Well, last time Egypt expelled an Islamist and the US gave him refuge, he organized the first World Trade Center bombing. This, of course, does not impress the NYT which would like Washington to ignore the advice of"A senior European counterterrorism official who has investigated Mr. Ramadan said European intelligence services had never turned up proof of wrongdoing on his part. The official added, however, that he thought the United States was wise to keep him out because of what he referred to as the professor's"dangerous" ideas".

Last fall, also on television, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister, challenged Mr. Ramadan to prove he was a moderate by telling Muslim women to"take off their veils." Mr. Ramadan refused.

Mr. Sarkozy also challenged him to call for the abolition of the stoning of adulterous women, which is mandated by a strict reading of Islamic law. Mr. Ramadan called instead for a moratorium on stoning.

"That way, you start a dialogue," he said."I won't change any thinking in the Muslim world if I issue a blanket condemnation of stoning to please the French interior minister."

Those dangerous ideas include the refusal of Mr. Ramadan"to take an absolutist stance" against antisemitism and the stoning of women."Hani Ramadan lost his job in Swiss education after publishing an essay justifying the stoning of adulterous women".

The paper even buys into what"Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent European intellectual, promptly labeled Mr. Ramadan a champion of double talk and said he had written an"anti-Semitic text." Why? because Mr. Ramadan wrote that"if Muslim intellectuals, he wrote, were expected to denounce anti-Semitism and terrorism committed in the name of Islam - . . . why didn't Jewish intellectuals bear a similar responsibility to condemn"the repressive policies of the state of Israel?" Well, because there is a difference between a blanket denigration of an entire religious/ethnic community (Jews are"pigs and donkeys" whose religion demands drinking the blood of gentile children _see my article on blood libel or just the recent Arab publications in MEMRI: Search : antisemitism ) and criticizing the actions of a state.

For more on this subject, see Tariq Ramadan, the Chicago Tribune, and Me