Anyone who is about to give a public lecture on Islam in which there are Muslims in the audience likely to give trouble during the Q.-and-A., should anticipate in his lecture the kinds of statements that will be made by those apologists for Islam -- unless they are merely of the yelling, screaming, violence-threatening variety. But a police presence, or even, on a campus, the presence of professors outside of the expected fields (Middle Eastern or Islamic studies, where apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, are thick on the ground), may help to dampen this. Speakers can easily anticipate such questions since they are always the same predictable handful. Indeed, a list of them could be prepared and even posted, with the replies, as part of a helpful vademecum for speakers on Islam.
But along with this, it would be helpful to recognize the strategies used by Muslim speakers when they themselves are subject to questioning. And the most slithery of the bunch is undoubtedly the renowned Muslim “reformer” Tariq Ramadan.
In his article here, Henrik Clausen has done a wonderful and exhaustive job in compiling a list of pointed questions that might be asked of Tariq Ramadan, Frere Tariq. Ramadan is now too well known in France to be able to conduct his propagandistic operation, so now he has landed a temporary lectureship at St. Antony’s College. For decades the Middle Eastern wing of St. Antony’s College was under the plump thumb of Albert Hourani, and was turned into a diploma mill for some Arabs -- no courses, no waiting -- whose D.Phils. were on such favorite themes as the “construction of a Palestinian identity.” (Oh, yes, it definitely needed “construction,” it always was and remains a propagandistic construct, not “postcolonial” but, rather, post-1967 war.) Now Tariq Ramadan, billing himself quite inaccurately as a “professor at Oxford,” has taken upon himself the anglo-saxon sphere, and even hopes to make a make another assault on America from which to continue to conduct his operation.
But along with those pointed questions, the ones that Tariq Ramadan cannot dare to answer truthfully, Henrik Clausen has in a single sentence captured the essence of the Ramadan slither:
“I had the interesting experience of meeting Mr. Ramadan in Denmark last year, talking about the need for a Reformation of Islam. In the questions and answers session, he tended to use much time seemingly getting to the point, but eventually not really doing so.”
Let’s repeat that: “He tended to use much time seemingly getting to the point, but eventually not really doing so.”
That is Tariq Ramadan’s modus operandi. It is the modus operandi of every sly Muslim apologist for Islam. It will be the modus operandi of those imams who have those transparently taqiyya-and-tu-quoque sessions for unwitting Infidels at Mosque Outreach Nights, or that they will use during those “Weekend of Twinning” sessions -- 50 smiling rabbis, 50 smiling imams, but the members of the two groups smiling for different reasons -- that is now upon us this weekend. One wonders if among those rabbis or those who are in their congregations there is anyone who happens to have taken it upon himself to study, to read books -- that is, to have decided to be akin not to the with-it Tikkun-reading rabbis engaged in this doubtful enterprise of “Twinning” with imams, but to the old-fashioned kind of rabbis and the Jewish schoolboys dutifully davening in their shuls (the kind captured on film, before their imminent disappearance, by Roman Vishniac). One wonders if there is anyone in those congregations who has taken it upon himself to actually learn about Islam so as to better be able to ask of those smiling imams certain questions, based on knowledge rather than wishful thinking and on such pieties of the age as We All Want The Same Thing and Deep Down Inside We Are All The Same.
Yes. Like so many little tariq-ramadans, so many of those imams and other Muslim apologists will do, and now do, exactly as Ramadan does when, as Henrik Clausen notes, he “tended to use much time seemingly getting to the point, but eventually not really doing so.”
If the task is to prolong Infidel unwariness, based on Infidel ignorance, that’s really the best way. “Use much time seemingly getting to the point, but eventually not really doing so.”
