http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=126770The Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations will host the first U.S. appearance of Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood whose Bush administration ban for alleged terrorist ties recently was lifted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
CAIR, an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, is regarded by U.S. counter-terrorism officials as a front group for the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of most of the major Islamic terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Hamas.
Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is scheduled to speak at CAIR-Chicago's sixth annual banquet April 10. In a promo for the event, first reported by the AtlasShrugs blog, CAIR called his appearance a "milestone for the American Muslim community since he was banned from visiting the United States almost six years ago."
As WND has reported, CAIR is suing a father-and-son team that conducted an undercover probe that came up with 12,000 pages of internal documents confirming the Islamic organization's role as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in the U.S.
Get "Muslim Mafia," the book that exposed CAIR from the inside out, autographed, from WND's Superstore!
Citing ties to terrorism, including financial contributions to Hamas, the Bush administration revoked Ramadan's visa in 2004 when he was offered a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. He currently is a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University.
Civil rights activists at the time accused the Bush administration of using the 9/11-inspired Patriot Act to silence foreign scholars critical of its policies.
Ramadan issued a statement when Clinton lifted the ban in January.
"The decision brings to an end a dark period in American politics that saw security considerations invoked to block critical debate through a policy of exclusion and baseless allegation," Ramadan said.
Ramadan's maternal grandfather, Hasan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. His father, Said Ramadan, was an Islamist leader who fled Egypt after a crackdown on the Brotherhood and ended up in Geneva in 1958. Tariq Ramadan was born in the Swiss capital in 1962.
In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Ramadan's work visa under a law that denies entry to aliens who have used a "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity."
The DHS did not release its evidence on Ramadan, but Middle East scholar and anti-terrorism specialist Daniel Pipes listed at the time a number of likely reasons for him to be denied entry.
Ramadan had been banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of links with an Algerian Islamist who initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris. He also had contacts with Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for al-Qaida activities, and Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris.
Ramadan also has denied that there was "any certain proof" Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11 and praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi, who in turn called Ramadan the "future of Islam."
Pipes said Ramadan publicly referred to the attacks of 9/11, Bali and Madrid as "interventions," minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement.
Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer who worked for some of the 9/11 families, said Ramadan, along with his brother Hani, coordinated a meeting in Geneva for Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy head of al-Qaida, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik convicted in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
Brisard discovered Ramadan's address appears in a register of Al Taqwa Bank, an organization the State Department accuses of supporting terrorism.
Pipes cited a report by Olivier Guitta that bin Laden studied with Tariq Ramadan's father in Geneva, suggesting Tariq and the al-Qaida founder might have known each other.
Topic: 'Muslim Mafia' hosts banned Islamist (Read 2426 times)