ACLU Fights for Tariq Ramadan
Charles Johnson
Fri Oct 26, 2007 at 9:18 am PDT • Views: 225
The ACLU has never met an enemy of Western civilization that they didn’t like, and yesterday they went to court to try to force the government to admit Muslim Brotherhood stalking horse Tariq Ramadan: AFP: Civil liberties group challenges US visa ban for Muslim intellectual.
The Brotherhood is being absolutely relentless in their quest to get Tariq Ramadan into America. Each time their efforts are thwarted, they find another way to come at the problem.
NEW YORK (AFP) — The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged in federal court Thursday the US government’s refusal to grant a travel visa to Swiss-based Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan.
Ramadan, one of the world’s leading scholars on Islam, was forced to turn down a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame when the US government revoked his visa in late 2004 on the basis of the so-called “ideological exclusion” provision of the Patriot Act. Washington later dropped its claim, unable to prove that Ramadan had endorsed terrorism.
But it banned the academic in September 2006 on grounds he made donations between 1998 and 2002 to a Swiss-based charity that provides aid to Palestinians. The charity was included in a US list of terrorist organizations in 2003.
“The government is barring Professor Ramadan not because of his actions but because of his ideas,” ACLU’s National Security Project Director Jameel Jaffer told the court in New York.
“Ideological exclusion is a form of censorship and it should not be tolerated in a country committed to democratic values,” he added.
“The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” — Justice Robert H. Jackson.
Frank says: