Today’s Washington Post has a nice piece following-up on the case of Sami al-Arian, the former tenured University of South Florida professor of computer science and engineering fired and indicted in the wake of 9/11 for his opposition to Bush Administration policy in the Middle East. As Justin Park reported in our September/October issue, Dr. al-Arian was arrested over two years ago on a number of charges alleging that his activism in opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine had aided Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. His arrest, for voicing in opinions in public and not in his capacity as a professor or representative of the university, has given academics across the country and political spectrum pause.

After an investigation and prosecution costing US and Tampa taxpayers over $30 million, jurors found al-Arian not-guilty on 17 charges. This doesn’t change the fact that al-Arian, whose work as a teacher has twice been recognized for excellence, remains out of a job and facing possible deportation. And he is still incarcerated while federal prosecutors decide whether to retry him on several charges on which the jury deadlocked. The federal government’s failure to prove that Dr. al-Arian and his co-defendants were, in John Ashcroft’s words, “responsible for the murders of dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of people,” does not, unfortunately, mean an end to his legal troubles.

Sadly, Dr. al-Arian’s headaches began when he made the mistake of appearing on the O’Reilly Factor. And, while I would generally support legislation making an appearance on O’Reilly’s freakshow punishable by some kind of sanction, we at Clamor hope that Dr. al-Arian’s case is speedily and fairly resolved.

Keith McCrea
Reviews Editor

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 3:38 pm by Keith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.