Word: palestinians
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...double suicide bombing at Beit Lid Junction, Israel, killed 21 Israelis and was one of the bloodiest attacks ever by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.)--which the U.S. soon after designated as a terrorist organization. A few weeks later, according to U.S. court documents, Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian computer-science professor at the University of South Florida (U.S.F.) in Tampa, wrote a letter to an associate in Kuwait bragging that the Beit Lid carnage was "an example of what P.I.J. could do" and soliciting funds for the bombers' families. A year earlier, the records show, al-Arian faxed to Islamic...
...after a six-month trial in which the defense called no witnesses. "We didn't have to," says al-Arian attorney William Moffitt, "because we were convinced this was a First Amendment case. This whole prosecution was simply an effort to silence Dr. al-Arian because his outspoken pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views were a pain in the butt to the Bush Administration...
...retry him on the charges the jurors deadlocked on. But even if he emerges from jail, the trial's revelations about his stealth involvement with Islamic Jihad--after he claimed for years that he rejected the group--have all but wrecked his standing as a spokesman for mainstream Palestinian causes...
...began investigating al-Arian shortly after he came to U.S.F. in 1986 and started making speeches like one in 1988 calling for "death to Israel!" He fell under scrutiny in 1995, when Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, a Palestinian economist who had helped direct the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a Muslim think tank co-founded by al-Arian at U.S.F., turned up in Syria as head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian maintained that he hadn't known of Shallah's involvement in the terrorist group and kept building an image of himself as an "enlightened Islamist" who led interfaith projects...
Things changed after 9/11. When the Fox Network's Bill O'Reilly had al-Arian on his show and questioned him about the FBI probe, al-Arian condemned the 9/11 attacks but affirmed his support for the intifadeh, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation--hardly a statement marking him as a terrorist. But U.S.F. president Judy Genshaft, buckling under pressure from conservative trustees, eventually fired al-Arian despite his being tenured. Congress had just passed the USA Patriot Act expanding federal powers to investigate terrorism suspects, which Attorney General John Ashcroft seized on as a tool to nail al-Arian...