Al-Mustaqbal (Beirut) on Daniel Pipes and Tariq Ramadan

This is a translation from the Arabic paper Al-Mustaqbal

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/mereview.asp?edition_id=10&article_id=7917

Commenting on the revocation of Tariq Ramadan’s work visa by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Islamic scholar Radwan al-Sayyed said the DHS’s decision against Ramadan, who was scheduled to begin teaching a seminar on Islamic ethics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, is an example of the suffering of Muslims in the West, and demonstrates that Washington’s “war on terror” is a “comprehensive war against Islam.”

Sayyed asked: If the Swiss-born Egyptian Ramadan, professor at the College of Geneva and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, famous as the “Muslim Martin Luther” and considered a “deviant scholar by radical Muslims,” was not tolerated by the United States who would be?

Sayyed added that Western authorities are daily arresting Muslim youth in the US, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Australia, and that books which criticize Islam and Muslims are also published everyday. Daniel Pipes, director of the pro-Israel advocacy group Middle East Forum and founder of “Campus Watch,” which monitors allegedly radical pro-Muslim scholars at American colleges, was involved in the revocation of Ramadan’s visa by the DHS, according to Sayyed.

He added that Ramadan, who was born in Geneva in 1962, was recently harassed by French authorities because he opposes the French ban on Islamic headscarves.

Washington’s and Paris’ stance against Ramadan, Sayyed said, is similar, in one way or another, to the attitude of those radical Muslims who have recently kidnapped two French journalists in Iraq in order to pressure French authorities to revoke the ban on headscarves.

See more on this Topic