Tariq Ramadan is known for his double talk.
I don’t know why he bothers. Being slippery does not hide his thinking. It only makes it even more objectionable.
You can see him at it again in a speech at Palestine Expo in London last weekend. Hamas are not terrorists. Only bad Israelis make that claim:
What we heard from Livni, what we heard from Netanyahu, telling us, you know what, when we are dealing now with terrorism in your country, you are dealing with terrorism, with what happened in Manchester, what happened in London, and we condemn terrorists, we condemn violent extremists, what are they saying? That, you know what, what you are experiencing now, is what we had there. Who said that? Netanyahu said that, just in 2001, what we heard is what you got in the States is what we are getting in Israel.
As if al-Qaeda is exactly like Hamas and the Palestinian resistance. By saying that they are all terrorists, that’s exactly the game. And we are saying we condemn terrorism. But there is a legitimate resistance to your state terrorism.
Hamas itself begs to differ. When Osama bin Laden was killed, Hamas mourned the “holy warrior”:
The Palestinian Prime Minister in the Gaza government Ismail Haniya denounced on Monday, May 2nd, 2011, the assassination of the Al Qeda spiritual leader Sheikh Osama Bin Laden by the US special forces in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.
Haniya said during a meeting with reporters and international journalists in his office in Gaza city on Monday afternoon ” If these news are true, then this means that its part of the American policy based on the oppression and bloodshed in the Muslim and Arab world.
In his speech for the reporters Haniya mourned Sheikh Osama Bin Laden as an Arab holy warrior.
Haniya expressed his strong condemnation for the killing or assassination of any human or Muslim Mujahed, praying for mercy and acceptance of Bin Laden.
While Hamas official Yehia Moussa saluted a “brother”:
Mr. Moussa said that Hamas considers anybody killed while fighting “the American occupation and the Israeli occupation as a martyr, regardless of who he was.” He added: “We consider them our brothers in this case.”
Indeed, both Hamas and al-Qaeda love nothing more than murdering civilians. This is the brotherhood of jihad.
Mr Ramadan knows this, of course. So he tries to wriggle out later in the Palestine Expo talk:
It’s not for us to decide what are the means the people on the ground there have to use. I said it from the very beginning, targeting civilians will never be right for me. The resistance is legitimate and the resistance should remain the reality there.
Mr Ramadan wants it both ways. He’s a nice man, oh yes he is. But when it does come to slaughtering civilians, well, “it’s not for us to decide”. What a foul position.
It echoes just what Asim Qureshi of the al-Qaeda PR team Cage told British Muslims at Queen Mary University when Qureshi was seeking more “understanding” for the Chechen Black Widows. Mr Ramadan is a keen supporter of Cage.
Inveterate double talker that he is, I still don’t think it’s quite right to call Mr Ramadan a fraud. Fraud takes some clever work. Mr Ramadan’s position on having and eating jihadi cake is rather too obvious.
