The Martyring of Tariq Ramadan Pt. 2

 

Henda Ayaari burst into tears infront of a live audience with Thiery Ardison when he evoked Tariq Ramadan. Peg Hunter / Flickr

 

One of the least interesting details of the Tariq Ramadan’s sexual assault story is that it fell apart. Anyone who could follow the scent-trails of power could have seen it coming. From the start, something was off when rape accusers asked the then-Oxford Professor of religious studies to be cast in prison without a trial  — it prompted the famous MIT linguist Noam Chomsky to ask, “is there a different legal process for Muslims and one for everyone else?”

It’s hard not to suspect that someone instrumentalized society’s hatred of a wicked crime. What good is a trial to do if this guy is morally unfit to sit in society much less sit in Oxford as a professor?

Then the evidence started to pile up in one direction.  A man swore in an affidavit that he was harassed by Henda Ayari in March 2013, a year after the rape she claims to have been a victim of! In a sworn statement the frenchman said:

She told me: ‘either we do it and I become your mistress’, or I file a complaint against you for rape. She told me that everyone would believe her because she is a woman and there was no witness.  She threatened to file a complaint immediately after leaving my office.

I heard about the Ramadan case in the press like everyone else,” said the witness, a sworn official. “When I saw that it concerned Mrs. Ayari, I reacted, because I already met this person. I can confirm I have never met Mr. Ramadan and I am not a Muslim.

Then she said she was slapped by Ramadan hard across the face before the assault, but her bestfriend Malika A, who saw her the day after the alleged rape testified “Henda seemed completely normal,  she looked radiant, she did not have any suspicious marks on her face. It looks like Ayari wasn’t honest about building a second front door due to her groping-related trauma.

Even though she claimed to have cut off all contact with him in 2013. But between June and August 2014, Ayari sent more than 200 messages to Tariq Ramdan.

Hi! It’s been a while since I’ve heard news from you …”

“I know you’ll never be in love with me, but soon you’ll be between my thighs” !!

She then admitted to contacting Tariq Ramadan via Facebook to seduce and entrap him …

 

 

People are worried about precedent. And civility. And that the trick of pulling a rape victim out of a hat could be repeated by the bad guys. But again, none of that is the interesting part. It’s obvious to the point of being boring that this is a play in the contest of power. It’s supposed to happen — a feature of the game, not a bug. We let deliberative bodies touch our courts, and no-holds-barred deliberative theater is the result. The court of public opinion has lower standards than its legal equivalent, and so this fiasco is the game-theoretic response. This doesn’t mean Tariq Ramadan isn’t a rapist. Maybe he is. But if Ramadan’s rape victims weren’t actually victims, then  Nicolas Sarkozy would have needed to invent them.

I am confident that very few people care about that detail in and of itself. But why the specific accusation of rape? Nicolas Sarkozy could get someone to say that Tariq Ramdan routinely called Jews the K-word. Or he could produce someone who claims that Ramadan, in a Jihadist haze, made a credible threat to their life. The only thing standing between these claims and widespread belief in them is Occam’s Razor, or the intuitive, mass-market version of it. But the same goes for sexual assault. So what’s different?

 

The answer, the interesting part of all this, is that otherwise-accepted epistemological substance twists when a woman’s testimony about sexual assault comes into the equation. It becomes an unanswerable spell: Occam’s Razor is powerful, but the peculiar epistemics of believing women is more powerful still. A woman’s accusation is culturally immune to contradiction because contradiction is designated as immoral — being immoral is being wrong, plus other bad stuff. This isn’t so much a feminist ploy but a feminine epistemology: if slogan of “always believe woman” shoots anxiety into the logical-implications part of your brain, it’s likely that that brain is male, or at least masculine. (No, this has nothing to do with intelligence.)

This isn’t to say that system-based reasoning is good and empathy-based reasoning is bad — that’s wrong for a number of a reasons, and if you believe it, you’re LARPing as Al Jazeera showed when discussing the case. It’s that, when it comes to solving problems with strangers, systematization scales and empathy does not. Large-scale systems can be gamed when they abide conventions that only make sense on a smaller scale. Yeah, a contest for control over the most dispassionate branch of government can be short-circuited with the alarmedly personal.  A smuggling operation between these different epistemic orders of magnitude is the perfect crime. How has this only happened once before?

If Ramadan deserved to be the grandson of the legendary Egyptian Politician Hassan El Banna who is the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and if he deserved to be an Oxford Professor and the most famous religious intellectual , then this was indeed the cynical ploy that we fear it is. It was carried on the wings of sentiment of a mother not letting her good-for-nothing son sleep on the street, a standard that makes sense on the feminine scale: local, domestic, parochial, personal. Consider the four different types of truth that we use in the four different scopes below.

Tier 1: Imagine something terrible: your daughter, tears in her eyes, comes to you and tells you that she was sexually assaulted. Anything except utter trust in her story would be monstrous. The same goes for such a story from your sister: either of those people claiming to be victims of assault should be, for your purposes, identical to them actually being victims of assault. We’re tribal for a reason. These people rely on your empathy for succor in an uncaring world, and it works in small, high-trust groups.

Tier 2: Moving across the gradient of trust, then comes your cousin or friend making a claim of sexual assault. Your faith should still be strong, but a few notches further from absolute truth. That’s enough for you to take a firm side, lack of evidence be damned.

Tier 3: Beyond the boundary of the Dunbar number is a hazy, echoey place. Here are people who wouldn’t come to you about an assault: coworkers, acquaintances, neighbors you never see. Despite the fog of unfamiliarity, though, you can still make out shapes. Sure, we don’t know the claimant, so we can’t be sure she’s not one of the few bad apples who would falsify a rape accusation. But when nothing is at stake, we can still safely side with the accuser. What’s in it for her, after all?

Tier 4: Things get plain uncomfortable when we mix  a room full of strangers with the bid for political power.  Here live sectarianism and politics and absolute strangers with something to gain from false claims, things that go hand-in-hand. Confidence in a “he-said, she-said” situation might even push trust below 50/50, due to the incentives at play.

As we traverse this hierarchy downwards, it’s obvious that we need more coldness and less empathy to secure our systems from the threat of being gamed. Universalizing impulses take wing at tier 4 and beyond. If we systematize too hard, the pain of existence becomes pronounced: everything that matters to a person being undeniably small. As we zoom out from the familiar so as to try to dissect the Big Picture, we leave an enchanted garden behind, and things become less human and less humane. That’s the pain of being a man. Systematization is exhausting.

Seeing Henda Ayari cry wasn’t easy

Female subtlety is like a ghost story. It confounds any algorithm, and no matter how the algorithm is tweaked, it will only be confounded again. Women are wilder and more mutable, they have always been considered to be more magical — maybe in the way that sub-literal social rules are wild and mutable to an autistic person. To men, this is a dark enchantment to take comfort in. Even though watching Henda Ayari cry wasn’t easy, a woman’s tears just seem to have truth in them, alluring like a credible tale of the supernatural. Believing is having hope that there could be something true that’s beyond the harsh, anemic light of the mechanistic universe, that the things we are attached to really do matter.

At certain points when Tariq Ramadan’s followers started attacking Henda Ayari, over the accusations she levied. This indignation to them probably felt good at the time,  Tariq Ramadan however stepped in to tell them to respect her and not get involved and not harass her. After all we need people at the levers of power to put their own passions away, that outcry reminded us. But he learned the hard way that we can only enjoy the enchanted garden of the subjective for so long. For when he stepped in for voluntary questioning at a police station in Paris, he was handcuffed and thrown into solitary confinement, that he has been in since March without a trial.   After all being a leader of any kind can’t tolerate the subjective truths that are cherished in intimate life.

Xenofeminism

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sam Haris

There’s a joke about a tourist who gets lost on a bad detour in an Irish fog. He reaches a village and asks an old local how to get to Dublin. The Irishman thinks for a minute, and then replies, “I wouldn’t start here if I were you.”

The adolescence of the social-media age is a confusing place to start when looking for a unifying principle of the media. We’ve wandered a long way from the ABC-NBC-CBS concern for neutrality and respectability to the gynocentric religious eliminationist rhetoric of Ayaan Hirsi Ali receiving tacit support from The American Enterprise Institute.  What that fiasco has made apparent is that Classical Libertarian radicalism is mainstream and expected in America’s newsrooms. But trying to ask why this is the case is a lot like reading a sheep’s liver.

 “Never confuse Islamic Sharia and the Muslims who really mean it with those extremist Christians who live in the United States” is one tweet that Ayaan Hirsi Ali made. “We cannot ignore that the Muslim birth rate is higher than that of their non-European counterparts” is another. Is your inner Mehdi Hassan fuming?

And actual Muslim women in this video have told Ayaan Hirsi Ali that she doesn’t speak for them Does Ayaan Hirsi Ali who is married to a Christian white man speak for Muslim women and their experiences with Muslim men? Criticizing their birth rates and experiences in the veil.  The level of gynocentrism in this is fairly breathtaking.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her Husband

As you might predict, though, the usual suspects claiming that Muslims are the intolerant ones did not stop every journalist from giving Ayaan Hirsi Ali a spirit of warm buttress. The Islamic-media response is one of asking where the ref is — there is supposed to be a neutral referee that makes both teams play by the same rules. Forced to play the bigoted jester, Muslims are always raring for an opportunity to share their perennial humiliation with progressives. It never works; the transcendent arbiter somehow always misses the call. Ayaan Hirsi Ali didn’t get the same treatment from the West as Reza Aslan who was fired from CNN for anti-Christian rhetoric or, Anjem Choudary who is serving a five year sentence for anti-Christian rhetoric despite never having any manifestation of violence. Both were fired on their first day. And one is actually in a maximum security prison. Wagon-circling is based on tribe, after all. Have you ever seen them break into formation to protect Scientologists?

A brand-new demonstration of inconsistency is the assailing of Linda Sarsour. The West has blamed Al Jazeera, Vox,  the intercept, Western feminists, and the Left all in an attempt of making semblance of sympathizers of the Islam question, it culminated in bringing the hammer down on the Palestinian Linda Sarsour’s presence in the women’s march in late January, days after the “Western feminists love Islam” controversy ignited. Their combined market cap approaches three trillion. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I’m not sure what to call sentencing Anjem Choudary to five years in a maximum security prison because he preached Islam on the streets of London.

At first glance, it’s weird that Republicans support the corporate technological panopticon that has captured the public square from “conservative” accountability. But the mystery evaporates when you realize that, in this instance, NRx is used as a vehicle for power. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s camp might be both conservative and right-leaning, but it’s not exactly important that they are. They are as conservative as possible about the law — without actually getting too far into the whole “separation of church and state” injunction in the law thing — because conservatism isn’t memetically equipped to do away with neutral principles by itself. As opposed to liberalism, it’s been rendered culturally powerless to guarantee power. Conservatism endows the opposition with the same procedural principles as those who govern. If religious hatred is impermissible against one group, it’s impermissible against another. Conservatism doesn’t provide a satisfactory justification when someone asks themselves, “why do we get special rules?”

Within this operationalization, conservatism and black conservatism (as seen in Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Candace Owens) form a complementary motte-and-bailey system. When one can confidently express their radicalism, they can say that the bad guys on the other team need to be punished. When such rhetoric is indefensible, the drawbridge is pulled back and the unmistakably liberal ethos of privacy-from-politics is emphasized; the rights of capital to include or exclude anyone from a platform are invoked. The public’s square’s gradual annexation by private interests isn’t a problem when those private interests act for the benefit of the tribe. Our ruling tribe happens to be stoked about religious Dekulakization.

Even after notions of a neutral referee are dispelled, there remains a Pavlovian ugliness when what Ayaan Hirsi Ali said about Muslim men is said about another form of faithful expression. Because Ayaan Hirsi Ali built a career savaging Islam because it’s brutal to women but famously mounted a campaign to defend Brett Kavanaugh. As I said, if she doesn’t care about real women who live next to her in America what makes you think that she cares about women abroad?  In the Platonic troposphere there floats the justification for this apparent contradiction, a gentle prototype to “fuck you, brown Muslim. Go back to your country that we just bombed I went to Columbia and I control the means of representation.” The explanation is that this is about power: Muslim men are morally compromised because they have all of it and they leverage it against women. And so people without power, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali who work at the American Enterprise Institute, are allowed to make the rules.

Power — you’ll come across the word often if you read the defenses of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, its invocations having an unmistakable blank slate pedigree. It’s just as we feared: beneath the smiling, civility-minded reactionary conservative is a demonic red beast, but one that is difficult to paint with the blood-crimson brush of Bolshevism. The Characterization of neo-populism or cultural conservatism, brought by more erudite conservatives, aren’t really correct, either. Identifiably conservative modes of praxis are absent. Pieces of such things have been taken and subordinated to an elite that has a neuroses about its own power and needs to sanitize it. Talking about “phasing out” Muslim people by mitigating their birth rate is cool, but to liberate the working class Christians from a capitalist mode of production? That’s weird and old-fashioned, and also not very appealing to the folks on top.

American right-neoconservatism is absorbing what it needs to secure the status of its adherents. This post-NRx is becoming the religion of the elites, kind of like how Episcopalianism was a century ago. Alarm about Muslim males “claiming to be oppressed” when no such claim was made, as strong as ever during the Ayaan Hirsi Ali controversy, is the perfect illustration of why this ideology is so useful to the powerful. That such a specific phantasm is automatically generated by our shitty aristocrats indicates that it’s something that they’re worried about: Muslim males having a claim to oppression is a threat. Nominal oppression is jealously guarded because it’s understood to be the gate and key to legitimized social domination. By limiting the vocabulary of social injury to this word, any grievance that doesn’t fit into the category of “oppression” as delineated by the intelligentsia is rendered illegitimate. The greater lesson might be that the best strategy for social change is to convince elites that adopting a new ideology is in the interest of maintaining their elite position. It’s no mystery why the Ayaan Hirsi Alis’ of the world subscribed to an ideology where they factually cannot lose. The math stands against them however.

I’d bet that bona fide capitalists have an anxiety about the American Enterprise Institute  hiring someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one that they wouldn’t admit to having. Combining that with the news about Linda Sarsour, no class analysis could have made it out of this past week unscathed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s beliefs are adjacent to those of history’s most violently extreme conservatives who lynched Emmet Till, Maoist-white men of European-Christian descent who murdered Malik Elshabazz (Malcom X), who more or less believe that Muslim men need to be murdered so that economic protectionism can be built and evangelical Christianity can experience true revival.

 

The Limits of discourse

 

I had another very heated philosophical debate with a friend from Taibah called Arnold Kansime on the heritability of IQ, we reached the limits of discourse in attempting to define intelligence. I share it here.

Jaffer. 

The average genetic IQ of Uganda is declining owing to the tendency of the more intelligent to have fewer children than the less intelligent.

Arnold. 

This is contentious; never knew intelligence was genetically transmitted. You know why Ugandans/Africans IQ is drastically declining, it because breast milk has become too expensive and now mothers feed their sons and daughters on powdered formula engineered by our foes!

Jaffer. 

Height and IQ are one of the most heritable human qualities. Genes seem to be 80% of the story. It’s most certainly inherited because the IQ measures of siblings tend to be in proximity of each other, but here’s a twist scientists insist children get their intelligence from their mothers.

Arnold. 

Just to be clear, there is no blood transfusion from a woman to her son during gestation and at the point of birth. That is why an HIV positive mother can give birth to a negative child. You could make an argument that traits are transmitted through sperm and egg; but let’s see if you can answer why there is no one likened to a zebra? I haven’t done any substantial research on this issue but without doubt I would (any day) disagree with this judgment! I don’t have to read the full length of those articles to believe that their deductions are baseless and can be construed in negative connotations! Just in case you didn’t know some researches are funded and sponsored by groups and individuals and this makes their legitimacy questionable. It reminds me of one research that claimed- “animals too are predisposed naturally to practicing homosexuality.” Your assertion exerts so much gravity; what does it mean? That some people are more intelligent than others by design or heredity and (in that) if your parents were at the bottom of the hierarchy your chances of getting to the top are naught, except you mate with a woman who is exceptionally smart! Some one should most definitely find a label for this. I believe geniuses are not born but are made with a component of mysticism regarding the soul of which is beyond our comprehension! Otherwise we wouldn’t be the human race!

Jaffer.

There’s no reason to believe the boar forgets to grow angry, the hind, to trust in flight, the bear to attack hardy herds. Wild animals have impulses–frenzy, ferocity, aggression–but they no more have anger than they have luxury. Only the human being has been alloted practical wisdom, foresight, scrupulousness, deliberation. Though some traces of love, hate, friendship, animosity, disagreement, harmony, exist in animals; they are the proper possession of human hearts. These traits are in possession–for good and ill alike–of human hearts. Animals are barred not only from human virtues but also human vices. Historically children of intellectually gifted mothers have performed exceptionally well and have always been part of the intelligentsia. While at times gifted fathers were not always able to give birth to intelligent children when they married beneath their cognitive class. Genetic scientists say children get their intelligence from their mothers and I’d like to think science is the poetry of reality. And Genius is born–not paid, there’s little that can be done in adulthood to shift intelligence in adulthood. IQ is like the NFL you need to be 300 pounds to get in, then other qualities like ambition, hardwork, discipline come in, but there’s no argument that supports the notion that a person with low cognitive ability will go into a high IQ profession and find inimitable success, that’s a social Justice warrior/Marxist complex that’s fundamentally damaging

Arnold.

It’s true that when you reach a certain age the brain cells have grounded their structure and are irreversible (at least for the moment; there most probably will be a cure for that in future) it would be easier to regenerate an amputated limb than change the cognitive strata, I fully agree with this. But irrespective of what those scientists found, “and I am being explicitly adamant,” I believe a child gains those 300lbs during gestation and the period when a mother offers appropriate nursing for the child. It is food that nourishes the body-like rain the vegetation. As I said earlier, there are concepts of the cognitive process that science only blatantly answer but isn’t sure about. For instance, can you explain the differences in race “civilization?” When the Germans took brains from decapitated Namibians’ to prove white supremacy they were shocked to discover that in fact there was no difference in how the brain is structured. So frustrated and dismayed they thought it appropriate to leave the water murky-and ended up saying that blacks are just darn lazy. I think the mind is so complex that we may never understand it; it’s like telling a screw to unscrew itself!

Jaffer.

Variation in intelligence was the subject of productive scientific study in the last half of the nineteenth century, stimulated, like so many other intellectual developments of that era, by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin had asserted that the transmission of inherited intelligence was a key step in human evolution, driving our simian ancestors apart from the other apes. When environments are the same but success is different the difference is due to genetics when environments are different and success is different the difference is due to environment. The argument is based on analyses where individuals’ IQ scores are shown to better predict their outcomes as adults than their parents socioeconomic status. Such results are reported for many outcomes, including poverty, dropping out of school, unemployment, marriage, divorce, child illegitimacy, welfare dependency and the probability of criminal offending. One of the most robust findings not only in psychology but behavioural genetics is IQ is highly heritable. It seems to be more heritable the older we get. There’s the concept of genetic amplification where the boundary between genetic difference and boundary modification is difficult to draw. However, For better or worse there’s nothing more validated and vindicated in psychometric tests, there’s nothing that has ever been as concrete in genetic science, than the fact that children get their intelligence from their mothers, when you say “I am not familiar with that research, but I would have to disagree” then you are using your intuitive common sense to argue with facts, you cannot use your intuitive common sense to diss biology. Genetic scientists are sophisticated people, they do sophisticated work and they solve complex equations. You would have to carry out your research on a sample of people, otherwise refuting scientific studies with no research of our own makes us pseudoscientists.

Arnold.

Ok since you emphatically made your point, explain this; whether I believe in natural selection or genetic transmutation or the big bang all products of science (among others); if your assertions “based on scientific research” are true-do you realise what kind of scenario we would be predestined to have? Eventually as we evolve intellectually “for those who are genetically adept, it would spell catastrophe for those left out of the cognitive aristocratic strata. Look-if science’s claims where true and women are the jewel offspring through which intelligence should be propagated for prosperity it would cause a construed climate (in which there are lords and servants): Look around you-which woman in the corporate world will be as willing to condescend to marry a man doing double shifts as a blue collar worker, “the ones preserved for those men whose genetic sequence was structure inferior so that they are reliably sure to take up that career;” (if at all it can be termed as one!) And how about those intelligent women, what are the chances that there is as much a bilaterally mutual relationship where by for every gifted woman, there is a man who fits her caliber-so that they can go ahead and procreate what is subsequently subtle children who who will “by genetic trait” be most likely be above the decile average. I mean this will most definitely heighten our difference, and will prove a miscalculated and poorly planned bio-system. Each man and woman for the sake of their offspring will seek to get a partner that is “gifted.” This will surely stratify or world! Hey never know, at that rate we may eventually head back to 1534…you know “when James Markley and his boys came to take workers!” By the way “without tainting researched facts and science all together!” it’s a beautiful thing to dig into intuitive common sense. (Now that’s something that can’t be genetically transmitted.)

 

Jaffer. 

That’s the more pressing matter actually; we are living in a world separated by class, wealth and hierarchies. And the world is being culturally divided along hierarchies of intelligence, status, power and money.There was a time when being a few standard deviations above mean IQ didn’t have so much value. But now being a few standard deviations above mean, could help you start a software company or a hedge fund and that will lead to greater levels of wealth inequality. It would be disingenuous not to assess our intellectual capacity. This is why Albert Binet created the intelligence test it was invented to discover children with Intellectual Giftedness for the betterment of the rest of humanity and to help children with abnormally low levels of intelligence become more productive members of society. As you brought up James Markley without testing for intelligence Black failure will always be blamed on slavery, the legacy of colonialism and so on. And yet if we gave people mental tests it can help us so that we don’t go looking for problems that don’t exist and so that we don’t offer problems that actually exist bad remedies.  For the people below the bottom decile of IQ life tends to get worse they have children out of wedlock because they don’t think between sex and reproduction and they go on to become chronic welfare recipients and they tend to give birth to many children, they are highly likely to get divorced once they get married since they are less likely to work through their differences and resolve conflicts by employing intelligence, they are involved in crime and they start right away with early interaction with the law and disengagement from school. So I ask , “are they deprived or depraved?” Life for the members of the low cognitive class sadly tends to get worse and its members collect at the bottom of society. Poverty is severe, drugs and crime are rampant, and the traditional family all but disappears. Economic growth passes them by .
Technology is not a partner in their lives but an electronic opiate. They live together in urban centers or scattered in rural backwaters, but their presence hovers over the other parts of town and countryside as well, creating fear and resentment in the rest of society that is seldom openly expressed but festers nonetheless.

I must say after the conversation I realized that the complex juggling of lies and truth required to get past the demented gate keepers of our society may not Arnold’s forte. He was intellectually dishonest because empiricism makes our heads hurt and rationalism looks like an aspirin. I had to discontinue my conversation with him.