The Islamist Charm Offensive

By Douglas Farah

The Islamist front is clearly on a broad charm offensive. The results are impressive. We have the Foreign Affairs piece, op-eds in both the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, the friendly forum for 4.5 hours of undisputed discourse from Tariq Ramadan at Georgetown University and the upcoming "What Does it Mean to Be Muslim in America" forum again at Georgetown's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (funded by an endowment from the Saudi prince who had difficulty discerning 9/11 as a terrorist attack). The last includes the president of ISNA and the Muslim Student Association, ISNA's precursor as the first Muslim Brotherhood entity in the United States.

Given the scope and success of this push for a new acceptance of Islamists as politically representative of Islam writ large, and the efforts to reframe the debate in this country away from Islamists believe toward what they are willing to say in public, it is an important move.

The debate is now to be framed over whether Islam is compatible with democracy and how supposedly "moderate" groups like the Brotherhood are, despite their continued support of _jihad_ and an Islamic world government. (For a good look at the fallacies of this argument, see today's Frontpage piece by Patrick Poole.)

It is interesting that Georgetown University chose to allow Europe's leading Islamist, Tariq Ramadan, a friendly forum from which to espouse his views, virtually uncontested. Ramadan has been banned from the United States and France for his defense of the Islamist agenda and long-standing associations with violent Islamist _jihadists._

I do not believe talking to Ramadan and those like him is necessarily a bad thing. But allowing him to set the definitions, the parameters of the debate and underlying assumptions, is wrong. My full blog is here.

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