RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tariq Ramadan was barred from the US under Bush, but Obama threw open the doors for him. Ramadan was billed as a moderate reformer. And here is the “moderate reformer” on the Brussels attacks. After the formality of condemning the attacks, mumbling that terrorism is wrong, Ramadan pivots to the same old song and dance.

We cannot, today, afford to disconnect these events with the violence, terror and death that have long been commonplace in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and in Africa and Asia more widely. European and American foreign policy does not happen in a vacuum, as those who target us have repeated in countless videos: You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.

Now the “war and death” that ISIS terrorists are talking about is the US and the rest of NATO pushing back against its genocide of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities. Or to put it another way, American intervention against Islamic terror doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. “You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.”

But what is Tariq Ramadan really suggesting? That bombing ISIS is wrong?

We must hear those who criticize the incoherence of our allegiances and our support of dictatorships.

What dictatorships? Obama threw them overboard. And the Islamist alternative is itself a dictatorship. That’s what ISIS is.

Does the condemnable violence of their reaction mean we can ignore their arguments?

What ISIS arguments would Tariq Ramadan like us to listen to?

Tariq doesn’t answer. Instead he recycles the same old tedious nonsense. ISIS wants to wreck Muslim integration in the West. (The Brotherhood and the Saudis and Erdogan have done that on their own already.) Muslim terrorists are irreligious and need to be taught Islam propertly. (Fight Islamist indoctrination with our flavor of Islamist indoctrination.)

But then Tariq Ramadan informs us that if we don’t bomb the right Muslims, then maybe we also deserve to be bombed.

 We cannot support dictatorships, be political and economic partners with states who export literalist Salafi doctrine, be silent when civilians are massacred south of our borders and hope that we will not receive a response to the injustice and humiliation we have provoked.

Wait… so we can’t bomb Muslim countries and not expect to be bombed. Also we can’t not bomb Muslim countries and not expect to be bombed.

According to Tariq Ramadan, we need to bomb the countries that Islamists want us to bomb (non-Islamist dictators) and not bomb the wrong ones (Islamist dictators and terror groups) or… we will receive a response to the injustice and humiliation we have provoked.

But that probably sounded better in the original Jihadist.

France bombed Syria. So it deserved to get bombed. So why did Brussels deserve to get bombed? Well it wasn’t bombing Syria was it. So it deserved to get bombed. This is the Islamist Catch 22 that Tariq Ramadan is offering. Anything you do or don’t do is an excuse for Islamic terrorists to bomb you.