Excerpt:
Islamic apologist Tariq Ramadan has returned to the U.S., the ban against his entry to the country, issued under the Patriot Act, having been lifted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After addressing audiences in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, he will revisit Canada where he will speak at the Palais de Congrès in Montreal. The question is: What is he really up to? Ramadan is used to meeting with rock star type adulation, but a skeptical attitude may be rather more appropriate.
In a talk given at Olivieri Bookstore in Montreal on January 3, 2007 to promote his book La tyrannie de la pénitence, philosopher Pascal Bruckner argued that the failure of Muslim immigrants to integrate into European society is owing largely to the multicultural tendency to promote special interest groups and extraterritorial ethnicities. At the same time, as Bruckner stresses in the book itself, "On oublie qu'il existe un despotisme des minorités rétives à l'assimilation si celle-ci n'accompangne pas d'un statut d'extraterritorialité." ("We forget that there exists a despotism of minorities that resists assimilation if the latter is not accompanied by a status of extraterritoriality.")
This "resistance" is precisely the situation that Tariq Ramadan is attempting to remedy, but in a way that does not augur well for the host societies of the West. Pulpiting the ideal of Muslim social integration and positing a supposed underlying affinity between what are clearly two opposing creeds and cultures, Ramadan intends something very different from what we usually understand by "assimilation" and "accommodation." Assimilation for Ramadan really works in reverse and means, in effect, the gradual absorption of the West into the social and political construct of Islam. Accommodation seems to imply mutuality but, again, its ultimate aim is somewhat different from what we might expect. Accommodation is what must presently be accorded to the Muslim community, which may in the course of time graciously accommodate us in turn should we convert to the faith or pay the jizzya (poll tax). Ramadan's discourse sounds at first like he's using a terminology of reconciliation but it's all bling and glitz meant to embroider an ulterior purpose, something initially nebulous but no less sinister for all that. Ramadan's agenda is not to enlighten but to distract.