Free Republic

The Barack Obama administration has decided to lift a ban preventing Muslim Scholar Professor Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States. Ramadan, an Egyptian currently living in Switzerland, is a leading member of Europe’s Muslim Brotherhood branch and the grandson of the movement’s founder Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization for Hamas and some of the groups that recently merged into al-Qaeda, including Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Ramadan was invited to teach at the University of Notre Dame in 2004 but the George W. Bush administration revoked his visa, citing a statute that applies to...

A prominent Muslim scholar banned from the United States for six years returned Wednesday for visits to four cities... "In the name of your fear or mistrust of Muslim-majority countries, you may end up betraying your own values," Tariq Ramadan ... Ramadan said he was happy to be in the U.S. ...to speak on a panel Thursday at The Cooper Union college. "My name has been cleared," he said. The 47-year-old professor at Oxford University in England was permitted to return to the United States after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in January signed orders enabling re-entry for him...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lifted a U.S. ban on a planned visit by a leading European Muslim critic of the Iraq war, in a move rights groups hailed as a victory for civil liberties. Clinton signed orders which ended the ban on Professor Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University, who was barred due to alleged terrorism ties which he denies, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said on Wednesday.

The U.S. government is increasingly using secret evidence allowed under new anti-terrorism laws to prevent certain critics from entering the United States, according to a group of civil rights and academic organizations. The group, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, went to court Tuesday in Boston seeking to force the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to grant an entry visa to a Muslim academic who they said was barred from the United States because of his criticism of American foreign policy. ... The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, seeks to force the government to issue...