Here’s Tariq Ramadan’s op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, painting himself as a noble crusader (oops! sorry!) for free speech, brutally suppressed by a bigoted US government who revoked his visa to teach Islamism at Notre Dame, for no reason whatsoever: My Fight Against American Phantoms.

OK.

Read that, notice how he never addresses one substantive point about his agenda, then go read Hugh Fitzgerald’s account of the voluminous case against Tariq Ramadan—who has actually been exposed on French TV (yes! really!) by none other than the head of Jacques Chirac’s party, Nicolas Sarkozy:

Several things have happened to Tariq Ramadan that have made him extremely eager to move to the United States. Essentially, in Europe, for him, the jig is up. Too many people have been studying his connections, his speeches, the contents of his books, described by NPR as “scholarship” but, in reality, he is no Muslim scholar (Bassam Tibi is a Muslim scholar), but a full-time propagandist for Da’wa.

These include:

1) the appearance of Ramadan on a television show with Nicolas Sarkozy, who demolished every one of Ramadan’s well-worn attempts to practice taqiyya/kitman, to turn aside any discussion of his support for “my grandfather” Hassan al-Banna (who used to whip up Cairene crowds, which crowds would then express their enthusiasm, as they did on November 2, 1945, by attacking Coptic and Jewish shops, and murdering Copts and Jews — something about his grandfather that Ramadan has never condemned or mentioned, just as he has never uttered a syllable against the persecution of the Copts in Egypt, nor of the persecution of any non-Muslims anywhere in the Muslim world).

Sarkozy’s steely performance destroyed Ramadan, who has never before had to face any real interviewer — the same way, on NPR the other day, he had only the gush and mush of Jack (“McCarran Act! McCarran Act!) Beatty and the sympathetic Gail Harris, both of whom were worrying about what this ”great Islamic scholar“ would do now, and what is family would do, since he had been denied admittance to the United States — as well as Jay Tolson, apparently a recent recruit to the ranks of Ramadan groupies, who would not tolerate anyone invoking such words as ”taqiyya“ and ”kitman,“ and who stood, stoutly and ignorantly, by his man — and his main man is Ramadan.

2) the careful study of Caroline Fourest, ”Frere Tariq,“ which is the main book on offer even in provincial towns in Brittany, according to an informant, and which sets out all sorts of Ramadan’s prevarications, omissions, and outright lies — one by one by one. It is a book from which, like the encounter with Sarkozy, Ramadan will not recover, and has no reply. He will simply hope the book is not translated into English, and that the clear-headed at Notre Dame — that leaves out Scott Appleby in particular, who ”knows“ all about Tariq Ramadan, and does not wish to be confused with fact after fact after dismal fact — never read it. Ditto with Esposito at Georgetown, who doesn’t want to have James V. Schall (terrifying thought: Esposito has to mix it up with James V. Schall before the Georgetown University trustees, who may be getting calls to sever their now most-embarrassing institutional connection with the Arab-financed Center of Muslim Apologetics that provides Esposito with his handsome returns of the day).

3) the emission by the Franco-Arab journalist Mohamed Sarfaoui (whom Google), which the Union of Muslim Associations tried to prevent from being broadcast on France-2 on December 2 (the broadcast went on anyway) by threatening Sarfaoui himself. They were not subtle: they said that such a broadcast against ”Frere Tariq“ would be tantamount to apostasy — and while we are not saying more, you know what can happen to apostates.

The broadcast needs to be seen in this country as well, with subtitles, so that the Notre Dame administration, trustees, and interested faculty can read the book (”Frere Tariq”) and see the movie, or movielet, about this sinister figure.

4) the connections with assorted terrorists — a meeting with Al-Zawahiri, and similar sinister socializing that has been documented by Daniel Pipes — whom Ramadan kept referring to on NPR, as if the only thing he had to worry about was the charge that he had met with known terrorists, and not his whole propaganda operation. For obvious reasons, the French and American governments cannot go into in any detail about that operation (nor explain how they know what they know, in order to satisfy Mesa Nostra or the Scott Applebys of this world). But these connections also have not gone away, nor been forgotten.

Go read the rest, for it is good to have knowledge.