Tariq Ramadan Arrested for Rape

Remember Tariq Ramadan. Maybe you don’t. If you don’t, Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He teaches Islamic Studies at Oxford University. He was in the news over ten years ago because the Bush administration refused to grant him a visa to come to the United States. It seems that he was connected to terrorism, as in, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. For the record, Hamas is an armed branch of the Brotherhood.

Ramadan had been offered a tenured professorship at Notre Dame, but the Bush administration denied him a visa in 2004. It did so again in 2006.

The ACLU and others took the case to the courts and the courts ruled in his favor. And, once Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State she lifted the ban and allowed Ramadan to come to America. Civil libertarians were thrilled.

The New York Times portrayed him as a conquering hero:

A federal appeals court had ruled in his favor. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had issued an order that paved the way for a visa. And so, on Wednesday afternoon, Tariq Ramadan stepped off a plane at Newark Liberty International Airport for his first visit to the United States since 2004, when the Bush administration barred him from entering, asserting he had contributed money to terrorist enterprises.

But for Mr. Ramadan, one of the foremost European scholars of the Islamic world, there was still one last hurdle: a closed-door session with three immigration agents, one after the other, who asked him where he planned to go, whom he planned to meet and what he planned to discuss.

Two hours after his plane from Paris landed, Mr. Ramadan, wearing a dark suit and a smile of relief, cleared customs and shook hands with two representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had litigated his case, and Muna Ali, an assistant of his who lives in the United States.

“How are you, Muna?” he asked.

“You kept us waiting,” she said, with good humor. “What’s new?”

Of course, that was a long time ago. We are all anxious to know how Prof. Ramadan has been doing lately. As it happens, he hasn’t been doing too well. He has just been arrested in Paris for rape. Hmmm.

The Daily Mail has the story:

Prominent Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been taken into custody by French police following accusations of rape, a judicial source said on Wednesday.

The source said a preliminary investigation was opened after two complaints were filed against Ramadan, a well-known figure in the Middle East. 

He is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna.

Ramadan took a leave of absence from Oxford last November after two women filed complaints in France alleging rape. 

He has denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against author Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.

She made the accusations as part of the #MeToo movement:

Ms Ayari, 41, claims Ramadan raped her at a Paris hotel during a Muslim convention in 2012.

She first made the allegation in October last year as part of the #MeToo movement in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

She later made a formal complaint to prosecutors in Rouen, Normandy  on October 20, insisting she had been too scared to speak up until now.

The divorced mother-of-three also accused the contemporary Islamic studies professor of threatening her children to stop her from going to the police….

The other accuser is a an unnamed disabled woman also claims the academic raped her in a hotel room in Lyon in 2009.

Ramadan has denied the two women's accusations, as well as further allegations in Swiss media of sexual misconduct against teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s, as 'a campaign of lies launched by my adversaries'.

Where have we heard that before? All of those who were defending Ramadan against the big, bad Bush administration could have known that he had previously been accused of sexually predatory behavior.