The University of South Jihad
Readers of The Weekly Standard may remember former University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian. Last week, a federal grand jury in Tampa charged him with being involved in a conspiracy to murder hundreds of Americans and Israelis in suicide bombings, as U.S. leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In several articles in these pages and on our website beginning in October 2001, David Tell chronicled al-Arian’s extensive terrorist connections: Among other things, al-Arian had founded a “think tank” at USF called the World Islam Studies Enterprise and installed Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, now Islamic Jihad’s leader, as its director. He raised money for Islamic Jihad through various front groups (in a 1995 handwritten letter al-Arian asked for financial contributions “so that operations such as these can continue”–referring to a recent bombing in Israel that had killed 22 civilians). And at a pep rally for the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, Sheikh Abdul Rahman, al-Arian shouted such niceties as: “Jihad is our path! Victory to Islam! Death to Israel!”
Al-Arian’s ardent defenders–Muslim-American and civil liberties groups, as well as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof–have insisted he’s just a harmless professor whose academic freedom was squashed because of his anti-Israel views. USF had given al-Arian a paid leave of absence–which he agreed to–when the school received death threats against him after he appeared on the “O’Reilly Factor” in September 2001. And USF president Judy Genshaft subsequently recommended that al-Arian be dismissed, arguing that his presence on campus was disruptive of the university’s mission. By and large, this was condemned by the civilized world as an attack on the man’s ideas, not his shady organizational ties.
DOJ’s detailed 120-page indictment should trouble critics of Genshaft, who has shown remarkable guts throughout the controversy. Stoic in the face of a year’s worth of transcontinental “academic freedom” smears, she now appears vindicated for attempting to dismiss al-Arian.
The indictment is also a vindication of the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorist legislation President Bush signed into law a month after the 9/11 attacks, for the act’s provisions are what finally made possible al-Arian’s arrest. For over a decade the FBI suspected al-Arian of being a terrorist operative, but Justice was unable to bring a case against him because of restrictions on the use of foreign intelligence information in domestic criminal cases–limitations ended by the Patriot Act. Far from inciting the McCarthyite witchhunt that paranoid groups across the political spectrum predicted, the Patriot Act appears to be working exactly as intended, making it easier for the government to break up terrorist cells in the United States.
Annals of MoDo
It’s hardly news anymore when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd gets her comeuppance. But it happened again last week after she trotted out a 1986 quote from President Bush to zing him as a hypocrite.
The quote came from a piece in the Washington Post about the Bushes by Walt Harrington, now a journalism professor at the University of Illinois. Bush told Harrington that being in the upper class didn’t confer special privilege in America. Dowd sneered in a January column that Bush has benefited from his class status and now doesn’t want others to be given a chance through things like affirmative action.
Calling Dowd on this is Harrington himself. Writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on February 18, he said Bush “wasn’t like any child of privilege I’d ever met. He was blunt and cocky but without any hint that he thought he was better than anyone else. I just plain liked the guy.” As it turned out, the Harringtons and the Bush family became friends. Bush, he wrote, “knew well what it was to be a marginal person, to see the world through a very different set of eyes, to recognize the arrogance of those to the manor born.”
Harrington said he used to be “quite a self-righteous twit in my youth.” But “coming to know the Presidents Bush and Bush changed me, helped me learn that no class–rich or poor–has cornered the market on decency or wisdom.” Though he said it pained him, Harrington didn’t vote for Bush in 2000, disagreeing with him on the environment, abortion, affirmative action, and the death penalty. “But I think he’s too decent a man to hold that against me.”
Lieberman’s Non-Flop
This magazine recently detailed Joe Lieberman’s rather obvious flip-flop on the question of affirmative action. In 1995, Lieberman spoke out forcefully and eloquently against racial preferences. But in 2000, as a candidate for vice president, and again this year, after President Bush announced his decision to weigh-in on the University of Michigan’s admissions procedures, Lieberman defended the most discriminatory of these practices–explicit bonus points for skin color.
This abrupt reversal raised a larger question: Is presidential candidate Lieberman willing to say anything to please the left-wing activists that comprise his party’s base?
Last week in Iowa, Lieberman answered that question with a decisive “no,” by delivering a strong speech on Iraq. That he did so in pacifist Iowa, in front of a hostile, antiwar crowd, is a further credit to him. The host, a local labor leader, opened the program with a harsh critique of the coming war. “What’s the hurry to go to war?” That harangue was followed by back-to-back arguments against removing Saddam from Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich and former Vermont governor Howard Dean, candidates vying to be the most antiwar in the field. John Edwards, who like Lieberman voted to authorize force in Iraq, defended his vote as one made on “principled belief,” and then ripped the administration for a lack of vision in international affairs. Bush policies will lead to a world “where generation after generation of people hate us.”
Lieberman, by contrast, told the audience that his support for removing Saddam dates back to the first Gulf War. “I worried then and throughout the ’90s that we were allowing Saddam to become a ticking time bomb. I’m not going to oppose a policy I’ve supported for 12 years just because the person who happens to be the commander in chief of the United States today is a Republican,” Lieberman told the crowd. He added: “I’m going to hope, ultimately, that people will draw a conclusion, even if they disagree with me on Iraq, that I’m going to be the kind of candidate and the type of president who will not try to please all the people all of the time.”
Nominations Requested
Applications are invited for the fifth annual Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award is named for longtime New York Post editor and columnist (and Weekly Standard contributor) Eric Breindel, who died in 1998 at the age of 42. It is presented each year to the columnist, editorialist, or reporter whose work best reflects the spirit of Breindel’s too-short career: love of country, concern for the preservation and integrity of democratic institutions, and resistance to the evils of totalitarianism.
For an application and further information about this year’s contest, which once again features a $10,000 award, please contact Germaine Febles, 212-843-8031 or [email protected]. Deadline for submissions is April 25. The recipient will be announced in June.
