Exposing Tariq Ramadan and the rogue French spy

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Hugh Fitzgerald

The latest news about Tariq Ramadan has to do with a rogue French spy, hired by his supporters, in order to discover the identity of one of Ramadan’s accusers, known only as “Christelle,” in an obvious attempt to threaten her into silence.

The story appeared in The Jerusalem Post.

The ongoing case against Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan became mired in even more controversy when one of his accusers filed a complaint over her identity being stolen and illegally published by a rogue French intelligence agent, Le Parisien reported.

Ramadan, a professor [on leave, likely permanently] of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford’s St. Anthony’s College and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, is currently facing four charges of rape in France. The two initial charges were made by feminist activist Henda Ayari, with the other one being a disabled woman identified only as “Christelle.”

However, Ramadan’s supporters reportedly uncovered Christelle’s identity in 2018 after hiring an active member of France’s internal intelligence agenc , Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), identified only as “Haurus,” to comb through the Dark Web for information. This agent has reportedly fallen into disgrace for selling information, according to a report accessed by Le Parisien, and the agent has since been indicted.

In 2019, Christelle sought legal action to stop Ramadan from publicizing her identity in his book, titled Devoir de vérité or Duty of Truth, which mentions her name no less than 84 times. However, her first name and birthdate was reportedly released to, and published by, the Muslim Post, a Tunis-based news outlet that has published many articles in Ramadan’s defense.

Christelle’s lawyer, Eric Morain, now wants to request the admission of evidence from the Haurus case into the case against Ramadan.

Speaking to Le Parisien, Morain referred to the actions as “foul-smelling” and said that it was part of an effort to pressure and scare his client with threats into silence.

“Investigations must be carried out to find out if these foul-smelling practices are the work of Tariq Ramadan and his entourage, even if it seems obvious,” he said….

Though initially denying any sexual contact with his accusers over a span of years, Ramadan later claimed in October 2018 that he had consensual sex with his accusers.

He has consistently denied all the charges against him and labeled them as a media frenzy, while his supporters have called the charges an “international Zionist plot.”

This latest news about the attempt to discover the identity of “Christelle” reminds us yet again of the relentless efforts by Ramadan and his supporters to silence his accusers. His supporters hired a rogue French spy (known only as “Haurus”) — now under indictment — to determine her identity, and with that information, Ramadan hoped to threaten her into silence. When that didn’t work, he named her 84 times in his book “Duty of Truth,” which has unsurprisingly scared her, for who knows what Ramadan’s fanatical admirers (he has 2 million followers on Facebook) might do to her? And it is possible that “Christelle’s” treatment will scare off still others into dropping their own charges, such as the four women in Switzerland who accused Ramadan of sexually assaulting them when they were his underage pupils in a high school.

Ramadan is doing everything he can during this long drawn-out case to win popular sympathy. Early on, he described himself as suffering from multiple sclerosis, hoping for release from detention, but a French medical team examined him and declared his case was sufficiently mild so as to be “compatible with detention.” Then his supporters began to describe him as the victim of trumped-up charges orchestrated by “Zionists.” They still hope to convince the world that he’s been the victim of a Jewish conspiracy. Ramadan has compared his treatment to that of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer famously prosecuted as a “traitor” by antisemites, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Their cases are not similar. Dreyfus was accused, falsely, because of his identity as a Jew. Ramadan was not accused because of his identity as a Muslim; at least four of his accusers have been Muslims themselves. And the evidence against him, including the testimony of at least eight women in France and Switzerland, as to his sexually violent behavior toward them, dwarfs that presented against Dreyfus.

It’s been a long time since anyone described Tariq Ramadan, as they once did, as a “towering intellect” and a “leading Islamic scholar.” No one calls him anymore, as TIME did in 2000, “one of the seven most important religious innovators” of the 21st century; nor does anyone consider Ramadan as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World Today,” as TIME did in 2004. He’s no longer one of the “100 top global thinkers,” as Foreign Policy hailed him in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. He’s no longer even an Oxford professor; he’s been “on leave” for two years, and if convicted of even a fraction of what he is accused of, he’ll never teach again.

He’s now merely Tariq Ramadan, an accused sexual predator and pathetic liar, whose claim of innocence looks more ludicrous every day. This frightened creature, who is frantically hoping to avoid his final rendezvous with French justice, is discovering that the wheels of justice grind exceeding slow, but they do grind. Multiple sclerosis, an “international Zionist plot,” “consensual” sado-masochism, threats intended to silence accusers – he and his defenders will try anything. But for Tariq Ramadan, it’s going to be a very bad year.

Tariq Ramadan was once hailed by many as a “towering intellect” and a “leading Islamic scholar.” In 2000, TIME called Tariq Ramadan “one of the seven most important religious innovators” of the 21st century; in 2004, TIME named Ramadan as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” In Internet polls, Foreign Policy magazine listed Ramadan as one of the “100 top global thinkers” in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. All very impressive, if you are impressed by that sort of thing.

In November 2017 the kissing had to stop, however, when two French women, Henda Ayari and a disabled woman known only as “Christelle” accused Ramadan of rape “with extreme violence.” Later, a third woman known as “Marie” — her real name is Mounia Borrouj — also accused Ramadan of rape. Then came a fourth accusation, by another Muslim Frenchwoman. Other accusations of rape and sexual violence have also been made against him by an American woman now living in Kuwait, and by yet another in Belgium; the legal status of these accusations at this time is not clear. And in Geneva, four women who had been his underage pupils when he taught high school came forward to describe his sexual assaults on them.

These women came forward, obviously with palpable fear, and only dared to do so years after the sexual violence and rapes, for they had been frightened by the threats Ramadan is accused of making, that “if they dared say anything” about what he had done, harm could come to them. He is alleged to have threatened to blackmail one victim with compromising photos he possessed. For another victim, Henda Ayari, he has been accused of making physical threats not just to her, but even more terrifying, threatening to harm her children. The wanton violence he has been accused of inflicting on them gave them every reason to believe that he would carry out such threats. Henda Ayari was the first to break through her own carapace of fear, and then the other women followed. Indeed, Ayari’s revelation about Ramadan came in two stages. First, she described in detail Tariq Ramadan’s behavior, a man whom she had so admired, once she was alone with him in his hotel room, in her book I Chose To Be Free. But in the book, she called him by the alias “Zoubeyr”:

“This man, Zoubeyr, transformed before my very eyes into a vile, vulgar, aggressive being – physically and verbally,” she wrote. “For modesty, I will not give the precise details here of the acts he made me submit to. But it is enough that he took great advantage of my weakness and the admiration I felt for him. ”

“He allowed himself gestures, attitudes and words that I could never have imagined.”

“And when I resisted,” she writes, “when I cried to him to stop, he insulted and humiliated me. He slapped me and attacked me. I saw in his crazy eyes that he was no longer master of himself. I was afraid he would kill me. I was completely lost. I started crying uncontrollably. He mocked me.”

These statements, and others from Henda Ayari, described his violence: “He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die.” She also described him as threatening that her children might be harmed if she were to tell anyone.

His other victims also described Ramadan as violent and threatening. And there is more:

Mr Ramadan is also accused of raping another woman in a hotel room in 2009. The unnamed 42-year-old, who is reported to have disability in her legs, said on Friday that the professor had subjected her to a terrifying and violent sexual assault.

A third complainant, identified as Yasmina, told Le Parisien in an interview on Saturday that Mr Ramadan sexually harassed her in 2014 and blackmailed her for sexual favours.

The disabled woman was later identified only as “Christelle.” Her account is particularly harrowing:

The French edition of Vanity Fair magazine, whose staff met the 45-year-old woman, said her lawsuit against Ramadan described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on”.

A previous report, now scrubbed from the Internet, had this:

There is still a fourth woman, a Belgian known as Sarah, who is apparently thinking of filing a complaint, according to the RTBF radio network. In a testimony about her relationship with Mr Ramadan, she said she was scared for her life. “He can be very, very violent, grabbing you very violently, expecting from you any sexual practice and demanding it aggressively enough, and then it comes down again, but these moments are very difficult to live.”

The same extreme physical violence, including grabbing and choking, the same threats, the same aggressive and humiliating sexual demands, including rape and sodomy – his modus operandi appears to have always been the same. Tariq Ramadan is consistent in the evil of his ways.

Tariq Ramadan and his supporters would like the world to believe that he is being persecuted by French authorities for being a Muslim of note. They would like you to forget that all of his French accusers were Muslim women, not “Europeans” with a score to settle against Islam; nor did they “gang up” on Ramadan, but only with difficulty managed to summon up the courage to denounce this powerful monster, who with his connections and ability to tap the limitless wealth of his Muslim admirers to pay for the best lawyers, will certainly do all he can to blacken their names, to brazenly deny everything, and even threaten to sue for libel.

And that is exactly what he did at first: he denied having any sexual relations whatsoever with any of these women. But as the evidence mounted of his sexual encounters, he changed his story and now claimed that yes, he had indeed had sexual relations with the women who accused him, but it had always been “consensual.” The details about violence and humiliation did not sound as if those relations were “consensual.” But by dint of repetition, Ramadan and his noisy supporters hope to convince the world that these women who now accuse him were in truth all masochists, just asking for it, and he was prepared to accommodate them.

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