Excerpt:
The Bush administration denied Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan a visa six years ago, forcing him to turn down a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit and fought successfully on his behalf. In January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revoked a ban, allowing the Swiss-born Ramadan and another Muslim scholar to visit the U.S. On his first trip back, Ramadan, now a professor at Oxford University, gave a keynote address this month at a fundraising dinner for the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He also sat down with the Chicago Tribune.
Q: Why do you think you were banned from the United States?
A: I gave money to many organizations and two were blacklisted in the United States. (The Bush administration) said you gave the money so you should reasonably have known that these organizations were connected to Hamas, or allegedly connected to Hamas. The problem for (the Bush administration) was that they made a mistake because I gave the money between 1998 and 2002, before these organizations were blacklisted in the States, while they were never blacklisted in Europe where I lived. This was all a pretext for keeping me outside (the U.S.). It was an ideological exclusion.