By Ronald Radosh The New York Sun | August 28, 2002

This article first appeared in the New York Sun on August 27, 2002.

This past week Judy Genshaft, the president of the University of South Florida, announced that she was immediately dismissing without pay Sami Al-Arian from his post as a professor of computer science. Since last year, when Mr. Al-Arian appeared on Fox TV's "O'Reilly Report" and it was disclosed that he had chanted "Death to Israel" at a political rally raising funds for Islamic Jihad, the professor had been relieved of his duties, but was still on the faculty and was receiving his salary.

Overnight, Mr. Al-Arian became a poster boy for the Left, which treated him as its first martyr, a victim of a new right-wing McCarthy type repression. He is a "nice man with a wining smile," one of his defenders argued. Mr. Al-Arian himself put it this way: "This is the USA. We have some very important rights, and we're not willing to give them up." One story referred to him as a "soft-spoken teacher and adviser who cares about his students; a community-spirited man who has worked to bring an understanding of Muslim culture to his Christian and Jewish neighbors; and an intellectual who advocates pluralism." It was a clever gambit to make it seem that the issue is the old one of the denial of academic freedom during times of crisis. He hardly appears to be the same man who can be seen on video shouting "Revolution until victory," and "Death to the Jews," as well as endorsing a permanent "Jihad" before an extremist Islamic group.

In reality, the defense of Mr. Al-Arian is not a revolt against political correctness, but an expression of it. The issue is not the man's political views — which are certainly both reprehensible and protected by the First Amendment — but his demonstrated support of and involvement with known terrorist front groups. The issue is similar to one our nation confronted during the McCarthy years, when Communists and their fellow travelers faced being dismissed from government jobs and university positions. The question raised back then was one we face again: How does a democratic society protect itself without destroying its own character and thereby end up emulating the totalitarianism it seeks to resist?

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet Union had within our nation a cadre of agents ready to act on its behalf if the Cold War heated up. It made sense, the liberal newspaper editor James Wechsler explained, to exclude these people from government jobs, while affirming their right to free speech since the groups to which they belonged were, in effect, battalions for the Soviet KGB. Today, Mr. Al-Arian shows the same kind of links to the terrorist international.

Mr. Al-Arian presided over a terrorist front. Speakers at its functions regularly condoned violence against Israel and Jews, raised funds for terrorist groups from their audience, and saw themselves as the American arm of the Islamic Jihad. Mr. Al-Arian sponsored a visa for Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, whom he hired to work at a USF institute, and whom he sought to hire at the university as a professor of Middle Eastern studies. This same Mr. Shallah would soon leave America for Syria, where it was announced he was the new secretary-general of the Islamic Jihad.

Of course, we could accept Mr. Al-Arian's claim that all this was purely accidental; that he never knew Abdullah Shallah had any connection with Islamic Jihad. This defense is similar to the denials made by Communists in the 1940's, that they never had any kind of connection with Soviet espionage, and were only being persecuted because of their unpopular ideas. We have known, since the 1995 release of the Venona decrypts, that American Communists were in fact heavily involved in Soviet espionage and that they used the supposedly independent American Communist Party as a conduit for KGB recruits.

As Stephen Schwartz, author of the forthcoming book, "The Two Faces of Islam," has written, American Communists who supported the Moscow purges, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the assassination of Leon Trotsky were loyal to the secret police of a foreign government, supported the Soviet Union's foreign policy unconditionally, and many of them infiltrated the highest levels of the American government on behalf of the Soviet espionage apparatus. Likewise, Mr. Al-Arian is, as Mr. Schwartz puts it, "a defender of Hamas, is loyal to a foreign terrorist organization, supports a policy inimical to the United States, and supports the terrorist work of organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad."

The FBI has said consistently that his now defunct USF Muslim organization was an Islamic Jihad front group. And like Communists who invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned by Congressional committees in the 1950s, Mr. Al-Arian invoked the Fifth scores of times rather than answer questions pertaining to his apparent fund-raising for terrorist groups. Until now, USF had helped make Mr. Al-Arian a martyr by arguing he was taken off campus purely to prevent violence, due to the death threats he received after his appearance on the O'Reilly show and subsequent tension on campus.

It was the wrong reason to use to fire him. Dismissing a professor because he has been threatened with violence could easily backfire, encouraging opponents of other professors to try and gain their dismissal by such tactics. The danger in such a case stems from outsiders making illegal threats, and the threatened faculty member deserves protection. Ms. Genshaft has finally indicated a more appropriate motivation for his dismissal action ‹ Mr. Al Arian's links to terrorist groups. As Norman Gross, former president of a Florida teacher's union, wrote in a letter to a local Florida newspaper, Mr. Al-Arian "is not guilty by association with terrorists; he is guilty in association with terrorists." As a man who fought in his capacity as a union leader for the rights of teachers, Mr. Gross wrote that Mr. Al-Arian's dismissal has to do with our nation's war on terrorism; to make him a martyr for academic freedom makes it all the more difficult to defend the real victims who have been denied academic freedom on campus. He concluded his letter: "Al-Arian must go!"

In the 1950s, well-meaning liberals who failed to address the actual Communist threat protected real Communists who were guilty of much more than simply expressing their ideas. This made matters all the worse for actual dissenters attempting to exercise and protect their civil liberties. Those few Communists who engaged in espionage — men like Alger Hiss — helped confuse treason and dissent, making it easier for demagogues like Joseph McCarthy to portray those who were genuine dissenters as Communist traitors.

In a new era of a serious war against terrorism and Islamic radicalism — a war as serious and dangerous as the old one against long gone totalitarian regimes — it is important that we not repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. Unless the terrorist threat emanating from Islamic radicalism is met, there will be no free society with civil liberties left to defend. It is precisely this understanding that led Ms. Genshaft to remove finally Mr. Al-Arian from his professorial duties, with the governor's support. She deserves our thanks.

-- Anonymous, August 28, 2002

Answers

Bubye, Al-Arian.

-- Anonymous, August 28, 2002