"Once-barred Muslim scholar to speak
A Muslim scholar previously denied a visa and barred from speaking engagements in the United States is to speak this week at Harvard Law School. Adam Habib of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa is slated to speak Wednesday about ideological exclusion in an event cosponsored by the ACLU of Massachusetts. In January, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton signed orders enabling the reentry of Habib and Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University in England. The order was signed after American rights groups filed lawsuits on their behalf challenging the scholars’ exclusion. Habib has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and some US terrorism-related policies (AP)."
"A once-unwelcome scholar speaks in US; State Dept. lifts ban on his entry" by James F. Smith, Globe Staff | April 2, 2010
CAMBRIDGE — More than three years after he was barred from entering the United States, South African political science professor Adam Habib finally got to speak to audiences around Boston this week. And he seized the platform to call on President Obama to declare that “ideological exclusion is wrong.’’
In January, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton withdrew the ban on a visa for Habib, without explaining why. Several Boston groups, including the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, had brought a lawsuit in 2007 challenging the denial of visas to Habib, his wife, Fatima, and their two children. The case argued that Habib, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, was being excluded from the country on ideological grounds.
Addressing a small group at Harvard Law School on Wednesday, Habib did not sound like the terror-stained radical the Bush administration suggested he was in October 2006, when Department of Homeland Security officials turned him back at Kennedy Airport in New York....
With human rights violations becoming more transnational, civil rights defenders such as the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have to work together more closely against them, Habib said.
“When Iranian scholars are detained, all of us have to be heard. In Iran, in Zimbabwe, in Myanmar, unless there are global pressures and collective solidarity, those struggles will never be successful.’’
Sucking up to his oppressive hosts?
