MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

It turns out that Tunisia’s ruling party leader has always been a wolf in wolf’s clothing. The West simply chose to ignore it …

By Michael Weiss, Lebanon Now -“It has been amusing to see Rached Ghannouchi caught in a moment of pure honesty, forgetting the well-tended script he has had has to recite for months now before credulous Western audiences. What a relief it must be to let it all hang out. A secret video was leaked last week, probably recorded in February or March, showing the En-Nahda founder having an informal mentoring session with members of different Tunisian Islamic associations. He outlines his strategy for the slow consolidation of Islamist power, recounting the free advice he’s dispensed to En-Nahda’s supposed extremist rivals, the Salafists, here depicted as overzealous kindred who show a lot of potential. ‘Do not rush things. I tell the Salafist youth,’ he says. ‘We all went through the same and we suffered. Now you want to have a TV, radio, schools and invite the preachers. Why are you rushing things?’ The real threat to the country’s post-Ben Ali future, Ghannouchi explains, is the electoral victory of the secularists.

This should greatly impress the US State Department, which has hailed Tunisia’s ‘transition’ as a model for the Arab Spring, even as En-Nahda has introduced a blasphemy law into the Constituent Assembly and taken to describing women as ‘complementary’ to men in the draft constitution. The same ‘Salafist youth’ Ghannouchi advises have rallied at the Great Mosque of Kairouan in March chanting, ‘We are all the children of Osama,’ ‘The revolution was made for sharia’ and ‘Jews, Jews, the army of Mohammed is back.’ They have firebombed the home of the Tunisian exhibitor of Persopolis, the film based on Marjane Satrapi’s scathing memoir about growing up in Khomeinist Iran (one En-Nahda official described the film as ‘prostitution’).

… Ghannouchi has long been a hardline extremist, as Oren Kessler documented in a recent report about En-Nahda. He backed Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991 (‘joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two, praise be to God.’). As for the power that kicked Saddam out, Ghannouchi had this to say: ‘We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam.’ He reassured the leaderships of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in Tehran in 1990 that ‘the greatest danger to civilization, religion and world peace is the United States. It is the Great Satan.’ He described the Oslo Accords as a ‘Jewish-American plan encompassing the entire region, which would cleanse it of all resistance and open it to Jewish economic and cultural activity, culminating in complete Jewish hegemony from Marrakesh to Kazakhstan.’ From his cushy state of exile in London, Ghannouchi issued a fatwa against secular Tunisian writer Lafif Lakhdar in 2005, accusing a 71-year-old man of authoring a book that was irreverent toward the Prophet Mohammed. (Lakhdar wrote no such book, though fears for his safety prompted Muslim human rights activists to initiate a Rushdie-style defense campaign on his behalf.)…

The self-satisfaction with which Ghannouchi and En-Nahda have been treated in the international press (‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ are familiar bywords) is now being seriously challenged by events on the ground.” Read more.