Islamic Scholar Facing New Rape Allegations

The prominent former Oxford Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan, charged in France with raping two women, has now had further allegations made against him.

The sources confirmed by AFP cite reports on Europe 1 radio and in Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper that a woman in her 50s had accused Swiss-born Ramadan, 56, of raping her along with a member of his staff when she went to interview the academic at a hotel in Lyon in May 2014.

The woman, who filed a criminal complaint in May 2019, also accused Ramadan of issuing “threats or acts of intimidation” aimed at dissuading her from reporting the alleged attack to the police, the judicial sources added.

Ramadan, grandson of Hassan Al Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, denies any wrong doing and maintains his innocence.

The married father of four was a professor at Oxford University until he was forced to take leave when rape allegations surfaced at the height of the “Me Too” movement in late 2017. He has previously  denied charges he raped a disabled woman in 2009 and a feminist activist in 2012.

The academic was taken into custody in February 2018 and held for nine months before being granted bail. Authorities in Switzerland are also investigating him after receiving a rape complaint in that country.

The woman behind the latest complaint told police that Ramadan and a male assistant repeatedly raped her in Ramadan’s room at the Sofitel hotel in Lyon.

She described the alleged attack as being of “untold violence” and claimed that when she threatened to report them to the police Ramadan replied: “You don’t know how powerful I am.”

Ramadan was banned from entering the United States by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 after it was alleged he donated to the Association de Secours Palestinien (ASP/Palestinian Relief Organisation) from 1998 to 2002.

The U.S. government considered the ASP a group that funded terrorism by giving some of their donations to the anti-Israel terrorist organisation Hamas which is proscribed in the U.S.

Ramadan’s U.S. travel ban was later lifted by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010 during the Obama administration.

Ramadan’s own supporters have previously used social media networks to claim his problems are all part of a “Zionist plot.”

And where are the feminist protests demanding that the "victim" must be believed? This is a very high profile man, after all. All we can hear is crickets!