US Deepened Islam-West Mistrust: Tariq Ramadan

"The current US administration under [George W. Bush] is perceived as untrustworthy and merely acting in favor of specific interests," said Ramadan.

"I think the great majority of Muslim people around the world expressed their condemnation of what happened. The feeling is that it was not Islamic and was against our values," Tariq Ramadan told swissinfo in an interview.

"But there is a very deep lack of trust because of what happened afterwards at a global level," said Ramadan, who is currently working as a senior research fellow at St Anthony's College, Oxford University, and at the Lokahi Foundation in London.

Ramadan, who published more than 200 books on Islam, added that overall perception of the consequences of 9/11 is quite negative with Muslims in the United States and the West feeling under siege.

"Over the past five years there have been many people saying we need more mutual understanding, but since September 11 events around the world have conspired against this," he said.

"There is still this perception in the West that Islam is a potential threat, not only the extremists and radicals but Muslims in general," lamented Ramadan, who was appointed to a British government task force set up to combat radicalization and extremism in the wake of the London bombings.

He said anti-terror laws in the West and the US global war on terror with news about rendition flights and torture of terror suspects have added insult to injury.

The US Senate Office Of Research has said that the Arab Americans and the Muslim community have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Amnesty International also repeatedly said that racial profiling by US law enforcement agencies had grown dramatically in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Ramadan himself experienced racial profiling when he was denied a US visa to teach Islamic philosophy and ethics at Indiana's Notre Dame University's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

The US State Department revoked his visa in July 2004 on the recommendation of officials in the Department of Homeland Security.

A US federal judge criticized last April the Bush administration for being inconsistent in its handling the visa application of Ramadan.

Untrustworthy

Ramadan said the US administration has proved untrustworthy.

"The current US administration under [George W. Bush] is perceived as untrustworthy and merely acting in favor of specific interests."

He continued: "Muslims hear the West talking about democracy and human rights, yet they see that intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan has not brought democracy and that people are not being treated in a dignified way."

Ramadan said Muslims and Arabs pinned high hopes on a unified Europe to counterweight the US hegemony, but woke up to a European Union following in the footsteps of Washington.

"Europe is seen as having the potential to be different but instead follows the lead set by the US," he said.

"After [their opposition to] the war in Iraq, there had been hope that European governments might show another face. But the war in Lebanon showed that little can be expected from Europe and that it is not courageous enough to take a stand on the Arab side."

Europe's heavyweights were reluctant to call for an immediate ceasefire in the latest Israeli war on Lebanon, echoing a US stance.

Thirty-three days of massive Israeli air strikes and bombardment killed up 1, 200 people, nearly all civilians, and left the country's hard-won infrastructure in tatters.

"Muslim countries believe Israel was effectively given the green light to kill civilians in Lebanon for more than five weeks," said Ramadan.

Ramadan, who was named by Time magazine as one of 100 innovators of the 21st Century for his work on creating an independent European Islam, said the West has to be "consistence" should it want to turn a new leaf with the Muslim world.

"You cannot say on the one hand that you are promoting democracy when on the other you are dealing with dictatorships," in the Middle East, he said.

"Also this continuous discourse on the impossibility of integration is pushing Muslims to the margins of society. In Europe and the United States we still present Islam as something that is alien, as if we don't have shared values and cannot live together," he noted.