American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (11 page)

The series set off a huge controversy at USF. Islamic critics charged the
Tampa Tribune
with “persecuting” Muslims. Fechter was falsely accused of distorting the news. Nonetheless, two weeks after the
Tribune’
s reports, the university suspended its relationship with WISE.

Then five months later, on October 26, 1995, a bomb exploded in Malta that soon reverberated all over southern Florida. Dr. Fathi Shikaki, the secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was assassinated. His murder was almost certainly committed by Israel’s Mossad. One week later, Shikaki’s body was greeted at Damascus Airport by a full military honor guard. Standing directly beside the body, in his new position as secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was none other than Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, former adjunct professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of South Florida.

Shallah’s connections to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad ran right back to its origins in Egypt in the 1970s. Indeed, present at the creation were no fewer than three men who would come to be affiliated with the University of South Florida through WISE. At the beginning, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was an offshoot of the militant Islamic group the Muslim Brotherhood, based in Egypt.
¹⁸
Whereas the Brotherhood had focused on jihad against Egypt’s secular government, some Palestinian members wanted to direct their efforts toward the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
¹⁹
Among these original founders of the PIJ were Fathi Shikaki, Abdel Aziz Odeh, Bashir Nafi,
²⁰
and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah
²¹
—all, with the exception of Fathi Shikaki, later associated with ICP and WISE.

Shallah migrated to England in 1986,
²²
joining Palestinian Islamic Jihad activist Bashir Nafi,
²³
who had moved to London in 1983.
²⁴
Together, they organized communications between the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s leaders and operatives in the Middle East. Their primary contact within the Occupied Territories was Omar Shallah, Ramadan Shallah’s brother.
²⁵
At the same time Shallah and Nafi operated their London outpost,
²⁶
they were also associated with WISE and ICP.
²⁷
Nafi has been called a “leading ideologue” of the Islamic Jihad movement.
²⁸
Khalil Shikaki has said that Nafi was the person who recruited him to join WISE.

Although he became WISE’s director of research, Nafi was no ordinary scholar. While in England he wrote for Islamist publications in France and London, including
Falastin al-Muslimah,
the monthly magazine of Hamas,
al-Hilal ad-Dawli,
and
at-Taliyah al-Islamiyah.
Although one of the oldest members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Nafi was
not
considered as a successor to the murdered Fathi Shikaki, according to reports in the Jordanian newspaper
Al-Urdun.
In June 1996, Nafi was arrested by INS agents in Herndon, Virginia, outside the offices of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a nonprofit institute sponsored by the S.A.A.R. Foundation, a billion-dollar Saudi conglomerate. (S.A.A.R. also funded ICP and WISE.) Nafi, who was employed by IIIT at the time of his arrest, was charged with violating his visa, which stipulated that WISE would be his sole employer in the United States. He was deported.

Needless to say, the revelation that the new leader of one of the world’s most notorious terror organizations was also a University of South Florida faculty member caused a great deal of commotion in Tampa. To that point, the
Tampa Tribune
series and my “Jihad in America” documentary had been severely criticized. Sami al-Arian had claimed to know nothing about his protégé’s terrorist background. Yet as Carnot Nelson, a psychology professor, now argued, “What [Shallah’s departure] does is validate everything Steven Emerson has been saying.” Not all university officials agreed. “There may be a terrorist element to [the Islamic Jihad],” said Harry Bratton, university vice president, “but it is also an important cultural group in the Middle East.” Bratton went on to say that critics were making an invalid “assumption that because [Shallah] was elevated to head an organization that has a terrorist element…he has terrorism on his mind.”
²⁹

The university’s official response was to commission an investigation and report from William Reece Smith, a prominent Tampa attorney and former provost of the university. At a cost of nearly $20,000, Smith interviewed many people and wrote up a 98-page analysis that largely absolved the university of blame. Noting that WISE was involved in some legitimate scholarly activities, and that the university had neither the time nor the resources to investigate every organization with which it might affiliate, his criticism was muted: “I do find it unusual that committee members did not ask, out of curiosity if nothing else, some rather basic questions which would have identified the officers of WISE. There, I think, it failed to act as one might reasonably expect.”
³⁰

Elsewhere, the news of Shallah’s new position was not well received—especially among military officers at MacDill Air Force Base, near Tampa. On two previous occasions, Shallah had been invited to brief U.S. Central Command (Centcom) there.

The revelation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad activities in Tampa led to a federal investigation. FBI officials were soon scouring the records of the ICP, WISE, and its members. In November 1995, two Florida bank accounts totaling some $17,000 and belonging to Ramadan Abdullah Shallah were frozen under a Presidential order. On Monday, November 20, 1995, federal officials searched the campus offices and home of al-Arian under a warrant for evidence of perjury and immigration-related infractions. In an affidavit filed in support of the government’s warrant petition, the INS charged that on applying for citizenship in the United States, al-Arian had failed to list organizations to which he belonged prior to his arrival and during his residence in the United States. Although listing the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Community of Tampa, the IEEE (the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and the IEEE Computer Society, al-Arian had failed to mention either the ICP or WISE, even though he was a founding officer of both.
³¹
The affidavit further stated that al-Arian had placed “numerous” phone calls from his ICP office to the Iranian Interest Section (the equivalent of an embassy) in the United States and to the Sudanese Embassy—despite the fact that both nations are on the official State Department list of nations supporting international terrorism. They also found that al-Arian had made a series of calls to Siraj El-din Yousif, a Sudanese diplomatic operative in New York who was later implicated in and expelled for participating in the Day of Terror bombing plot in New York in 1993.

In executing the search warrants, federal authorities uncovered one of the largest collections of terrorist fund-raising and propaganda material ever seized in the United States. According to federal sources, both WISE and ICP had extensive financial and political ties with Islamic extremists worldwide. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman had been a guest speaker at one ICP conference.

In a follow-up affidavit, FBI Special Agent Barry Carmody reported the discovery of a particularly damning document: “Located and seized at the residence of Sami al-Arian on November 20, 1995, was a letter written by Sami al-Arian in which al-Arian is soliciting funds for the Islamic movement in Palestine…. This letter also appeals for support for the Jihad so that the people will not lose faith in Islam…[T]he Jihad has been declared an international terrorist organization by the Department of State.”
³²

The complete contents of this letter were not revealed until the letter was declassified in October 2000. Al-Arian’s letter had been written to a Kuwaiti citizen, soliciting funds on behalf of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
³³
In it, al-Arian describes an “operation” that needs to be emulated by the movement. It appears that the “operation” was the dual suicide bombings by Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists at the Beit Lid bus junction in Israel that resulted in the deaths of nineteen Israelis. Al-Arian also described the relations between the PIJ and Hamas as having improved: “The link with the brothers in Hamas is very good and making steady progress, and there are serious attempts at unification and permanent coordination.”
³⁴

By the late 1990s, a great deal of information about the ICP, WISE, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad had come to light. It was known that Tarik Hamdi, one of WISE’s board members, personally delivered a satellite telephone and battery pack to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in May 1998. The FBI had also seized correspondence between Ramadan Shallah and Khalil Shikaki showing that Shallah had served as a contact person for messages between the two Shikaki brothers prior to Fathi Shikaki’s assassination. One letter, for example, showed that Shallah was involved in the governing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad even while he was in Tampa and that he used Khalil Shikaki as a resource to further the education of one of the organization’s terrorist leaders. In the letter, Shallah relayed Fathi Shikaki’s request for assistance from Khalil to procure an academic recommendation for a student living in Damascus named Anwar Abdel Hadi Mohammad abu Taha. According to the June 1999 issue of the
Middle East Intelligence Bulletin,
Anwar Abu Taha is the “chief of [the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s] military wing.”

Despite all this evidence, the ICP and WISE leaders have faced few legal consequences. For a time, Mazen al-Najjar, the USF faculty member who ran day-to-day operations at WISE, was taken into custody. Al-Najjar was brought up on visa violations and immigration-fraud charges, including perpetrating a fictitious marriage to an American citizen on the sole grounds of obtaining permanent resident status in the United States. In an immigration hearing held in July 1996, INS Special Agent William West testified that al-Najjar was a “mid-level operative” in both the ICP and WISE, which he characterized as “front groups”
³⁵
for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the United States. Evidence against Mazen al-Najjar included a number of documents in his possession: Islamic Jihad fax communiqués announcing the “martyrdom” of a battalion leader in 1992 and claiming credit for an attack on Israelis; detailed biographies of Hizballah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad leaders; and an ICP draft charter containing incendiary provisions calling for the destruction of Israel and aggressive confrontation with the West.

Despite the fact that al-Najjar had been ordered deported based on visa violations and was incarcerated by the INS pursuant to, and pending the execution of, his deportation, on October 27, 2000, Immigration Judge Kevin McHugh ordered al-Najjar released on bond unless the government provided classified information to the Court that would warrant the continued detention of al-Najjar. On December 6, 2000, McHugh ordered al-Najjar released on the grounds that the government’s classification of the evidence against al-Najjar had not afforded him the opportunity to defend himself against the charges and had thus violated his due process rights under the Constitution. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has since upheld the orders of deportation against both al-Najjar and his wife, and on November 24, 2001, al-Najjar was arrested yet again.

*  *  *

On September 26, 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Sami al-Arian appeared on Fox TV’s
The O’Reilly Factor,
where host Bill O’Reilly questioned him in detail about the relation between WISE and the Islamic Jihad. When al-Arian responded evasively, O’Reilly read from the transcript of several ICP rallies prior to 1995 in which al-Arian had trumpeted “Death to Israel” and its allies. Al-Arian, not surprisingly, tried to shift the subject but O’Reilly was persistent and tenacious. After this appearance, the University of South Florida was bombarded with hostile phone calls and e-mails. Al-Arian was put on indefinite paid administrative leave, his second such stint (the first coming after the FBI’s 1995 search of al-Arian’s home and office). More exposure came in the form of a memorable
Dateline
segment on NBC, which comprehensively explored al-Arian’s activities.

As the
St. Petersburg Times
wrote in an apologetic editorial on November 1, 2001, “He [Al-Arian] has been playing his American hosts for fools for years, presenting a benign face to the general public while spewing the most hateful sort of venom in the company of fellow Islamic extremists…. But he’ll never again getaway with the pretense that his ugly support for terrorism has been misunderstood.”
³⁶

That Sami al-Arian continues to draw his salary as a tenured professor is a tribute to the strength of academic freedoms in this country. After all, he has never been charged with any crime, much less convicted of one. With liberties like these, why wouldn’t the international jihad movement want to settle here?