Tunisia's toxic Ennahda Islamists pulled the wool over the eyes of a lot of governments and reporters back when they first took power in the Arab Spring. The results were horrifying, an upswing in Islamic violence, including the attack on American facilities, and widespread protests that eventually forced them from power. Now Ennahda wants to reinvent itself. It's not into "Political Islam" anymore, which is a euphemism for Islamism.
Political Islam has inspired jihadists across the world, but there are glimmers of hope within the house of Islam. One of them is Tunisia’s moderate Ennahda party, which this week set out to sever its Islamist roots and remake itself as a strictly civic political entity
Ennahada is not moderate. That's a myth that keeps being repeated. And that too many people keep falling for. It's on record as supporting Islamic terrorism and its goal was, until recently, theocracy. How is that,moderate?
A party conference in Tunis over the weekend ratified the change. Ennahda (“Awakening”) will separate its politics from its religious and social activities, which will be carried out by independent civil-society organizations. In other words, Ennahda will no longer be a movement but a normal party within the democratic system that arose after Tunisians overthrew the regime of Zine El-Abedine Ben Ali in 2011.
Not only does this smack of the political vs military wing you see in Islamic terror groups, but it looks very much like a shell game. The Islamic law agenda will be fitted into one box while a political box will seek to gain power while claiming not to have the same agenda anymore. This looks a lot like typical front group tactics.
“We are leaving political Islam and entering democratic Islam,” Ennahda’s founder and leader, Rached Ghannouchi, told France’s Le Monde newspaper. “We are Muslim democrats.” This is notable, given Ennahda’s origins as a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot.
What is Democratic Islam and how is it different from political Islam?
And here's how moderate this Ghannouchi fellow is.
According to Ghannouchi, the Muslims now faced "Crusader America," the "enemy of Islam," and Saddam had taken a necessary step toward unity, "joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two, praise be to Allah."
Ghannouchi also threatened the United States. Speaking in Khartoum during the crisis, he said, " We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.
Sheik Ghanushi, began by blessing the mothers of the suicide bombers: "I would like to send my blessings to the mothers of those youth, those men who succeeded in creating a new balance of power… I bless the mothers who planted in the blessed land of Palestine the amazing seeds of these youths, who taught the international system and the Israeli arrogance, supported by the US, an important lesson. The Palestinian woman, mother of the Shahids [martyrs], is a martyr herself, and she has created a new model of woman…"
The Arab Spring "will achieve positive results on the path to the Palestinian cause and threaten the extinction of Israel," Ghannouchi said. "I give you the good news that the Arab region will get rid of the bacillus of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, said that Israel will disappear by the year 2027. I say that this date may be too far away, and Israel may disappear before this."
Sure, but that was then. Maybe he's become more moderate since?
In the video, which was first broadcast last April and re-broadcast October 9th, Ghannouchi said, “The secularists are still controlling the media, economy and administration. Therefore, controlling them would require more time.” He added that “the police and army’s support for Islamists is not guaranteed, and controlling them would also require more time.”
The Ennahda leader said, “We’ve met with Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the salafists, including Sheikh Abou Iyadh and Sheikh al-Idrissi.”
Abou Iyadh, also known as Seif Allah Ben Hassine, is currently wanted by Tunisian police in connection with the September 14th attack on the US embassy.
Please tell us more about this Muslim Democrats thing.