http://www.stratfor.com/sitrep/20110...slamist-leader
Tunisia: Thousands Welcome Return Of Exiled Islamist Leader
January 30, 2011 | 1703 GMT
Thousands of Tunisians on Jan. 30 welcomed Islamist leader Sheikh Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of the Ennahda party, at the airport in Tunis, Reuters reported. The reception was the largest showing of the country’s Islamists in 20 years, as many of them were jailed or exiled by former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Ghannouchi was exiled in 1989.
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http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/...id-ghannouchi/
....Tunisia has had a strong secular tradition since its independence from France in 1956. Both Bourguiba and Ben Ali discouraged women from wearing the Islamic veil and men from sporting long beards and enforced secular ideals....
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http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/...id-ghannouchi/
A U.S. Visa for Rachid Ghannouchi?
Martin Kramer, “A U.S. Visa for an Islamic Extremist?” Policywatch, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, no. 121, June 29, 1994.
....Who Is Rashid Ghannouchi?
Rashid Ghannouchi was born in 1941 in the south of Tunisia. As a student in Damascus and Paris, he embraced the doctrines of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he disseminated on his return to Tunisia. His writings and activities against the government during the 1980s led to his repeated arrest. Ghannouchi chose voluntary exile in 1989. In 1992, a Tunisian court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment, for plotting to overthrow the Tunisian government.
Ghannouchi arrived in Britain in November 1991, and requested political asylum. The Tunisian government objected, but members of the Muslim community in Britain took up Ghannouchi’s cause, and he was granted asylum in August 1993.
America: “Enemy of Islam”
Ghannouchi visited the United States in December 1989, when he attended Islamic conferences in Chicago and Kansas City. At the time, he impressed some as a “moderate” Islamist, amenable to dialogue. But this reading of Ghannouchi was completely overturned by his reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Ghannouchi not only denounced King Fahd of Saudi Arabia for the “colossal crime” of inviting the U.S. to deploy forces, he also fully justified Saddam’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Ghannouchi compared Saddam to Yusuf Ibn Tashfin, the 11th-century Almoravid ruler who forcibly unified the Muslim principalities of Spain in order to wrest them from Christian domination. According to Ghannouchi, the Muslims now faced “Crusader America,” the “enemy of Islam,” and Saddam had taken a necessary step toward unity, “joining together two Arab states out of twenty-two, praise be to God.”1 Although other Islamists criticized Saudi Arabia, none embraced Saddam as fervently as Ghannouchi.
Ghannouchi also threatened the United States. Speaking in Khartoum during the crisis, he said, “There must be no doubt that we will strike anywhere against whoever strikes Iraq … We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world… Muslim youth must be serious in their warning to the Americans that a blow to Iraq will be a license to strike American and Western interests throughout the Islamic world.” He also called for a Muslim boycott of American goods, planes and ships....