ACLU Asks Federal Court to Lift Visa Ban on Tariq Ramadan

Posted on March 15, 2006

The ACLU are asking the Court to lift a Visa ban on Tariq Ramadan.

Saying the government is violating the rights of Americans to hear constitutionally protected speech, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union today asked a federal court to prevent the Departments of State and Homeland Security from barring a prominent Swiss scholar from entering the country to speak to American audiences.

In legal papers filed today, the ACLU said the government wrongfully used a section of the Patriot Act known as the “ideological exclusion” provision to deny a nonimmigrant visa to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen who now teaches at the University of Oxford. As a result, Ramadan will be unable to speak at events organized by the ACLU’s clients, the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center.

“The government does not have the authority to exclude foreign scholars at the border simply because it disagrees with their political views,” said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer, who is lead counsel in this case. “To invest the government with that authority would be to invest it with sweeping power to manipulate and censor debate inside the United States.”

The ACLU and NYCLU are seeking a preliminary ruling that the government cannot bar entry to Ramadan based on the ideological exclusion provision, which authorizes the exclusion of foreigners who endorse terrorism.

However, as we have reported before, it isn’t as simple a situation as the ACLU claim in their press releases. Tariq Ramadan is Islamist royalty. His grandfather is Hasan al-Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, in all probability the most powerful Islamist institution of the twentieth century, in Egypt in 1928. The Muslim Brotherhood, has been referred to by some to be the father of virtually all modern-day Islamic terror groups. Tariq is a Swiss citizen because his father, Sa‘id Ramadan, also a leading Islamist, fled from Egypt in 1954 following a crackdown on the brotherhood.

Daniel Pipes gives us a list of reasons why Americans should thank DHS for keeping Tariq Ramadan out of America.

He has praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi. Mr. Turabi in turn called Mr. Ramadan the “future of Islam.”
Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris.
Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for Al-Qaeda activities, had “routine contacts” with Mr. Ramadan, according to a Spanish judge (Baltasar Garzón) in 1999.
Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris, stated in his 2001 trial that he had studied with Mr. Ramadan.
Along with nearly all Islamists, Mr. Ramadan has denied that there is “any certain proof” that Bin Laden was behind 9/11.
He publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as “interventions,” minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement.
And here are other reasons, dug up by Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer doing work for some of the 9/11 families, as reported in Le Parisien:
Intelligence agencies suspect that Mr. Ramadan (along with his brother Hani) coordinated a meeting at the Hôtel Penta in Geneva for Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy head of Al-Qaeda, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, now in a Minnesota prison.
Mr. Ramadan’s address appears in a register of Al Taqwa Bank, an organization the State Department accuses of supporting Islamist terrorism.

All of these sound like logical reasons to be cautious in allowing this man into America. However…

The ACLU said Ramadan is not being excluded because of any alleged support of terrorism, but because he is a vocal critic of American policy in the Middle East, and of what he calls the “deleterious effects of unregulated consumerism.”

“It would be absurd to suggest that this criticism – the same kind of criticism that appears every morning in the editorial pages of major American newspapers – amounts to approval of terrorism,” writes the ACLU in today’s motion.

Actually, what is absurd is that American newspapers do spout off this kind of crap, and as we have also learned, leak out classified information. Of course the ACLU also fights to protect this treasonous behavior too. But all of this is beside the point.

As I have said before…We have enough cliff-dwelling Left Wing professors of our own, we don’t need another terrorist enabler as a professor. We are still in the process of getting rid of our own Muslim professors that support Terrorist groups, we don’t have to import them!

Others: Junkyard Blog

» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, News, War On Terror

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Comments

2 Responses to “ACLU Asks Federal Court to Lift Visa Ban on Tariq Ramadan”

Draven32 on March 15th, 2006 4:11 pm

With his connections? If he came into the country, he should be given a one-way flight to Cuba.
gitardood on March 16th, 2006 8:37 am

I just don’t get it. We are AT WAR and yet treason is happening on a daily basis. What if we would’ve allowed Japanese or German sympathizers to teach our kids during WW2? Or if professors were trying to “justify” Pearl Harbour, saying we “made them do it” or “we just didn’t understand them”.

Gimmie a break…We’d be speaking German or Japanese if we had the kind of pansies back then that we do now in this country.

We cannot allow this sort of treason to continue if we want to have the upper hand in this “war on terror” that could last a long time.