The path to French citizenship should have been much easier: his wife is French, his four children are French and it is in France that the Swiss preacher Tariq Ramadan emerged in the early Nineties. He took the decision to apply for French citizenship after President François Hollande suggested that France should act to deprive ISIS fighters of their citizenship.
Ramadan launched his challenge to the government. “I want to send a message: Islam is part of France”. Prime Minister Manuel Valls just replied to Tariq Ramadan, explaining that “there is no reason” to give French nationality to Mr. Ramadan.
Jean Baubérot, scholar of secularism, has established a parallel between Ramadan and Communism. Both share the idea of a cultural hegemony. In fact, Ramadan, who will be in Italy in the next few days for a conference, has set up a formidable propaganda machine. His office is in the Parisian banlieue of Saint Denis, from where he coordinates four branches (London, Doha, Geneva, Washington). With two million Facebook fans, 30 books and thousands of audio tapes that the Tawhid editions distributed to the Muslim youth of the suburbs, Ramadan is the star of Europe’s Islam.
His face appeared on a giant screen at the gala dinner in Paris of the “Committee against Islamophobia”. After a message of solidarity to the guests, Ramadan offered for auctioning a lunch with him.
He has academic chairs all over the world, from Freiburg to Malaysia, he is the director of the Research Center for Islamic Law in Doha (Qatar), president of the European Muslim Network, a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and he is the star of Al Jazeera and of Iran’s Press TV.
Ramadan has just published “The genius of Islam” (Presses du Chatelet), which seems to herald the “genius of Christianity” of Chateaubriand.
In France there are even clones of Ramadan imitating his look and way of speaking. One of the Ramadan “boys,” Muhammad Marwan, has just been hired as a consultant on Islamophobia at OECD in Vienna. Ramadan is linked to several non Muslim personalities, from Christian Pastor Jean-Claude Lenoir to the late Stéphane Hessel and the philosopher Edgar Morin, with whom Ramadan wrote a book in the gardens of the Mamounia luxury hotel in Marrakech.
His propaganda machine is well oiled by Qatar: in fact, Tariq Ramadan spends two weeks per month there. “Qatar has bought Ramadan,” said political scientist Vincent Geisser.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Georges Bensoussan, one of France’s most important scholars of the Holocaust. He told me that “Tariq Ramadan’s request for French nationality is a political provocation of the same nature as that used and abused by the Nazis against the Weimar democracy. It is the Islamist version of Nazi tactics of 1930-1932 years, when Goebbels said that the Weimar Republic had given the Nazis the weapons of its own defeat.”
Tariq Ramadan is Islam’s Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. This Nazi official punctually arrived late at his own rallies: “It increases the tension”, Goebbels said. And to those who reproached him because he used a taxi, Goebbels replied: “You have no idea of what is propaganda. I would have to get two taxis, one for me and one for my bag.”
It was Goebbels’ idea to launch the Nazi appeal to the heart in order to manipulate public opinion. “The art of propaganda” he said, “consists precisely in the ability to solicit the public’s imagination with an appeal to the feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will attract attention and will touch the hearts of the masses of the nation.”
Joseph Goebbels was frail, slender, with a large head and a hollow face, a beautiful voice. People flocked to hear him, because he was able to instill in the public different feelings such as hysteria, hatred, enthusiasm. He knew how to use every means: books and films, radio and music, media and tourism. He conquered writers, philosophers, scientists, intellectuals. “It is nice to exercise power with guns, but wonderful is gaining power over the hearts and the brains,” Goebbels said.
This is exactly what Mr. Ramadan and other Islamists are doing today in Europe: the ferocious appeal to the Muslim masses, the manipulation of hatred and emotions through mosques and schools, the conquest of brains and hearts through televisions and rallies.
Dr. Goebbels and Dr. Ramadan also share the same goal: the submission of Europe. Yesterday to the Aryan race, today to Islam.