Ibn Warraq reviews Caroline Fourest’s Brother Tariq: the Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.

Fourest reveals Ramadan’s art of duplicity, which encompasses an entire repertoire of rhetorical subterfuges, from doublespeak and equivocation to euphemism and lies of omission. Ramadan claims that he accepts the law in Western democracies — so long as the law “does not force me to do something in contradiction with my religion.” He calls the terrorist acts in New York, Madrid, and Bali “interventions.” He claims to be a “reformist,” but defines the term to exclude the concept of “liberal reformism.” He tells a television audience that he believes in the theory of evolution, but neglects to mention that his book, Is Man Descended from the Apes? A Muslim View of the Theory of Evolution, argues for creationism…

That Ramadan is an impostor is evident even in the titles that he freely accords himself. He claims that he is “Professor of Islamic Studies (Faculty of Theology at Oxford),” and the biography in the inside flap of his Western Muslims and the Future of Islam describes him as “Professor of Philosophy at the College of Geneva and Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.” But as journalist Gudrun Eussner has shown, Ramadan is merely a research fellow at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, where has given just three lectures. Nor is he a professor at Geneva, especially not at the university there. He was a teacher at a sub-university level in the Collège Saussure, and he served as a “scholarly associate” at the University of Fribourg, teaching a two-hour course every two weeks, “Introduction to Islam.”

Ramadan has been described by Theodore Dalrymple as “the second-hand car salesman of Islamic fundamentalism” – which seems a tad unfair to salesmen of used cars. For more on Brother Tariq’s habitual dissembling, and the contortions of his left-leaning groupies, see here.

Related. And. (h/t, Andrew Bostom.)

Via Protein Wisdom, The Thin Man sends us this. Readers may spot a thematic link with the previous post. 

After recent terrorist attacks, Spanish police are in no mood for leniency. This man picked the wrong time and the wrong way to try to support his drug habit.

Further to recent comments on the ideological disdain of territory, this may be relevant. Over at Harry’s Place, David T says something I find bizarre. In discussing the Nassim Saadi deportation case and its broader implications, he says,

I think it is quite right that we should not deport individuals to countries where they will be tortured. A country which deports – or even connives in the rendition of – a person who they know or suspect will be tortured bears moral responsibility for any torture which takes place. If you oppose torture in all circumstances, as you should, then it does not do to argue that your country bears no guilt for what happens after deportation.

This is quite a remarkable bundle of claims and one that’s often asserted wholesale rather than argued. Why doesn’t it do? One might, for instance, take the view that a person of foreign citizenship convicted of serious crimes, whether they include terrorism or not, has broken a fundamental covenant with the host society. And thus, one might argue, the conditional protections extended to visitors by that society are forfeit. Tax payers could conceivably have moral objections to paying for the food, medicines and accommodation of foreign prisoners intent on doing them harm, and possibly spreading their intentions among others, either in prison or at large.

In light of that, expulsion from the host society seems a not unreasonable consequence and certainly within the realm of consideration. If a person facing expulsion runs the risk of ill-treatment, even torture, by third parties overseas, it’s not exactly clear why that should imply some vicarious moral responsibility. (Though one could argue it may discourage foreign nationals from committing serious crimes in the first place.) Awareness that such acts may or may not take place in other countries doesn’t imply that one condones those acts. It merely implies one no longer feels an obligation to protect an unwelcome and hostile visitor from the actions of third parties. Indeed, in instances of egregious criminality, including terrorism and attempted terrorism, I suspect quite a few people would be happy to see the perpetrators dropped into international waters and allowed to fend for themselves, to whatever extent they can.

Update: More in the comments.

Update 2: Over at Harry’s Place, Brett Lock is angry.

I am angry because there is more public debate about the rights of terrorists and criminals facing deportation than there seems to be for genuine, innocent and vulnerable people.

I wonder whether legitimate asylum seekers might fare better in their applications, and their welcome, if the broader public was reassured that visitors who abuse such favours could be expelled without great difficulty.   

Cath Elliott shares her wisdom in today’s Comment is Cheap Free. The self-proclaimed feminist and trades union activist targets an Aspen Times column by Gary Hubbell, whose grumbling about the presidential candidates’ alleged pandering to special interest groups is promptly, and inevitably, compared to that of the BNP. What catches the eye, though, is Elliott’s highlighting of this passage from Hubbell’s article:

Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader.

A fair point, one might think. Much as many have recoiled from the current incumbent of the White House, due in part to his limited ability to convey whatever thought processes may take place behind his eyes. Ms Elliott adds,

This isn’t because she’s a woman, he goes on to say, but because she is who she is.

Again, sounds like a fair point. My own impression of Hillary Clinton is of a shrill and dissembling harpy forever peddling victimhood – quite often her own – and struggling with rather vengeful authoritarian urges. Pointing that out says nothing in particular about the rest of womankind, at least among those of us who think in terms of individuals, not symbols of some designated group. However, Ms Elliott disagrees: 

I for one don’t believe him. Hubbell and his new-found cheerleaders across the net give the game away when they reserve the worst of their ire for Hillary Clinton. This isn’t about a crisis of identity for poor working class men; it’s a defence of masculinity and a last desperate effort to cling on to the power that men have enjoyed for centuries. Just another anti-Hillary misogynist rant, then.

And nothing at all like a hackneyed far left rant against the “defence of masculinity” – which, as every good-hearted person knows, is an unspeakable vice and almost certainly a cover for something more unspeakable still. But hold on a minute. Does this mean that we men folk aren’t allowed to take a dim view of a presidential candidate if she happens to be a woman? What about Clinton’s female critics – do they get some special license to be unkind by virtue of having internal genitalia? What about men who dislike Hillary Clinton but quite like Condoleezza Rice? And, by the same thinking, does any disparaging of Cath Elliott immediately signal misogyny and oppression, regardless of what claptrap falls from her mouth? Are quasi-Marxist power dramas and the dislike of an entire gender the only conceivable motives here? And if I point out that Ms Elliott looks and sounds like an Eighties cliché, is that just my desperate attempt to cling to masculine power? I think we should be told.

A few weeks ago, Georges and I were discussing Margaret Thatcher’s often-taken-out-of-context “society” quote and the idea of the nation state as a marker of solidarity. Georges was struck by,

How much people seem to need larger forms of affiliation than self and family and immediate social circle.

To which I replied,

Well, indeed, and some more than others. But I don’t see why that should necessarily conflict with Thatcher’s statement, or with her broader outlook, or with a Conservative outlook generally. And the people who most vehemently disdain national identity and national pride – those “larger forms of affiliation” – tend to be on the left of the political spectrum. Which strikes me as counter-productive.

In today’s Observer, David Goodhart elaborates on a similar theme and offers reasons why such disdain is counter-productive.

Most of today’s cabinet were students in the 1970s and 1980s. If their student union had been debating the motion “The nation-state is a bloodstained anachronism”, most of them would probably have voted for it. And why not? I was there too and we were growing up in the shadow of nationalism’s 20th-century horrors… People on the left… were pro-mass immigration – among other things it added colour to the staid stoicism of Anglo-Saxon life. Meanwhile, a broader political world view emerged – there was no common culture in Britain, but, rather, a multicultural ethnic rainbow…

The fact is that the liberal baby-boomers were too insouciant about the nation-state and feelings of mutual obligation and belonging. Events, and voters’ responses to them, forced them to adjust. In Britain, those events included the asylum crisis in the late 1990s, the unprecedented increase in legal immigration, the unexpected East European surge after May 2004, the 7 July London attacks and, most important, the hostility of public opinion to mass immigration amid anxieties about public services and rapidly changing communities.

This does not mean that the average British citizen has become more prejudiced, though the far right gets more votes than ever. The principle of anti-discrimination is now more widely practised than ever… and the average Briton is more comfortable with difference – consider the rise of interracial marriage. But the liberal baby-boomers have come to grasp that a belief in universal moral equality does not mean that we have the same obligations to all humans – we do not consider our families to be on a different moral plane, yet would not hesitate to put their interests first. Until a few decades ago, the basis of national ‘specialness’ would have been ethnicity – shared ancestry, history, sacrifice. In multi-ethnic and multiracial societies, the basis of specialness is citizenship itself.

The justification for giving priority to the interests of fellow citizens boils down to a pragmatic claim about the value of the nation-state. Without fellow-citizen favouritism, the nation-state ceases to have much meaning. And most of the things that liberals desire – democracy, redistribution, welfare states, human rights – only work when one can assume the shared norms and solidarities of national communities.

Given the above, one might wonder how it is much of the left came to embrace dogmatic self-loathing and a pretentious disdain of territory. As when Joseph Harker, the Guardian’s deputy comment editor, repeatedly claimed “all white people are racist,” before identifying any fluttering of national identity as suspicious and, almost by default, a sign of xenophobia. When such views appear in the mainstream organ of the British left, voiced by a member of its own editorial staff, this isn’t exactly a cause for optimism. Nor is it encouraging to discover that even the most positive expressions of shared national identity can meet with official censure and threats of punishment. As, for instance, when Pendle council reprimanded Matthew Carter, a black dustman born in Barbados, for wearing a St George’s Cross bandana to keep his dreadlocks out of the way:

Ian McInery, the operational services manager for Pendle council, defended the decision to discipline Mr Carter. He said: “We have made it clear to staff that they are not allowed to put stickers or flags on bin wagons or wear clothing which shows support for a particular team, group or country… It’s just a common-sense approach that we are sticking to.”

One also has to wonder if viewing Mr Carter’s choice of headgear as a sign of xenophobic atavism, or as likely to be perceived as such, is what multicultural theorists really had in mind. And does this affected distaste for national symbols suggest progress, or its opposite?