RUTHFULLY YOURS

Almost every day now, since various actresses began pointing fingers at Harvey Weinstein, yet another celebrity has been accused of sexual misdeeds. Among the latest is Tariq Ramadan.

Who is Ramadan? First, he’s Muslim royalty, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, who despised the West and preached the doctrine of Islamic conquest of the Christian world. Ramadan himself pretends to be a different kind of Muslim. Mild-mannered and presentable, the silver-tongued, Swiss-born Ramadan poses as a moderate, or even liberal, bridge-builder between Islam and the West. In perfectly fluent French, and decent enough English, he speaks of a future “Euro-Islam” – a peaceful, modernized version of the faith, ushered in by himself and his followers, that would be entirely compatible with Western life and values.

Some of the West’s major cultural institutions have been sucked in by the visions Ramadan has spun and the image he’s created for himself. He’s been on the faculty at Oxford since 2005. The British Foreign Office, while banning from the U.K. such forthright critics of Islam as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, employs Ramadan as an adviser on religion. The New York Times has repeatedly carried water for him: the Times Magazine ran a glowing full-length profile; the Times Book Review published a review of one of his books that read like a press release, and later, in a bizarre and unprecedented move, a piece in which Ramadan spent 2500 words gushing over the supposed humanity, profundity, and poetic beauty of the Koran – without ever mentioning that it is, in reality, little more than a barbaric compendium of commands to kill infidels and accounts of the torment that awaits them after death.

For years, close observers of Ramadan have been well aware that despite his pretense to moderation, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s not really that hard to figure out. He openly supports sharia law. He openly supports female genital mutilation and the stoning of women. He’s reportedly on the payroll of the terrorist-funding rulers of Qatar. During the presidency of George W. Bush, he was banned from the U.S. because of suspected terrorist ties. (Hillary Clinton lifted the ban when she became Secretary of State.) He was, and perhaps still is, also prohibited from entering several Muslim countries. For a time he was banned from France, although this ban was apparently lifted at some point, because in 2012, according to a Muslim woman named Henda Ayari, he sexually assaulted her in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Paris when they both there attending an Islamic conference.

I’m shocked. No, not that Tariq Ramadan may have raped somebody. I’m shocked that there’s a Holiday Inn in Paris.

Who is Ayari? She’s a former hijab-wearing Muslim who, after enduring a forced marriage to a man who (she says) beat her mercilessly, rebelled against her religion’s oppression of women and threw off the veil – although, like many such rebels, she continues to identify as a Muslim. Last year published a book entitled J’ai choisi d’être libre (I Chose to Be Free). “I was one of the living dead,” she has said. “Salafism anaesthetized me until I freed myself from its mental chains.” As it happens, her book includes an account of the incident at the Holiday Inn, only with her attacker’s identity disguised. “I was completely under the thumb of this intelligent, seductive and manipulative being,” Ayari wrote. So bewitched was she by him, in fact, that she maintained an intimate relationship with him for several months after the assault, until she finally snapped out of it. Now she’s angry at what she considers the blatant hypocrisy of this man who “continues to give lessons in Islamic morality.” Not until the other day did Ayari disclose that her attacker was, in fact, Tariq Ramadan. She has since filed charges.

A pro-ISIS media group circulated an image today of a knife dripping blood over the Eiffel Tower, calling on lone jihadists to attack on Halloween.

“Enjoy their gathering,” reads the text superimposed over the image. “Terrorize October 31.”

Added was the hashtag #Paslechoix: “no choice.” Below that was the message, “Get out before it’s too late.”‘

It was produced by Centre Médiatique An-Nûr, which has produced in French not only videos about jihadist operations but about how online jihadis can practice web security. The group also distributes ISIS’ Rumiyah magazine, which has not yet been published this month, in French.

The image was shared by a Twitter account that distributes caliphate news, images and videos in French.
(ISIS image)

The threat came on the same day that French President Emmanuel Macron signed a controversial counterterrorism law that supplants the state of emergency that has been in effect since the November 2015 terror attacks that claimed 130 lives around Paris.

Under the law, security officials have the permanent ability to shut down houses of worship deemed to be hotbeds of extremism, and will not necessarily need a warrant to search the homes of terror suspects. They will also be able to contain terror suspects to their home neighborhoods and conduct more targeted identity checks near the borders and at transportation hubs.

The state of emergency, which has been extended six times since the 2015 attacks, expires Wednesday. Macron said the new law, which will be reassessed in two years, could go into effect on Halloween.

Macron tweeted a photo of the bill signing, saying it will be “strengthening the security of our citizens.”

Are there no-go zones in Europe, or aren’t there? Have political control and the power of law enforcement in some urban neighborhoods been tacitly turned over to local Muslim leaders, with even the police taking a hands-off attitude? Across Europe, some politicians, journalists, and police spokespeople continue to deny that such zones exist, although the evidence for their existence becomes increasingly difficult to disavow.

Even as these establishment functionaries continue to insist that no-go zones are a myth, however, news reports are indicating that in several European countries, the policing problem has advanced beyond the mere fact of no-go zones. Earlier this month, for instance, the Dutch newspaper Het Parool reported that throughout the Netherlands, police departments are now so overburdened by “radicalization, terrorism, and the influx of asylum seekers” that they simply don’t have the time to investigate a large percentage of crimes. In Rotterdam, 54% of crime reports are tossed at once, without even a cursory effort to track down a perpetrator; in The Hague, the figure is 48.5%; in Amsterdam, it’s a whopping 64.8%. The overall national figure is 56%.

One night nineteen years ago, a few steps away from Muntplein, a busy square in the heart of Amsterdam, I was accosted by a young Muslim man who held a knife on me and demanded my money while a half dozen of his pals hovered threateningly nearby, at canal’s edge. More angry than scared, I responded with what may be described as foolish bravado, telling my assailant to hit the road. He backed off, and headed with his friends down the canal, presumably in search of someone else to mug. For my part, I went to the nearest bar and ordered a gin and tonic. I was so stunned that it didn’t even occur to me until I was halfway through my second drink that I should’ve gone immediately to the police. Even all those years ago, I doubted that filing a police report would’ve made any difference. Today, apparently, it would almost certainly be a waste of time.

The same thing’s happening in Britain. On October 16, the Daily Mail reported that every police force in the country was now “abandoning inquiries into thousands of ‘hard to solve’ low-level offences.”

What kinds of offenses? The list includes “vandalism, theft, burglary and antisocial behaviour,” plus minor incidents of “grievous bodily harm” and “car crime.”

Of course, these are infractions that are committed, to a wildly disproportionate degree, by Muslims.

The message is clear: if you’re the victim of a violation that falls into any one of these categories, you need not bother reporting it, unless you actually know who committed it or have evidence that seems likely to help police identify the perpetrator without too much time or effort. Forget those scenes in movies where cops stare at CCTV footage for hours on end in search of a suspect: under the new British policy, police won’t even bother looking at crime-scene videos if the job promises to take more than twenty minutes. Cases will also be abandoned at once if there aren’t any “viable lines of inquiry,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, defended this new opposite-of-zero-tolerance approach, explaining that “we must prioritise so we are using our resources to the best effect and protecting people who need it most.”

What are the priorities of UK police? Well, as the London Times noted on October 12, they’ve been pretty busy the last couple of years collaring people for making “offensive” remarks online. Last year, at least 3,395 people – the real number is probably a good deal higher – were arrested for this purported transgression. No one will be surprised to know that the remarks judged to be “offensive” enough to merit punishment tend to be remarks about Islam. If you’re a Muslim who has repeatedly called for the death of infidels, don’t worry: the police won’t bother you. (A prominent example, cited by the Times, is terror-supporting activist Nadia Chan, who has called Jews “parasites” and white people “swine.”) If you’re an infidel who has merely complained about Muslims who call for the death of infidels, however, you’d better be ready for a knock at the door.

It’s hard not to conclude from all this that the British police – or the politicians who give them their marching orders – have cast their vote for dhimmitude, choosing to overlook Muslim misdeeds and to focus, instead, on muzzling those who dare to express concern about those misdeeds. CONTINUE AT SITE