** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 786 18 September 18 RAPE & TARIQ RAMADAN

A MODERN DREYFUS CASE HAUNTS FRANCE. DESPITE RAPE CHARGES, IS TARIQ RAMADAN A POLITICAL PRISONER?
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Has France got another, modern Dreyfus case? Dreyfus was a French Army officer jailed for spying, actually because he was a Jew. A notorious instance of national antisemitism. Right now a famous European Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan, languishes in a French prison. Accused of rape by five women, all Muslim, Ramadan is held in solitary confinement and denied proper medical care. Is he a political prisoner, persecuted because of his prominent Islamic advocacy?

As someone twice interviewed by Ramadan on Press TV, I declare a certain fondness for the man. Fanatical secularists in France accuse ‘Brother Tariq’ of being like Moliere’s Tartuffe, a hypocrite caught in the act. Formerly they claimed his apparent reasonableness and moderation masked an insidious Islamic strategy. A ‘long march’ through democratic institutions in order to undermine them, culminating in a French Caliphate. Yet it is difficult to see Ramadan as a die-hard Islamist. Because he bravely suggested that the ‘hudud’, penal punishments in sharia’, like lashing and stoning, should be bracketed or suspended. They are chiefly directed against the poor and the powerless, he sensibly argued. That stance gained him the hostility of real Islamists everywhere.

Although 150.00 people have signed a petition to free Tariq, Muslim voices swear that it is about ‘due process’, not about the crimes of which he is accused, and which he denies. The terrible charge of ‘misogyny’ terrifies Muslims, can you blame them? But is it pusillanimous? Can you ignore the existence of an aggressive, malevolent feminist agenda aimed at attacking and smearing men just because they are men? That well-known gay Islamophobe, Douglas Murray, has fingered the type of feminism which ‘is producing manifestos for torturing men’. Does Ramadan’s jailing exemplify a grievous result of that syndrome? Might psychoanalysis offer some insights, no matter how controversial, into what is going on here?

Helen Deutsch was an eminent female follower of Freud. Of Jewish origins, a brilliant clinician and writer on the psychology of women, Deutsch contented that a little girl early on becomes aware of the inferiority of her clitoris, compared with the male penis. That causes her to become passive and turn masochistic. To wish, unconsciously, to become dominated by men. Worse, the girl’s inferiority complex will lead her when grown up to desire to be humiliated and even raped by men. Could then Ramadan’s alleged victims have wished themselves to be violated? One of them said that Tariq flung himself unto her ‘like a wild animal’. True or not (shocking but…isn’t TV daily showing that kind of orgasmic sight?), might the nasty thing have been at bottom a case of wish-fulfilment?

Deutsch’s distinctly non-PC views stem from her great teacher and exemplar, Sigmund Freud. The male ‘castration complex’, harking back to the Greek myth of Oedipus, is resolved because a boy in his anxiety thinks ‘I may be punished by my father for desiring my mother’ and so he renounces that sinful desire. Different with a girl, Freud contends. Chagrined by her awareness of lacking a penis, a girl turns towards her father and rejects her mother. The castration complex hence works in a different way in her subconscious mind: ‘I do not have a penis, that has been my punishment’. Freud called that the Electra complex. Whilst Oedipus had unknowingly killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, Electra had connived at the death of her mother Clytemnestra for murdering her father Agamemnon. (NB Helen Deutsch disliked her own mother…) Upshot: somehow a little girl must renounce her hope of being a boy and accept her castration – submission to men’s desires – as a psychological fact
.

With masculinity execrated in a #MeToo feminist-dominated Western world, few Muslim men (or Christian, for that matter) would openly dare to maintain that an unconscious female desire causes women’s rape. Erstwhile feminist icon Germaine Greer is less extreme but still controversial. She prefers to call rape ‘unconsensual sex’, or even ‘inconsiderate’. Naturally the ‘sisters’ have pilloried her but Greer has drawn attention to a vital shift. The definition of rape has changed. It used to mean physical violence. Check out the French word ‘le viol’. Something for which there are usually objective criteria. Now ‘rape’ means consent. Something much more difficult to prove. (Wikileaks’ hero Julian Assange has been victimised by Swedish and British law exactly in relation to that.) Indeed, she terms consent ‘a conundrum’. It is time to rethink rape, she indicates. Has she got a point?

Let’s make no mistake about it. Rape is a horrendous crime, as well as an abominable sin. Pace Freud and Greer, holy and devout – or simply decent – women are disgusted and horrified at the thought. Saint Maria Goretti preferred death to submitting herself to the lust of her would-be rapist. A shining example of true feminity, worth meditating on. Against the unbridled, obscene lusts propagated by the West’s godless culture.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of espionage for Germany. He suffered 5 years on hard labour on French Guyana, Devil’s Island, before being released as innocent. Tariq Ramadan, if found guilty, would not undergo anything as brutal but the destruction of his reputation would be bad enough. French law will decide, eventually. I can only hope the cynical opinion uttered by Mr Bumble in Dickens’ Oliver Twist does not apply in the French Republic: ‘The law is an ass’!


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