Excerpt:
A capacity crowd of 860 students, professionals, hijab-clad women, and others filled Cooper Union's Great Hall on Thursday, April 8, to hear Tariq Ramadan deliver his first public address in the U.S. since the Bush administration revoked his visa in 2004. The controversial Swiss Muslim, who teaches Islamic history at Oxford University, was banned for his 2002 donation to a Muslim charity with links to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas -- a move that cost him an endowed chair at the University of Notre Dame. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally intervened to allow Ramadan to enter the country.
Cooper Union President George Campbell's voice swelled with pride when, in introducing Ramadan, he boasted that his college had earned a reputation of hosting countless "radical campaigners of every sort" who were described in their day "as the most dangerous men and women in America." Campbell, the ACLU, the PEN American Center, and the other sponsoring organizations portrayed the event, "Secularism, Islam and Democracy," as a celebration of free speech.
Ramadan has gained a reputation as an exemplar of the art of "double speech": making statements that can be interpreted favorably by both leftist secularists and Islamists. This sleight-of-hand has earned him admirers among the European and American Left, who have called him a leader of "moderate" Islam and even a "Muslim Martin Luther." In a damning 28,000-word article in The New Republic, writer Paul Berman debunked these claims, demonstrating that Ramadan is the intellectual heir of his Egyptian grandfather Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization whose ideology inspired the formation of Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hizb ut Tahrir, and numerous other terrorist organizations.