NEW YORK (AFP) – Civil rights lawyers appealed in court Tuesday against what they said was the US government's ideologically based decision to deny a visa to a leading Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan. Attorney Jameel Jaffer, from the American Civil Liberties Union, told a three judge panel that the "government had "failed to identify ... legitimate and bona fide reasons for the exclusion." Jaffer, ACLU national security project director, argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York that excluding Ramadan, a research fellow at Oxford University, also threatened free speech in the United States. The appeal followed...