Sunday, August 29, 2010 Anyone who fails to denounce Tariq Ramadan is an apologist for Islamist totalitarianism. Well, so Nick Cohen claims in Standpoint magazine. Along with his hero Paul Berman, whose writings provide the inspiration for his paranoid ravings against Islamism, Cohen shows how certain self-styled defenders of Enlightenment rationalism have in fact taken leave of reason.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010 
Rotterdam council was within its legal rights when it dismissed academic Tariq Ramadan in August 2009, a court ruled on Wednesday.
Ramadan was asking for €75,000 for wrongful dismissal, but the court ruled he has no claim. Instead, he will have to pay the €3,638 cost of the case.
The Islamic philosopher lost his job as city integration officer after officials discovered he presented a tv show for a broadcast company financed by Iran. Erasmus University also ended his contract as a visiting professor.
Monday, June 28, 2010 
Academic Tariq Ramadan, sacked by Rotterdam city council last year, is asking for €75,000 compensation for wrongful dismissal.
Ramadan lost his job as city integration adviser after officials discovered he presented a tv show for a broadcast company financed by Iran. The city said this could not be combined with his other roles. Erasmus University also ended his contract as a visiting professor.
Court hearings over the compensation claim began on Monday. Ramadan claims the sacking damaged his reputation as an Islamic scholar.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 
In The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman argues that it is not violent Islamists who pose the greatest danger to liberal societies in the West but rather their so-called moderate cousins, such as Tariq Ramadan.
Such a reading of contemporary Islamism, however, misses the many nuances of the movement and the real battles between reformers and Salafists.
The ever-excellent Marc Lynch takes on Berman over Islamism, Tariq Ramadan and Qaradawi.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 "Ramadan, it is true, is neither a Hirsi Ali nor a Salman Rushdie, who are both self-declared apostates. They have left the community and call to those trapped within. In contrast, Ramadan is an internal critic, to use Michael Walzer's term. Internal critics push their community to change, but they do so from within it, out of love. To follow Berman is to say that Muslims in their mainstream intellectual and religious traditions do not deserve internal critics. They deserve only apostates. As communism in another era had its Arthur Koestlers and Leszek Kolakowskis, so Islamic orthodoxy must have its Rushdies and Hirsi Alis."
Andrew March responds to Paul Berman's book The Flight of the Intellectuals.
Friday, April 16, 2010 
MONTREAL — This charming, erudite Muslim scholar is secretly out to destroy the free world. That pretty much sums up the message critics of Tariq Ramadan sent Thursday at a press conference on the eve of two lectures by the controversial Oxford University professor at the Palais des Congrès.
"Tariq Ramadan has come here to make sure our children become the fifth column against Western civilization," Tarek Fatah, founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress, told the conference organized by Point de Bascule, a group opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.
On his last visit in November, the organizers of Thursday's press conference sponsored a full-page advertisement in Le Devoir accusing Ramadan of hiding his true views on Muslim fundamentalism behind a facade of moderation. That didn't stop more than 800 people from attending the sold-out speech.
Montreal Gazette, 15 April 2010
Update: Cf. the report of Professor Ramadan's speech in the Montreal Gazette, 16 April 2010
Further update: See also "Tariq Ramadan, 'stealth jihadist', exposed!", LoonWatch, 16 April 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010 Democracy Now interviews Professor Ramadan following his arrival in the USA on his first visit since the lifting of the banning order.
Update: You can listen to Tariq Ramadan's contribution to the 8 April debate on "Secularism, Islam, and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West" at Cooper Hall in New York here
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 Fox & Friends baselessly suggested that Muslim scholars Tariq Ramadan and Adam Habib – who were both denied entry into the United States under the Bush administration but had the ban lifted by the Obama administration – are "terrorists." However, both have denied engaging in terrorist activity, neither was ever charged with any crime, and media accounts have noted that they "were denied admittance after making statements counter to U.S. foreign policy."
Saturday, March 27, 2010 Thus Phyllis Chesler's response to the news that Tariq Ramadan will be speaking at New York's Cooper Union on 8 April, following the lifting of the ban on his entering the US. Chesler herself probably won't be turning up:
"I do not know if I'll have the stomach to attend. Ramadan is not my problem, I know him for the snake he is. Rather, it would be the sight of so many Americans who've glamorized him, who are fooled by him, who have come to worship Death at his feet."
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 "It's not the first time America has tried to shield itself from dissenting opinions. During the Cold War, dozens of overseas artists, activists, and intellectuals – including British novelist Doris Lessing, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez – were denied visas because of their left-leaning ideas. Today, though, the American concept of the 'other' has taken on a relatively new and specific form: the Muslim. America must face the reality that, in the West, many adherents to Islam demonstrate loyalty to democratic values through criticism."
Tariq Ramadan writes in Newsweek, 29 March 2010