Islamophobia Watch

"I have written more than 20 books and about 800 articles; 170 tapes of lectures are circulating, and I keep asking my detractors: Have you read or listened to any of my material? Can you prove your allegations? To repeat them is not to prove. Where is the evidence of my double-talk? Have you read any of the numerous articles where I call on Muslims to unequivocally condemn radical views and acts of extremism?" Tariq Ramadan replies to his accusers.

Globe & Mail, 30 August 2004

"Tariq Ramadan is a Muslim Martin Luther. That's why Notre Dame, an old institution with a modern Catholic dedication to theological scholarship, hired him."

Paul Donnelly in the Washington Post, 28 August 2004

"It’s not every day that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revokes a visa issued to a Swiss-national scholar scheduled to teach at one of America’s premier universities. But this has just happened, and it’s a good thing too."

Daniel Pipes justifies the banning of the respected Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan.

New York Sun, 27 August 2004

Condoleezza Rice announces a new turn in US strategy in a speech to USIP: "We must also do everything that we can to support and encourage the voices of moderation and tolerance and pluralism within the Muslim world.... Americans also need to hear the stories of the people of the Muslim world. We need to understand their challenges and their cultures and their hopes; to speak their languages and read their literature; to know their cultures in the deepest sense. Our interaction must be a conversation, not a monologue. We must reach out and explain, but we must also listen."

One sceptic asks: "why is it that in the three years since 9/11 you haven't given this kind of a speech to a Muslim audience in one of the five largest Muslim countries, nor has any senior administration official?"

US consulate Mumbai press release, 20 August 2004

Ali H. Aslan isn't impressed either: "Aren't voices of moderation and tolerance in the Islamic world muted, when Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Ashcroft's FBI treat every Muslim on earth and in the U.S. as a potential enemy and terrorist?"

Zaman, 26 August 2004

Geneva-born Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan has said he is "in shock" that he will not be able to take up a teaching post in the United States after his visa was revoked. The US State Department said it had cancelled the visa at the request of the Department of Homeland Security.

swissinfo, 25 August 2004

"Since September 11 2001, Islamophobia – fear and hatred of Muslims – has been on the rampage across the Western world. In the UK, racist tabloid newspapers daily churn out frenzied reports of Muslim clerics declaring jihad against the West. The scaremongering of newspapers like the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express has succeeded in inciting widescale violence and abuse directed against the entire Muslim population."

Eddie Truman in Scottish Socialist Voice.

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A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reverse its decision to revoke the visa of an Islamic scholar who was due to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the DHS decision to revoke a visa previously granted to Tariq Ramadan, a well-known Islamic scholar who is often described as a "moderate" and a "reformer," sends the wrong message to the Islamic world about America's willingness to listen to what Muslims have to say.

CAIR news release, 24 August 2004

See also CAIR's letter to the DHS

"Muslim WakeUp! reports that Tariq Ramadan has been denied a visa by Homeland Security, and will not take up his teaching post at Notre Dame.... this a shameful, terrible decision, which will have wide ranging implications in American (alleged) attempts to reach Muslim moderates. When the United States attacks Islamist moderates like this, it does Osama bin Laden's work for him. Well done."

Abu Aardvark weblog, 24 August 2004

"The Finsbury Park mosque, the Muslim Association of Britain, Al Qaradawi and Islam itself are part and parcel of a reactionary movement that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East and North Africa and aims to do so here as well."

Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran in WPI Briefing No.149

"Expose the subversive activities of Islamist extremists around the world or in the United States, and speedy CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) pops up with accusations of Islamophobia."

Arnaud de Borchgrave in the Washington Times, 19 August 2004