Writing about the demonstration against Rachad Ghannouchi in Tunisia this weekend, I mused:
An anti-Islamist protest meets Mr Ghannouchi on his way to vote in Tunisia today. No, it wasn’t the EDL on an awayday.
Well, as far as the far Left Guardian columnist, Jonathan Steele is concerned, it might as well have been:
While several smaller secular parties tried to manipulate Islamophobia – a relatively easy card to play given the official state-controlled media’s demonisation of the Islamists over several decades – their efforts have failed.
Just astonishing. If you are a Muslim and you oppose an Islamist political party, that means that you are an Islamophobe.
This, incidentally, is the line taken by Islamist politicians, as well. They might even call you an apostate: deserving of death. That is what Rachad Ghannoushi has repeatedly done to his opponents, after all. He has been accused of an incitement to kill a Tunisian author, accused of writing an “irreverent book” about Mohammed. He also declared the Tunisian feminist, Mongia Souahi, an apostate. Here’s Christopher Hitchens:
During my stay, I visited the University of Tunis, attached to the “Zitouna” or “olive tree” mosque, to talk to a female professor of theology named Mongia Souahi. She is the author of a serious scholarly work explaining why the veil has no authority in the Quran. One response had come from an exiled Tunisian Islamist named Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who declared her to be a kuffar, or unbeliever. This, as everybody knows, is the prelude to declaring her life to be forfeit as an apostate
Then, there is this from Juan Cole:
In the 1970s Ghanoushi was a theocrat, but he may have changed. Tunisian university friends of mine remember him trying to take over the faculty union and get them fired for being secularists. They remember him as ruthless.
What else do we know about Ghannoushi?
He supports terrorism:
Sheik Ghanushi, began by blessing the mothers of the suicide bombers: “I would like to send my blessings to the mothers of those youth, those men who succeeded in creating a new balance of power… I bless the mothers who planted in the blessed land of Palestine the amazing seeds of these youths, who taught the international system and the Israeli arrogance, supported by the US, an important lesson. The Palestinian woman, mother of the Shahids [martyrs], is a martyr herself, and she has created a new model of woman…
He was a Saddam fan:
Ghannouchi compared Saddam to Yusuf Ibn Tashfin, the 11th-century Almoravid ruler who forcibly unified the Muslim principalities of Spain in order to wrest them from Christian domination. According to Ghannouchi, the Muslims now faced “Crusader America,” the “enemy of Islam,” and Saddam had taken a necessary step toward unity, “joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two, praise be to God.”1 Although other Islamists criticized Saudi Arabia, none embraced Saddam as fervently as Ghannouchi.
Ghannouchi also threatened the United States. Speaking in Khartoum during the crisis, he said, “There must be no doubt that we will strike anywhere against whoever strikes Iraq … We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world… Muslim youth must be serious in their warning to the Americans that a blow to Iraq will be a license to strike American and Western interests throughout the Islamic world.” He also called for a Muslim boycott of American goods, planes and ships.
Ghannoushi is an antisemite, who believes in the fraudulent Nazi “Franklin Prophecy“:
Americans did not follow their wise leader Franklin’s advice when he warned them of what Jews could do in America if they were left to their wishes.
Here are the statesmen to whom Ghannoushi dedicated his masterpiece,Civil Liberties in the Islamic State:
I dedicate it also to my symbolic fathers and on top of the list the shahid Hassan al-Bannah, Mawlana Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, al-shahid Sayyed Qutb, our professor Malek Ben Nabi, and the mujaddid and leader Hassan al-Turabi. I also dedicate it to the leader of the modern Islamic revolution al-Imam al-Khomayni, and shahid and ‘allamah al-Sadr …
These are, in essence, the founding fathers of Islamism.
For a Muslim to oppose this, according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, is Islamophobia.
UPDATE
More disgusting Tunisian Islamophobia:
Tunisian commentator Rachid Khechana said many in Ennahda give different messages in their own communities.
“They use different rhetoric in the rural areas where it’s more conservative: rhetoric about stopping culture from outside, corruption of youth and defending Islam,” he said.
“In the mosque, they tell their believers they should not fear what they hear them saying on TV.”