OIC’s Sec-Gen Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu would agree.
This was first published on Ynet, and is republished here with the author’s permission and with a bit longer text.
The Murderer Merah as a Victim and Hero
By Manfred Gerstenfeld
Politically correct European elites and many Muslims have jointly created the perception that all Muslims are victims of the West. Consistent flawed reasoning and false arguments have made this possible.
On the basis of the fake ‘victimhood’ platforms created over the years, whitewashers of the murderer Mohamed Merah are constructing new false images. It is difficult to deny that the three French soldiers, a Jewish teacher and three children whom he killed are victims. Once having paid tribute to them, whitewashers began to turn the brutal murderer into a victim as well.
Among the most intelligent Merah apologists is Tariq Ramadan, a Geneva-born Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford. He first whitewashed Muslim anti-Semite Merah’s worldview. He eloquently wrote that “Merah was a misguided youngster in whose thought there were no values of Islam or racist and anti-Semitic ideas.” The next step was to turn Merah into a victim. In Ramadan’s words, Merah was “a poor guy, guilty and to be condemned undoubtedly, even if he himself was a victim of a social order which had already condemned him and millions of others to a marginality and a non-recognition of his statute of citizen with equal rights and chances.”1 Ramadan thus transformed Merah into a non-racist, non- anti-Semitic victim of society, whose ideas had nothing to do with any Muslim current.
