"Are you Swiss or a Muslim?"
"Silly question!"
Thus spoke Tariq Ramadan to a mainly Anglican audience earlier this year. The audience laughed, and that is as far as he took the topic. Ramadan, who has Swiss nationality and holds a recently created Qatari-funded chair at Oxford University, was touching on citizenship. This is an example of closing a subject by bluff, a device to put the listener off the scent.
The uncomfortable reality is very different. The question is not silly, and bluff is not an answer. The loyalty that a Muslim is instructed to have is to the Sharia, to Islam, overriding loyalty to any state. Anjem Choudary and his followers are emphatic:
"As a Muslim you must have allegiance where the Sharia says that you have allegiance."
"As a Muslim… I must have hatred towards everything which is non Islam."
"Queen and Country, Go to Hell!"
"Man-made law, go to hell!"
A placard carried in Oxford Street confirms the point by citing an Islamic text:
"Prophet said, 'The Muslim nation is one nation to the exclusion of all others'."
Samir Khan, US citizen, Al Qaeda member, formerly of North Carolina and New York City, made the obligation quite clear:
"I am a traitor to America because my religion requires me to be. We pledge to wage jihad for the rest of our lives until either we implant Islam all over the world or meet our Lord as bearers of Islam."
Qatari-funded Ramadan is Muslim: Islam does not permit its followers to choose. Hear what he said to a mainly Muslim audience in Berkeley, California. They needed no bluff:
"At the end of the day, you might be a Muslim-American, Black, Latino, but not really. Us versus them… After four generations, you are Muslim with an American background."
Let the question be repeated:
"Are you Swiss or a Muslim?"
Answer:
"Muslim, loyal to Islam, nominally citizen of Switzerland but obliged by Islam to struggle in jihad, by force if needed, to make Switzerland, and Britain for that matter, Islamic, no longer a nation but part of the One-Muslim-Nation-to-the-exclusion-of-all-others, the Global Caliphate, with Sharia law imposed on everyone."
No bluff.