When Ramadan spoke last month at Cooper Union in New York City, George Packer of the New Yorker asked him why his grandfather made a speech gushing praise for the Mufti, a man who spent the war working with Hitler to achieve the extermination of the Jews. Ramadan replied that Hasan al-Banna did not support Nazism, adding that his alliance with the Mufti needed to be seen in "context:" Hasan al-Banna wasn't pro-Nazi, just anti-Zionist.
Ramadan overlooks the Mufti's expansive definition of "Zionism," Berman counters. The Mufti did not define "Zionism" as a mere conspiracy to create a Jewish nation in "a small sliver of Palestine." To him, Zionism was a conspiracy against Muslims and the Arabs.
In the Mufti's eyes, "Zionism is a gigantic conspiracy to annihilate Islam and the Arab world by supernaturally evil Jews that has been lasting for 1,300 years, and the defeat of Zionism is going to mean the extermination of the Jews. So, this is 'anti-Zionism,'" Berman said. "The Mufti made this point again and again."
Echoes of this genocidal approach to Jewry can be seen today in the platform of Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is no accident that Hamas quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its charter, Berman said.
The charter "is absolutely explicit in saying that the Jews must be killed," he told the IPT. "The charter comes out of the tradition that was established by the Mufti and by al-Banna. And it's a tradition which traces back, I think significantly, to the Nazi influence."
Qaradawi and the Bankruptcy of Tariq Ramadan's Talk of Reform
Echoes of the tripartite World War II alliance between Hasan al-Banna, the Mufti and Nazism can be heard in the modern-day speeches of Imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a man Tariq Ramadan would make a central figure in his effort to "reform" Islam in the 21st century.
Tariq Ramadan writes admiringly of
Qaradawi, a spiritual guide to the Muslim Brotherhood, and notes that the imam directed the funeral prayer for his father, Said Ramadan, at his 1995 funeral in Cairo. A top aide to Hasan al-Banna who became his son-in-law, Said Ramadan was a key figure in the Brotherhood for close to half a century.
If anything, Berman writes, "admiration" understates Ramadan's opinion of Qaradawi:
"Ramadan appears to hold Qaradawi in higher regard than any other present-day Islamic scholar. Ramadan has sprinkled these signs of personal homage throughout his books…one reference after another, always expressed in a tone of humble respect and deference, always designed to induce a feeling of respect and veneration among readers, as if Qaradawi were an entirely reputable scholar."
But Berman shows that the reality is very different. Qaradawi, best known for his sermons on Al-Jazeera television, has made statements praising Hitler, defending organizations like Hamas, and supporting suicide attacks.
For example, in a January 2009 appearance on the channel translated by the Middle East Media Research institute (MEMRI), Qaradawi spoke about Hitler and the Jews:
"Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption." The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all things he did to them - even though he exaggerated the issue - he managed to put them in their place."
These words about Hitler doing God's work "did not make their way into Qaradawi's oratory from some little-known corner of the Koran," Berman writes. Rather, they are a modern-day televised echo of the Mufti's radio broadcasts from the 1940s.
Two years after 9/11, Qaradawi issued a fatwa authorizing suicide terrorism by Palestinians. In a joint appearance on Al-Jazeera in 2007, Hamas boss Khaled Mashaal thanked Qaradawi for the fatwa.
"I support Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah," Qaradawi replied. "I support martyrdom operations." He issued another fatwa permitting women to carry out acts of suicide terrorism which exempted them from the obligation to conceal their hair under a hijab. When an Iranian news agency attacked him in 2008, Qaradawi defended himself this way: "I am an enemy of Israel and the Mufti of martyrdom operations."
When Ramadan talks about finding forward-thinking ethicists to come up with "reforms" to modernize disturbing aspects of the Islamic faith like the stoning of adulterers, Qaradawi is typically among the first names he invokes.
In Berman's view, Ramadan's suggestion that men like Qaradawi play such a large role illustrates the bankruptcy of his talk of reform:
"His repeated calls for reason and dialogue in an open-minded spirit, his denunciations of bigotry and unfairness. All of this has added up to nothing. Tariq Ramadan remains a man who cannot see that a monstrous figure like Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a monstrous figure."
Targeting Hirsi Ali, While Giving Muslim Brotherhood A Free Pass
Some of Berman's most important work appears in his book's final chapters, which constitute a telling indictment of the media's coverage of Islamism.
Berman contrasts media coverage of Tariq Ramadan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan grew up in relative privilege in Switzerland. Hirsi Ali, by contrast, spent her childhood and adolescence shuttling from home to home in her native Somalia, as well as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya, where "she saw and endured scenes of brutality and suffering of a sort that a privileged boy growing up in Switzerland could not possibly know," Berman writes.
Hirsi Ali joined the Muslim Brotherhood, studied the works of Hasan al-Banna, and prepared to move to Canada to consummate an arranged marriage and begin a new life. But she eventually became disillusioned, and sought and received asylum in Holland. She lived in refugee shelters and worked in factories.
Hirsi Ali learned to speak Dutch and went to work as an interpreter, helping Somali refugees and Dutch officials communicate with each other. She became an advocate of rights for Muslim women and a critic of Islamists, and soon she received police protection. She embarked on a political career and was elected to parliament.
She began a collaboration with Theo Van Gogh to make the film, "Submission, Part I," featuring some disturbing passages from the Koran that were graphically inscribed on women's bodies. After it appeared once on Dutch Television, a Muslim named Muhammed Bouyeri killed Van Gogh – shooting him and slitting his throat on a public street.
Bouyeri left a dagger in Van Gogh's chest, pinning to the body a fatwa calling for Hirsi Ali's death. Eventually Hirsi Ali, who had renounced Islam, concluded she was not safe in Holland and fled to the United States where she lives under police protection. She remains a staunch advocate for women's rights and a sharp critic of abuses of women under sharia.
Berman focuses on the examples of two prominent journalists who have written sympathetically of Ramadan and harshly of Hirsi Ali. One is Ian Buruma, who penned a sympathetic portrait of Ramadan in the New York Times Magazine. He wrote Murder in Amsterdam – a book about the Van Gogh slaying – and wrote about Hirsi Ali in the New York Review of Books. The other is historian Timothy Garton Ash, whose column appears in The Guardian newspaper.
Berman provides example after example in which Buruma and Garton Ash portray Ramadan as a moderate, and belittle Hirsi Ali as simplistic, strident, cruel, dismissive of human suffering, naïve, pampered, tenured and comfortable.
Berman writes that "in the course of looking down his nose at Hirsi Ali in the New York Review of Books," Garton Ash "pointed out that she has been awarded the 'Hero of the Month' prize from Glamour magazine."
"Why was this worth mentioning?" Berman asks. "Garton Ash seemed to regard it as an amusing proof that Hirsi Ali's successes owe more to her looks than to her brains –though, in reading Garton Ash, I can't help observing that here may be proof instead that Glamour magazine nowadays offers a more reliable guide to liberal principles than The New York Review of Books."
In an interview with IPT, Berman likened Hirsi Ali's treatment in the intellectual press to that meted out during the Cold War to refugees from the Soviet Union who would find themselves "slandered in the Western pro-Communist press."
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Garton Ash wrote extraordinary essays about repression in East Germany and other communist countries. Berman's book suggests that, when it comes to making sense of radical Islam, Garton Ash isn't faring so well.
Garton Ash traveled to Cairo in 2007 to meet Jamal al-Banna, Hasan's 86-year-old younger brother and great- uncle of Tariq Ramadan. Garton Ash wrote a column in The Guardian comparing Hirsi Ali unfavorably with al-Banna, a Muslim scholar who opposes honor killings and stoning adulterers.
The following day, MEMRI issued a report detailing some important information on al-Banna that Garton Ash omitted. Al-Banna had praised the 9/11 terrorists for their "extremely courageous" action. He had signed a petition in 2001 blaming America for having brought on the 9/11 attacks. And al-Banna defended "martyrdom operations" against Israeli civilians.
"How in the world did Garton Ash manage to come up with someone like this as his grand exemplar of Muslim liberalism in a superior version?" Berman asks. "There is something uncanny, almost creepy, about how often the journalistic critics of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who happen to be ardent defenders of Tariq Ramadan, have ended up wandering into the zones of suicide terror and the most prominent of its theorists and champions."
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