MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Flight Of The Intellectuals. An interview with Paul Berman. “Partly it’s sloppiness, but mostly it’s fear of discovering what they’re going to hear in the sixteenth minute. They don’t really want to take him seriously. He demands to be taken seriously, yet his admirers are precisely the types who, out of fear of the sixteenth minute, don’t wish to do so. What you discover in the sixteenth minute is that Tariq Ramadan is his grandfather’s grandson.”

Plus this: “What’s fascinating to me is how some Western intellectuals will praise this guy as a moderate when he is, at best, only half moderate, and yet at the same time they sneer at authentic Arab liberals.”