.com, for Tariq Ramadan, still up to his old tricks, that war has been lost.
