Another hoo-hah over Tariq Ramadan

Less than a week after last week’s bombings in London, it appears that Tariq Ramadan is visiting the UK to address young Muslims at the Islamic Cultural Centre near Regent’s Park. The right-wing press have taken exception to this, claiming that he supports suicide bombings in Palestine.

The invitation this time has come not from a university, but from the London Metropolitan Police, which as of this writing is sticking by its decision to invite him. The present commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Ian Blair, is widely accused by factions of the press of being a hidebound political correctivist and of “hanging out to dry” (the words have been repeated over and over again) four of his officers “falsely accused” of being racist (by, among other things, “mispronouncing” the word Shi’ites as Shitties). What he actually did, according to Melanie Phillips, was to seek to overturn a disciplinary panel’s decision to take no further action after finding them guilty.

The present controversy over Tariq Ramadan has been kicked up by the Sun, whose headline today screams that he has been banned in the US and France, but welcomed here. The paper’s website labels him an “Islamic militant”, and coming so soon after the bombings, the alarm and distress this will cause is massively out of proportion to what is actually happening. Tariq Ramadan is not even accused of violent action, or the incitement thereof. All he brings is ideas, and despite having a young Muslim woman on its staff, the Sun has little confidence in the intelligence of Muslim youth – the terrorists are well-educated Muslim youth, and he wants to lecture to … well-educated Muslim youth. Yep, all the brothers need is to hear some ideas, and they just can’t resist the urge to go and bomb.

The chief arguments against Tariq Ramadan is that he is “linked with Islamic extremism” and that he has been banned from entering the US and France. There has been a substantial article on A Fistful of Euros examining the attitudes of Daniel Pipes and his arguments for not allowing him to enter the US last year. In particular, the reason why he was briefly banned from France is spelled out:

Next [Pipes alleges]: Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris.

Pipes has the year wrong. It was 1995. I was in France on business at the time. The Algerian FIS was leaving bombs on French railway tracks, and Charles Pasqua, the interior minister, closed the borders and set up inspections and paperwork checks at all entry points to France. This is allowed by EU law in cases of national emergency. Pasqua forbade a great many people from entering France at the time. All manner of Muslims – almost anyone with a connection to terrorism, no matter how faint – was forbidden from entering the country. Pasqua’s emergency powers enabled him to do so without having to show any evidence or cause.

Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna. That is a connection to terrorism, enough to put him on a hastily constructed, evidence-free list of people temporarily blocked from entering France. It is not, however, a sign of culpability or risk. That is the nature of emergency power, under French law and generally elsewhere: It is arbitrary, but temporary. When the emergency had passed, no evidence to pursue Ramadan or continue to prevent him from entering was put forward.

As Ian Blair points out in the above-linked BBC article, he is no longer banned from France, so why ban him from entering the UK?

The other argument is that he supposedly supports suicide bombings. The Times, owned by the same Rupert Murdoch who owns the Scum, offers this rather suspicious quote in an article in today’s edition:

Professor Ramadan has previously justified suicide bombings. Asked by one Italian magazine if the killing of civilians was morally right, he replied: “In Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, there is a situation of oppression, repression and dictatorship. It is legitimate for Muslims to resist fascism that kills the innocent.”

The Italian magazine is not named, and I’m sure the reader will detect a certain disconnect between the quote and what comes before it. You will notice that it does not mention suicide bombings, only violent resistance against “fascism”. Why could the Times’ writer not find a quote that directly mentions suicide bombings or “martyrdom operations”? But a substantial proportion of the Arab public, particularly in Egypt, sympathises with the suicide bombers. Some Islamic scholars reject it as a tactic because of the suicide element, and no doubt most would reply in the negative if asked, “do you approve of Palestinians’ deliberately killing pregnant women and children?”, but the idea of violent restance to Israel is not rejected outright by any Muslim authority. (And no, “Shaikh Abdul-Hadi Palazzi” does not count.)

Like the Islamic scholars who defend suicide bombings in certain circumstances, Ramadan condemns the kind of terrorism which does deliberately target innocent and non-hostile people of whatever religion – including the recent bombings in London. Previous controversies about Arab hostility to Jews have included rants about apes and pigs – none of that from Dr Ramadan.

So why should Tariq Ramadan’s opinions about events in a different part of the world mean that he should be barred from this country? Because, as in the USA, people want to keep out people with opinions they don’t like. Pipes stated this openly after Ramadan gave up his professorship at Notre Dame: the victory was not a perfect one, because “it depended on Ramadan’s connections to terrorism; in the future, I hope that being an Islamist will in of itself – without necessarily having ties to violence – be grounds for keeping aliens out of the United States, much as being a communist was grounds for exclusion in an earlier era”.

Besides, Tariq Ramadan is no hardliner; his positions on many issues unrelated to Palestine, Chechenia and so on are widely regarded as too liberal. (That article, incidentally, claims that Ramadan’s comments to an Italian magazine on fascism were actually made to an Italian court!) He is not coming here to cause trouble; if he was, it’s inconceivable that he would be allowed, much less invited, to come here. The UK has permitted people who are widely suspected of having blood on their hands, like Narendra Modi, to come to the UK and address audiences in, among other places, Wembley. If Modi is no threat to security, and not sufficiently offensive to merit refusal of entry, Tariq Ramadan certainly is not.

(Update: more on this from Thabet.)