Infamous hate preacher Haitham Al-Haddad |
Almost 150 “professors, intellectuals and internationally renowned activists” have signed a letter calling for criminal proceedings against the infamous Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan (who has been charged with multiple counts of rape) to be dropped.
Reasons for this demand include claims that the court-appointed psychiatrist, Daniel Zagury, is a “Zionist,” that two of Ramadan’s accusers have been “manipulated” by an “Israel-French paparazzi Jean-Claude Elfassai” and that Ramadan has been denied fair treatment.
Who are these 150 luminaries? Alongside prominent academics such as Harvard’s Cornel West, Georgetown’s John Esposito, City University of New York’s Talal Asad and the infamous Ilan Pappe, the co-signers include some of the world’s most notorious Islamist extremists, including one convicted terrorist.
Here are just a few examples:
- Sami Al-Arian – the former North American representative of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian pleaded guilty in 2006 to “conspiring to provide services” to the terrorist group.
- Haitham al-Haddad – considered by British media to be one of the most extreme clerics in the country, al-Haddad advocates the stoning of adulterous women, describes Jews as “apes and pigs” and “enemies of God,” and has written that Bin Laden was a “martyr” who will enter “paradise.”
- Anas Altikriti – head of the Islamist Cordoba Foundation in the U.K, Altikriti is an open supporter of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. He affirmed, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “the right of the Iraqis to engage in legitimate resistance against foreign occupation.” And he has described the decision by a prominent British Islamist group to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day as a “principled stand.”
- Manazir Ahsan – head of the Islamic Foundation, one of the most important European institutions of the violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami. Officials of the Islamic Foundation have been included on U.N. lists of Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives. In 1989, Ahsan coordinated the riots against Salman Rushdie and explicitly backed the Iranian regime’s fatwa for the author’s murder.
- Ismail Patel – chairman of Friends of Al Aqsa, Patel is an open supporter of Hamas, declaring “Hamas is no terrorist organization. The reason they hate Hamas is because they refuse to be subjugated, occupied by the Israeli state, and we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel.” In 1997, Patel wrote a book in which he advocated the killing of adulterers.
- Shaker Elsayed – imam of the radical Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Virginia, Elsayed is another supporter of Hamas who has expressed support for suicide bombings. He has said that Jews kill prophets and betray peace agreements because “it is in their genes, it is in their blood.”
- Moazzam Begg – founder of CAGE, a British pressure group founded in 2003 to support Muslims arrested or captured in the War on Terror. Its advertisements on Facebook were recently banned after one claimed that coronavirus is a punishment from God. Begg is a former Guantanamo Bay inmate who has admitted to teaching “small arms and mountain tactics” training at al-Qaeda camps.
- Azad Ali – another official of CAGE, Ali was a supporter of the late Al Qaeda terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki. Ali opposes democracy if it is at “the expense of not implementing the sharia.”
- Ajmal Masroor – a British-Bangladeshi cleric who regularly promotes conspiracy theories, including the claim that the CIA was behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Another supporter of Hamas, Masroor served as a presenter on the Islam Channel, a television station censured by British regulators for advocating marital rape.
Did all these academics simply not know they were co-signing a letter with terrorists, extremists, racists and iniquitous conspiracy theorists? Then again, calling for a prosecution to be halted because of claims that court officials are “Zionists” is hardly a promising sign of judicious academic minds.