Zead Ramadan is thoroughly trained in Hamas-linked CAIR’s manipulative victimhood posturing and smearing of freedom fighters, as you can see here. He is by no stretch of the imagination an original thinker. As I have noted many times here, Leftists and Islamic supremacists tend to parrot the same talking points, as if they were all reading from the same script. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a database somewhere of themes to sound and stock answers to questions, since they repeat themselves with such dreary regularity. Ramadan is repeating talking points that we have heard before from the likes of dhimmi Jeffrey Goldberg, Islamic supremacist pseudo-moderate Reza Aslan, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison, Canadian Muslim leader Syed Soharwardy, and Nicholas Kristof, among many others. “CAIR-NY President Zead Ramadan: Anti-Muslim Rhetoric in the US Echoes Nazi Rhetoric against the Jews,” from MEMRI, May 13 (thanks to David):
Following are excerpts from an interview with Zead Ramadan, President of CAIR-NY, which aired on Press TV on May 13, 2012.
Zead Ramadan: I think that the United States and Americans need to realize that we have extremist elements in America, who are not Muslim, and who believe that America should only be one color, one way of living, and that is not what America is all about. America has invited immigrants from around the world to build its country, over its history.
[“¦]
Whenever you think that America, the “land of the free,” is going to grow up and go beyond it [bigotry], more intolerant, extremist voices come out. It seems that they come out in times of elections, because some groups think that they can get large groups of religious followers to side with them if they say negative things about other people. The easiest target”¦ the minority”¦ The easiest target has been the Muslim people.
In Nazi Germany, they targeted the minority, the Jewish minority, and unfortunately, it went from only philosophy, to rhetoric, to action. That is not where we want to go in America.
I don’t think we will ever get there, but I don’t think we should allow the road to continue to be built towards that direction, because the comments that are being made against Muslims are very eerily echoing the comments that were made against Jews by Nazis. A lot of people say they want Muslims to be taken out of the country, that they should have different citizenship status, and all of this stuff is an insult to the Constitution of the US….
Actually no one of any significance in this debate is saying that Muslims should be ” taken out of the country” or “that they should have different citizenship status.” In mischaracterizing the positions of anti-Sharia forces, Ramadan is trying to demonize resistance to jihad and Islamic supremacism, and deflect attention away from the real agenda of the counter-jihad movement, which is to defend freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for all people before the law.
Ramadan is doing the same thing with his comparison of counter-jihad rhetoric to Nazi rhetoric about the Jews. The late Christopher Hitchens ably took apart the central claim being made here when writing about the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero: “‘Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,’ Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.”
Ramadan’s aim (and the aim of all the others who have repeated this) is to intimidate his hearers into thinking that criticism of Islamic supremacism leads to the gas chambers, and thus there must be no criticism of Islamic supremacism. The unstated assumption is that if one group was unjustly accused of plotting subversion and violence, and was viciously persecuted and massacred on the basis of those false accusations, then any group accused of plotting subversion and violence must be innocent, and any such accusation must be in service of preparing for their internment and massacre.
The key difference is not only that Muslim leaders worldwide have made their intention to conquer and subjugate non-Muslims very clear, in a way that Jews never did in the run-up to the Holocaust; it is also that anti-jihadists nowhere advocate a “final solution” for Muslims, and never will — we are merely calling upon them to drop the authoritarian and repressive aspects of Sharia and obey the laws of the Western societies in which they live. This is a movement in defense of freedom and equality of rights before the law. Ramadan is lying about the alleged similarity of counter-jihad rhetoric to Nazi rhetoric about the Jews, which in reality was frankly and openly exterminationist from the beginning, while counter-jihadists have never advocated anything but the ideals enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and have explicitly denounced violence and vigilantism.
But Zead Ramadan wants to advance his repressive and authoritarian model for society, and in order to do so he has to smear those who are resisting the imposition of that societal model. And on a TV network controlled by the Iranian mullahs, no less.