As the United States marches toward Baghdad and braces for terrorist reprisals back home, Attorney General John Ashcroft may see in America’s orange-alert fears and us-against-them attitude a target of opportunity he cannot resist. The man who pushed the USA PATRIOT Act through a terrified Congress in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, may be planning a new assault on civil liberties in the wake of the war on Iraq.
In February, the Center for Public Integrity uncovered a confidential Justice Department draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. The legislation picks up where the PATRIOT Act left off — more wiretaps and secret searches, government access to credit reports and other personal records, a database of DNA samples, and provisions allowing the attorney general to revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone who provides assistance to a group the government considers a “terrorist” organization.
The draft drew a barrage of criticism from across the political spectrum. The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights called it a “Department of Justice wish list” that would “endanger core civil liberties,” while William Safire denounced it as both an “assault” and an “abomination.”
Although the 120-page draft had the detailed look of a proposal ready for congressional consideration, the Justice Department quickly downplayed it as merely the brainstorming of low-level staff. When pressed about the proposed security measure at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, Ashcroft devolved into an odd exploration of the self-referential passive voice: There was nothing to discuss with the Senate, the attorney general said, because “no final discussion has been made with the attorney general.”
But that was early March — before U.S. armed forces moved into Iraq, before intelligence officials declared additional terrorist attacks a “near certainty,” before a recent round of court decisions signaled increased judicial acceptance of the administration’s war on terror, and before a smattering of news reports showed signs that Americans may be adopting for themselves the with-us-or-against-us approach the administration has taken with foreign countries and internal dissenters alike.
It is a target-rich environment for Ashcroft now, and civil libertarians fear that he may be ready to fire soon. Last week, a remarkable alliance of more than 65 advocacy groups — ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP to the American Conservative Union and the Gun Owners of America — took the unusual step of writing to Congress to oppose legislation that has not yet been introduced. The theory: If they wait until the moment of crisis when Ashcroft unveils what they’re calling PATRIOT Act II, it will already be too late.
“Last time around, the attorney general announced that he was sending up a bill and that he expected Congress to enact it within three days,” the ACLU’s Timothy Edgar said of Ashcroft’s post-9/11 push for the first PATRIOT Act in an interview with Salon. “They ended up taking six weeks, but they still didn’t have a single hearing, and members were unable to obtain a complete text of the legislation even after they voted on it.”
Edgar said he hopes the groups’ preemptive strike will put Congress on notice of the “broad and deep concern” about PATRIOT II, and that Congress will have the courage to question the need for the new law enforcement powers in it. But in the climate of intolerance, intimidation and fear now swirling around the war on terror, he also knows that this may be wishful thinking.
The drumbeat began just days after Sept. 11, when George W. Bush told the nations of the world: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” It grew louder — and closer to home — when Ari Fleischer warned that “all Americans” should “watch what they say,” and then again when Attorney General Ashcroft said that those who complained of lost liberties during the war on terror “aid terrorists” by giving “ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.”
As Osama bin Laden slipped away and the war on terror slid into the war on Iraq, the president began to beat the drum so persistently that it was hard to hear anything else. He dismissed worldwide antiwar protests as something akin to “focus groups,” he refused to acknowledge that the leaders of other nations honestly disagreed with him about the best way to disarm Iraq, and he signaled contempt for a reporter who asked about the costs — both financial and human — of the war he seemed so determined to fight. As if serving as a poster boy for political intolerance wasn’t enough, Bush even went so far as to hint that American citizens might take it upon themselves to punish immigrants from countries that failed to fall in line with his plan to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. As Paul Krugman reported in the New York Times, when Bush was asked whether the United States would retaliate against Mexico for failing to support the drive for war, he said that the U.S. government probably wouldn’t, then volunteered that there was already a “backlash against the French, not stirred up by anyone except the people.”
In Washington and beyond, the president’s supporters have heard the drums and begun to dance to the tune. When Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle expressed sadness that Bush’s failure to find a diplomatic solution was finally leading to war, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Daschle had come “mighty close” to giving “comfort” to the enemy. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, more bluntly told the South Dakota Democrat to shut his mouth. “Fermez la bouche, Monsieur Daschle!” he snapped, equating Daschle’s criticism with France’s efforts to block a war resolution in the United Nations. When an attorney named Stephen Downs wore an antiwar T-shirt to a suburban New York mall, the mall’s owners had him arrested. And when a 16-year-old kid named Felix Fanaselle failed to stand when a flag-waving Lee Greenwood song blasted over the loudspeakers at a Houston rodeo, he was spat upon, assaulted and told to “go back to Iraq.” Never mind that Fanaselle is an American citizen of Italian and Mexican descent — you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.
That with-us-or-against-us message may be starting to take root in the entertainment industry as well. According to Matt Drudge, CBS warned musicians not to speak out against the war during the Grammy Awards last month. Last week, radio and concert giant Clear Channel barred protest groups from distributing literature at an Ani DiFranco concert in New Jersey — and threatened to pull the plug on DiFranco or anyone else who made antiwar comments from the stage. Sean Penn has filed suit against director Steven Bing, claiming that he lost a role for speaking out against the war. And Martin Sheen, whose real-life politics put him to the left of the president he plays on TV, says that NBC executives have expressed their discomfort about his public antiwar stand. A story on the Oscars in the New York Times this week hinted at the possibility that outspoken war critics may find themselves blacklisted in Hollywood.
Tamara Saviano learned something about that this month. A producer for the Great American Country music video channel, Saviano was flipping through her personal e-mail account at home one night when she came across a message from Charlie “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” Daniels. It was an open letter to Hollywood — all of those “pitiful, hypocritical, idiotic, spoiled mugwumps” who had raised their voices against the impending war on Iraq. Echoing the words of the president, Daniels argued that “the war against Saddam Hussein is the war on terrorism,” that America is in “imminent danger,” that “you’re either for her or against her” and that there is “no middle ground.”
Saviano responded — again, on her private e-mail account — with a message in which she called Daniels’ screed “anti-American.” Daniels’ publicist complained to GAC, and the next morning Saviano was fired.
“I’m a little too young to remember McCarthyism, but I’ve got the feeling that it might be happening again,” Saviano told Salon. “I wonder where it came from, this idea that anybody who wants to question this administration or debate things publicly is labeled unpatriotic?”
Steven Shapiro is a spokesman for GAC’s parent company, Jones Media Networks. Saviano wasn’t fired for expressing her political views, he said, but rather for suggesting a boycott of Charlie Daniels’ music and concerts while failing to make it sufficiently clear that she wasn’t speaking for GAC.
Jones Media Networks also owns a number of country music radio stations. Did on-air personalities at any of those stations join in the nationwide calls to boycott the Dixie Chicks after one of the Chicks told a London concert crowd that they were “ashamed” of President Bush? “That’s a good question,” Shapiro said. He said he’d look into it and call back when he knew more. He never did.
It is easy to write off these isolated incidents as blips on the radar of war — the misguided patriotism of random rednecks or the private-citizen equivalents of the House Republicans’ efforts to obliterate all things French from their gastronomical vocabulary. The victims survive and get on with their lives. The mall owner eventually dropped the charges against Stephen Downs, Felix Fanaselle wasn’t seriously injured in the rumble at the rodeo, and although Tamara Saviano figures she’ll always be a “pariah” in Nashville, she’s already at work on a new project publishing the written works of American roots artists. Someday soon, the world may even be safe for French fries again.
But what will be lost in the meantime? Will the climate of fear and intimidation that gives rise to the isolated incidents of intolerance also pave the way for more widespread and long-lasting limitations on civil liberties?
It already has.
As war began last week, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights issued a new report on the changes in law and government policy since Sept. 11. The report, a six-month follow-up to one the committee released on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, documents the ongoing erosion of “basic human rights protections in the United States, including fundamental guarantees central to our constitutional system.”
Any such report must begin with the USA PATRIOT Act itself, which Congress adopted and Bush signed less than two months after Sept. 11. The act handed sweeping new powers to law enforcement, the military and U.S. intelligence agencies, and it blurred the traditionally clear lines that divided them. Among other things, it granted federal law enforcement officers broad authority to use wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance; it expanded the circumstances under which the FBI could conduct searches under the forgiving rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rather than under the stricter tests of the Fourth Amendment; and it gave the president the power to confiscate property of those believed to be attacking the United States.
Scattered voices of dissent raised concerns that these new powers might be abused. A year and a half later, it is hard to know whether the critics were right. By and large, the Justice Department has refused to provide Congress with information about its use of the PATRIOT Act tools. What is clear, however, is that Justice Department officials and FBI agents have dramatically increased their use of secret searches and other clandestine techniques since the PATRIOT Act was passed.
The Washington Post reported Monday that Ashcroft has authorized more than 170 secret searches and/or wiretaps — more than three times the total authorized over the past 23 years by all other attorneys general combined. Meanwhile, the Post reported, FBI field offices have issued scores of so-called national security letters, a PATRIOT Act tool that requires businesses to provide the FBI with information about an individual’s finances, telephone calls, e-mail messages and the like — all without a warrant and all without prior court approval.
A few weeks after he signed the PATRIOT Act, Bush took matters a step further when he signed an executive order requiring that noncitizens suspected of participating in or supporting acts of terrorism be detained by the military and tried by military tribunals rather than in federal courts. At about the same time, the Justice Department took the position that it was entitled to eavesdrop on the conversations between inmates and their lawyers in order to protect against future acts of terrorism.
Of course, not all civil liberties received such cavalier treatment. Although the PATRIOT Act allows the FBI to obtain records showing what books you purchased at the local bookstore or checked out from the library — a suspect’s reading habits might suggest an unsettling interest in the architecture of tall buildings — Ashcroft has insisted that the FBI cannot review the records of gun-purchase background checks in the course of a terror investigation.
As the initial sense of panic cooled in the months after Sept. 11, federal courts began to stand up against some of the incursions on the civil liberties of terror-related suspects. Georgetown University law professor David Cole initially saw that as a hopeful sign; in an article he wrote for the Nation last summer, he suggested that the shock of 9/11 had “given way to a renewed interest for the rule of law.”
It didn’t last. This week, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case in which the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Justice Department’s use of wiretaps and other forms of surveillance authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in domestic criminal prosecutions.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that more than 600 detainees in U.S. military custody at Guantánamo Bay have no right to challenge their confinement in U.S. courts. So long as the detainees are noncitizens who were captured outside the United States during some sort of military operation and are now being held outside the United States, the courts of the United States “are not open to them.” Although the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base where the detainees are being held is inarguably controlled by the U.S. military, the court held that it was outside the reach of the federal courts because the United States merely leases the land from Cuba.
In the open-ended war on terror — with its infinitely flexible definitions of “enemy” and “field of battle” — the decision puts incredible power in the hands of the U.S military. Under the ruling, U.S. Special Forces could secretly kidnap, say, a British editorial writer who opposes the war on Iraq. And so long as they took him to someplace like Guantánamo — rather than to a military prison in the United States itself — they could keep him there forever if they wished. A U.S. court could do absolutely nothing about it.
Cole finds the decision shocking — and yet not. “If you look at history,” he says, “courts in times of crisis defer to the executive.” Although Cole says such wartime decisions frequently include “rules” that prevent abuses of civil liberties once the war is over, the potentially unending nature of the war on terror may undercut any such protections.
And in the meantime, allowing the administration to have its way now may embolden Ashcroft and others to seek new tools for the war on terror — even if those tools come at the expense of civil liberties that would otherwise be held sacrosanct.
Such may be the case with the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. Like the PATRIOT Act, PATRIOT II is a collection of provisions that touch upon virtually every aspect of law enforcement in the United States and abroad. Among other things, it would:
Cancel judicial consent decrees that prevent local police departments from spying on civil rights groups and other organizations that might once have been deemed subversive.
Require anyone suspected of participating in terrorist activities and any noncitizens suspected of supporting “terrorist” groups to submit a DNA sample for inclusion in a “Terrorist Identification Database.”
Allow the attorney general to revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone who provides assistance to any group the government considers to be a “terrorist” organization. Once the individual’s citizenship is revoked, the attorney general would then be free to deport him — or to hold him indefinitely in government custody.
Although PATRIOT Act I and many of the other more publicized efforts in the war on terror have focused on the rights of foreigners and of aliens living in the United States, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act aims much more squarely — and broadly — at the rights of U.S. citizens. Cole and others believe that this shift of focus may finally cause Congress to put on the brakes. Indeed, when reliable administration supporters like Bill O’Reilly and the American Conservative Union raise serious concerns about a proposal, as they have with PATRIOT Act II, there may be hope that Justice Department officials will exercise some restraint in what they propose, or at least that Congress will be emboldened to ask hard questions before giving in.
There have been some civil liberties victories in recent months, particularly where the executive branch has reached for powers that would intrude on the privacy rights of individual Americans. Ashcroft last year asked Congress for authority to launch Operation TIPS — a program that would have turned the nation’s letter carriers and meter-readers into junior spies — but Congress turned him down.
Earlier this month, the Senate Commerce Committee approved a measure that will require Tom Ridge to report to Congress on the civil-liberties impacts of CAPS II, a government computer program designed to assign terrorist risk levels to everyone who boards a commercial airliner.
And last month, Congress placed a hold on any funding for the Total Information Awareness program, a Defense Department plan to build a massive database on U.S. citizens based on everything from their credit card statements and medical records to the words they type into Internet search engines. Perhaps members of Congress found the privacy intrusions too much to stomach, or maybe they just couldn’t believe that the administration was really suggesting that the Defense Department’s John Poindexter — the former Reagan National Security Advisor who lied to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair — should actually be the man who is trusted with the private information of every American citizen. Either way, they found the temerity to say no to the program.
But with the troops on the battlefield in Iraq and the fear of terrorist reprisals back home, it is hard to believe Congress will hold off the administration forever. If U.S. soldiers are killed in substantial numbers or if terrorists strike at U.S. targets, members of Congress will feel the need to stand with the troops, with the president, and with “us” instead of “them.” That may mean standing with John Ashcroft as well.
“The real danger to our liberty comes from politicians wanting to look like they are doing something in a time of crisis,” said the ACLU’s Edgar. “Unfortunately, it’s inevitable that there will be politicians, including politicians in the Justice Department, who aren’t really looking to make us safer but to take advantage of the situation.”
In 2003, hip-hop is more tolerable to the masses than it has ever been. These days, rappers are often better known than contemporary rock stars — even emcees not named Eminem. Seeing rappers doing commercials for major consumer products still gives pioneering hip-hop journalist and “media assassin” Harry Allen pause. “I’m one of those people that, to this day, when I hear hip-hop in a commercial, I’ll write down the name of the commercial and the product, just as a form of recording it,” Allen says. “I remember very clearly when you didn’t hear that.”
White kids have jumped on hip-hop the same way that their parents and grandparents did with Little Richard. But there are still curmudgeons, just as there were in the days of early rock ‘n’ roll. The obvious example has been Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly, rap’s most visible critic over the past six months. His first attack on the genre came against Pepsi’s choice of rapper Ludacris as its spokesman. O’Reilly and his viewers managed to get the spots pulled, ostensibly over Luda’s foul language. Later, O’Reilly attacked Jay-Z when the rapper was named Principal for a Day at schools during his latest tour. Both actions were made under the auspices of protecting “morality,” and that is certainly O’Reilly’s prerogative. But when Pepsi chose Ozzy Osbourne — full-time legend, shock-rocker emeritus, and current winner of the Cleaver/Huxtable TV Dad of the Year Award — O’Reilly was notably silent.
Russell Simmons, CEO of Island Def Jam Records and head of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, duly noticed that silence. Simmons considers Pepsi’s choice of Osbourne as a spokesman, mere months after dropping Ludacris, to be hypocritical. In a statement issued Feb. 5, Simmons called for a boycott of Pepsi by “all artists and supporters of hip-hop culture.” The boycott will continue, he says, until Pepsi apologizes to Ludacris, donates $5 million to the emcee’s charitable foundation and returns his commercials to the air.
Framing this initiative in the context of “the hip-hop community” is necessary for Simmons to further the agenda of his group — and his record label, which boasts Ludacris on its roster — but it also ignores the real issue. Yes, Ludacris is a rapper, but O’Reilly would have protested his ads just as vehemently if he were an R&B singer. (Think you’ll be hearing R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” in a commercial anytime soon?) The reason Osbourne’s ads were tolerable and Luda’s were not has nothing to do with musical form and everything to do with race. Simply put, Ozzy’s white and Ludacris is black, and that makes the former more tolerable — yes, even now — than the latter. By not looking at this in terms of race, Simmons can make his point without alienating the millions of white kids that keep his label afloat or offending the white power brokers with whom he hobnobs at cocktail parties. But it lets O’Reilly and his followers off the hook.
It’s clearly silly for anyone to think that Ozzy Osbourne, the self-described “prince of fucking darkness,” is of higher moral fiber than Ludacris. Osbourne made his name with Black Sabbath, crafting some of heavy metal’s most disturbing (and, yes, brilliant) records, where the only thing darker than Geezer Butler’s bass lines were the songs. Much of the hype surrounding Ozzy’s lyrics has been overblown, but his embrace of satanic imagery is not exactly the kind of thing that makes the Fox News crowd feel warm and fuzzy. Consider this stanza from 1970′s “Black Sabbath”:
Now I have you with me under my pow’r
Our love grows stronger now with ev’ry hour
Look into my eyes, you’ll see who I am
My name is Lucifer, please take my hand.
On paper, such a line seems no different from anything in “Sympathy for the Devil,” but Ozzy’s lyrics never had Mick Jagger’s allegorical smirk. Where the Stones chose “Sympathy” to deliver an anarchic social message, Sabbath seemed more concerned with startling listeners with their loose rhythm section and Ozzy’s spooky lyrics (although “War Pigs,” from the album “Paranoid,” is a fine moment of political commentary). What always made Ozzy an easy target was that his work — pre- and post-Sabbath — never had a sense of humor that might have dulled the connotations of his lyrics.
By contrast, Ludacris is basically a barrel of laughs, clearly not meant to be taken seriously. His cartoonish, larger-than-life image has elicited chuckles since he was the DJ on WHTA-FM’s evening show in Atlanta. Rather than the diaries of a gangster, Luda’s albums sound more like the confessions of a class clown. Titles like “Move Bitch” and “Stick ‘em Up” seem to affirm O’Reilly’s gripes, but both of those songs — and countless others — are fundamentally, well, ludicrous. Yes, gunplay is mentioned, but never in a way that seems serious. To say Ludacris represents a threat because he talks about guns is like saying Mini-Me is a violent thug because he threatens to beat people up.
When you get right down to it, the current public personas of Ludacris and Osbourne are remarkably similar. Thanks to MTV, Osbourne has gone from being the Prince of Darkness to a lovable dad, a benign and harmless old coot who wouldn’t harm anything except a carton of Marlboros. In his own MTV appearances, Ludacris is one of the rare rappers who comes off as a smiling, happy presence.
In reality, it’s almost always a waste of time to discuss “morality,” but O’Reilly made the argument necessary by his anti-rap campaign. If he’s on a crusade to purify the spokespeople that corporations hire for commercials, his voice should have come through loud and clear the day after Super Sunday, when the Osbourne Pepsi spots debuted. O’Reilly, of course, claims he only takes up a charge at the behest of his viewers. Those same viewers who besieged him with e-mails about Ludacris’ “vulgar” music must not have done the same with Ozzy, even though I suspect more of them own copies of “Blizzard of Oz” than “Word of Mowf.” That’s the double standard at work.
But if the double standard is on the basis of race, not age or genre, how successful can Simmons’ campaign against Pepsi ever be? The money in hip-hop remains largely in the hands of white people, and those same white teenagers that buy up Def Jam releases from Ja Rule, Jay-Z and others also helped make “The Osbournes” a phenomenon. Can Simmons persuade those white suburban kids to stop drinking Pepsi? Can he make them understand the racial hypocrisy at work here? Probably not, and maybe that’s not his job. It’s understandable that Simmons avoided any direct mention of race in his call for a boycott. But racism, or at least racial anxiety, is clearly what lies beneath the whole Ludacris-Ozzy affair.
If Simmons can generate enough of a stink to make the right people take notice, Ozzy will be off the air before any of us can say “Iron Man.” But if Pepsi does that, it’ll be because its corporate honchos decide the metal god’s continued presence might damage the bottom line. Like most other things in America, this dispute comes down to money. One thing Bill O’Reilly and Russell Simmons seem to share, at least in their public postures, is the expectation that big corporations do things for reasons of morality or integrity. (In fact, I’m sure they both know better.)
Pepsi admakers chose Ludacris because they felt he would help them sell sodas, and that’s the same reason they later chose Ozzy. They don’t care who buys the soda — black, white, brown, yellow or green — as long as the can in their hand is blue instead of red. So as long as the Osbourne ads have high Q ratings and Pepsi flies off the shelf, we’ll be left with the most disturbing image of Ozzy’s entire career: getting cuddly with Florence Henderson. Can we talk about something else now?
The saga of Sami Al-Arian, the tenured University of South Florida professor accused of having terrorist ties, took another surprising turn Wednesday when the university’s president, Judy Genshaft, announced that the university would ask a circuit court to decide if the school could fire him. The university also went on record for the first time in insisting that Al-Arian’s alleged terrorist ties, along with an anti-Israel remark he made at a pro-Palestinian conference 14 years ago, made him unfit to teach at USF.
“I believe that Dr. Al-Arian has abused his position at the university and is using academic freedom as a shield to cover improper activities,” said Genshaft at a press conference.
Genshaft’s action fell short of the expected move to fire Al-Arian outright, but it raises new questions. One legal scholar says USF’s request that a state court bless its decision to fire somebody — in advance — is unprecedented. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says David Cole, professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. Cole doubts the Florida court will accept USF’s invitation to become involved in the controversy.
One USF faculty member critical of the move suggests USF’s strategy highlights the weakness of the school’s case against the tenured computer-science professor. “This is just another stalling technique to keep him in limbo,” says English professor Mary Jane Tyson, recent president of the university’s faculty senate. “They want somebody else to tell them what to do. But eventually it’ll end up in Al-Arian’s favor. The only question is how long it will drag on.”
Genshaft did not field questions from reporters on Wednesday and calls to USF’s media relations office were not returned. Al-Arian’s attorney, Robert McKee, said he was “disappointed” by Genshaft’s decision to expand the case against the professor and that the new charges were “without merit.”
In its amended grievance against the professor, USF claims the Kuwaiti-born professor used the university’s name in booking a 1991 conference at which “money was raised for causes later associated with terrorist activities.” At the time, Al-Arian was an organizer of World and Islam Studies Enterprises, a Middle Eastern affairs think tank affiliated with USF. The university now also claims that a decade ago Al-Arian used the think tank to bring terrorists into America.
Those allegations were first aired in 1995 when a think-tank scholar returned to the Middle East and soon emerged as the head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a radical group that has engaged in many acts of terrorism against Israelis. Al-Arian has long denied having any terrorist links, and says he was shocked to discover that his colleague was a terrorist. In 1996, USF itself conducted an investigation into World and Islam Studies Enterprises that concluded there was no evidence to support charges of terrorist activity. The university now claims it did not have all the information necessary then to prove Al-Arian’s terrorist links. And in 2000, a judge addressed the charges and found there was “no evidence” to suggest WISE was a front for militant Palestinian terrorist groups.
This summer, however, the FBI took the unusual step of publicly confirming the existence of an ongoing inquiry into Al-Arian. And last month, when asked why USF was trying to dismiss Al-Arian, USF board of trustees chairman Richard Beard, a real estate advisor by trade, told the St. Petersburg Times point blank: “The real reason is he’s a terrorist.”
The 1996 controversy faded, but Al-Arian reentered the spotlight last September when his appearance on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor” generated intense negative publicity, including death threats on campus. That’s because host Bill O’Reilly, suggesting that the CIA should trail Al-Arian around the clock, revisited the 1996 accusations about the think tank’s terrorist links. In order to calm a campus on edge after the Sept. 11 attacks, Al-Arian agreed to go on paid leave.
Then, during an emergency meeting called last December, where Al-Arian was not allowed to defend himself, USF’s board of trustees voted 12 to 1 to recommend that Genshaft fire the professor. Patrick Swygert, president of Howard University and the only USF trustee with an academic background, was the lone dissenting vote.
The trustees’ rationale: By going on “The O’Reilly Factor” Al-Arian had created an unsafe campus environment; further, though he was identified on the program as a USF professor, he did not point out to viewers that his opinions were not those of the university’s administration. Genshaft announced that by August she would make a final decision on whether to fire Al-Arian.
On Wednesday, though, a newly released letter from Genshaft to Al-Arian said the case is not so much about Al-Arian’s failure to properly identify himself during a television appearance, but about his alleged terrorist activities — along with the fact that he’d advocated “Death to Israel” at the 1988 conference.
Academic and free-speech advocates suggest the university, by embracing charges of terrorism and downplaying the idea that Al-Arian’s TV appearance created a disturbance, conceded the weakness of its original case. “It would have been insane for them to proceed on the ridiculous grounds they wanted,” says Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “That’s a slam-dunk First Amendment case.” The foundation takes no stand on the issue of possible terrorist ties, but is supporting Al-Arian’s case against USF.
Had Genshaft fired Al-Arian yesterday, Halvorssen said, “it would be the epitaph of her career. She’d go down in higher education history as one of the biggest administrative threats to academic freedom.” He adds that USF’s decision to seek an open hearing in court represents a “good step in the right direction.”
The university has come under sustained attack, both on and off campus, for threatening to fire the professor. To date, USF’s graduate assistants, faculty union, faculty senate and college of arts and sciences chairpersons have all voted to support Al-Arian in his fight with USF. The school’s student senate passed a resolution in support of Genshaft’s decision to remove Al-Arian.
Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers expressed its concern about firing Al-Arian in a July letter to Genshaft. Perhaps most daunting for USF, though, is that the American Association of University Professors has signaled that it will censure the university if it fires Al-Arian. Censure by the AAUP is considered a black eye in academia and can have serious ramifications in recruiting and retaining top professionals.
The president does have defenders on campus who insist Al-Arian’s behavior led to an unsafe campus environment. “The university president’s duty first and foremost is to ensure safety on the campus,” says Marion Becker, vice president of USF’s faculty senate. She says she would “absolutely” support the decision to fire the professor. “And Dr. Al-Arian continued to say things that disturb many people and participated in the disruption. He has really hurt the university in terms of image nationally.”
Several pointed ironies arise from USF’s action on Wednesday. The first is that in the immediate wake of Al-Arian’s appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” the university, seeking to downplay the story, dismissed the televised accusations as nothing more than speculation. Yet in Genshaft’s letter to Al-Arian released yesterday, USF is now echoing the same sort of terrorism charges O’Reilly made last year.
Second, during USF’s emergency meeting last December, Genshaft urged the board of trustees to take action because “an extraordinary amount of the university’s resources are being diverted into this situation.” That was nine months ago, but the trustees’ decision that day has only prolonged the controversy and diverted more of the university’s time, attention and money. Today, few observers think the conflict will resolved by year’s end.
Don’t tell “liberal media” bashers Bernard Goldberg or Ann Coulter, but bleeding heart Phil Donahue just debuted his prime-time cable talk show on MSNBC and the move was considered big news inside the business. Why? Because the TV and radio landscape has become so dominated by conservative talkers — a fact that flies in the face of the authors’ recent claims that the mainstream media reads off of the same lefty script.
Even Republicans acknowledge the obvious. Welcoming GOP stalwart Patrick Buchanan as a guest on the Monday night program, Donahue joked: “I got a show, Patrick. I mean, holy cow, somehow a liberal got in.”
“It’s affirmative action,” quipped Buchanan.
More likely it was good business that led MSNBC to hire the 66-year-old Donahue, the Dick Clark of TV talk. With the cable spectrum maxed out on conservatives — thanks, in part, to Fox News’ entire programming lineup — the also-ran MSNBC couldn’t do any worse with a liberal at the top of its prime-time lineup.
Just look at CNN. Its signature political debate show “Crossfire” recently saw a 57 percent increase in its household ratings after hard-hitting Clintonite liberals Paul Begala and James Carville were added to the fight card.
On his first night, Donahue drew just over a million viewers. That’s nearly triple the number who watched MSNBC’s “The News With Brian Williams,” which used to occupy the 8 p.m. time slot. Donahue also blew away ratings for the recently canceled “Making Sense,” featuring conservative Alan Keyes, which aired at 10 p.m.
And Monday night, Donahue actually beat his CNN rival Connie Chung and her new 8 p.m. news show. No doubt some tuned in just for sentimental reasons, or for the novelty. But if he can maintain an audience that hovers above 700,000, the program, like the new “Crossfire,” will be a success and perhaps wash away the notion that only conservatives can do TV talk.
But let’s not get carried away with the idea that Donahue is breaking through historic barriers. The white-haired host spent more than 30 years prowling the broadcast landscape and asking provocative questions before walking away in 1996. (Though many of those questions were directed at American housewives, not Beltway players.) When he and Buchanan squared off on camera to debate the recent Pledge of Allegiance court ruling, they were just another pair of wealthy, middle-aged, white Irish Catholic men pontificating.
Yet they did it with the kind of oratory skill, savvy and touch of bluster that’s almost extinct from televised debates today. Like a couple of PGA senior pros on familiar links, the two still had the swing and the smarts to play the game gracefully and entertainingly. Sure it was nostalgic, and at any moment viewers expected them to break into heated 1980s debate about the role of the contras, but it was also passionate TV that revolved around core beliefs, not hollow accusations or a game of political gotcha. For a few minutes, it was the old point-counterpoint style of televised debate. No cutaways to talking heads weighing in via satellite, no endless interruptions of guests.
And Donahue boldly defended the controversial court ruling that deemed the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. What other TV talker has done that in prime time?
Here was Donahue, eloquently reviewing a 1947 Supreme Court decision that ruled a Jehovah’s Witness child did not have to pledge his allegiance to the flag: “Justice Robert Jackson, he said if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, Patrick, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in religion, nationalism, politics or any other matters of opinion, and you can’t force them by word or deed. You cannot force an American to believe anything. You cannot force an American to pledge the flag. You cannot even force an American to believe in the United States of America.”
Judge Robert Jackson? Does anybody think Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly even knows who Judge Jackson was? Or cares? Instead, O’Reilly seems to wear his ignorance as a badge of honor. Now saddled with a daily syndicated radio talk show, it appears, judging from his on-air performance, O’Reilly’s nightly prep work before taping his TV show has shrunk from 20 minutes to 10.
Not that Donahue’s show is all academics and no theatrics. On the first two nights, round-table discussions about a possible war with Iraq and the consequences of the PATRIOT Act often disintegrated into impossible-to-follow shouting matches.
Yet there was one rare “aha” moment, thanks to conservative guest Cliff May, former communications director for the Republican National Committee. In a debate about the PATRIOT Act, May insisted that during the post-Sept. 11 dragnet, which detained nearly 2,000 people, “no constitutional rights have been taken away.”
When guest Bill Goodman, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out that American citizen and alleged “dirty bomb” suspect José Padilla has been held without access to a lawyer and without being charged with a crime, May shot back: “Do you really think he’s innocent?”
Rarely are such crass anti-democratic attitudes publicly revealed, but they were on Donahue’s program.
So much has been made in the press of a proud liberal like Donahue stepping into the conservative cage of talk television. But always the nice guy, whose sincerity still seems genuine after all these years, Donahue doesn’t want to try to out-shout anybody. Instead, he’s deftly using his power to shift the focus of the debate for 60 minutes each night.
It was telling that Donahue’s first guest on the inaugural show was Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector turned dove, who argued the United States today has no basis to declare war on Iraq. An ex-Marine and a proud Republican who spent years inspecting Saddam Hussein’s arsenal, Ritter has been surprisingly absent from the national debate about a new war with Iraq. Donahue fixed that oversight in one night.
Tuesday night’s program worked better since it was centered around a single theme, unlike Monday’s debut, which hopped around from war with Iraq to the Pledge of Allegiance to a possible baseball strike. Anchored by Ben Franklin’s quote, “Those who would sacrifice freedom for security will get neither,” the program focused on the PATRIOT Act, a chilling new domestic intelligence-gathering law that has been virtually ignored by television news outlets in recent months. (The only problem being that Donahue rendered the quote inexactly and wrongly attributed it to another of the founding fathers, James Madison.)
Donahue invited Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., the only Senate member who voted against the PATRIOT Act, to discuss the legislation and how it relates to the FBI’s national dragnet of mostly Middle Eastern men thought to have terrorist ties. “There have been serious abuses of civil liberties of people who did absolutely nothing wrong,” the senator said.
According to a search of Nexis’ electronic database, here is how many times in the six months before his “Donahue” gig that Feingold was on a national broadcast to discuss the PATRIOT Act or the people detained since Sept. 11: 0.
Truth is, in his first two nights on the air, Donahue did more to expand the perimeters of our national debate than Alan Keyes did during his last two months on MSNBC.
And that’s something that might really upset Goldberg and Coulter.
This story has been corrected since it was first published.
The current chaos in the Middle East has left partisans on both sides angry and bitter. Among the most frustrated, though, may be the pro-Israel pundits who have dominated the debate in the U.S. for decades.
Israel’s aggressive incursion into the West Bank, in which 5,000 Palestinians have been arrested and hundreds killed, may mark a turning point in how the conflict is seen in the United States. Suddenly the pro-Israel media mantra — that Israel’s fight is America’s fight, and that the two countries aren’t simply allies, but brothers in arms with inseparable goals — is being viewed with some new skepticism.
Polls show Americans remain strongly committed to Israel’s security. Yet there’s evidence that the nation’s cadre of relentlessly pro-Israeli commentators, most of them neoconservatives, have quietly lost their corner on American public opinion. Instead of shaping it, they’re caught chasing it.
Their media crusade to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, for instance, seems to be foundering, thanks to weeks of Israeli/Palestinian chaos. A majority of Americans told NBC/Wall Street Journal pollsters that an Iraqi invasion should be delayed until Middle East violence subsides. And other major national polls show that Americans increasingly question the premises of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s incursion into the West Bank, Israel’s most aggressive military operation in two decades, and how it will achieve peace.
Most of these same conservatives are coming off the high of the war in Afghanistan, when hawkish pundits backed the U.S. action with a full throat, spoke in perfect pitch with the White House’s bellicose tone, and found much of their bloodlust matched by the American public. So their recent impotence has led to some unpleasant, and unusual, bitterness directed at President Bush.
On Capitol Hill, where the pro-Israel political lobby is considered one of the Beltway’s most powerful, steadfast support for Israel remains the norm. But it was odd on Monday to hear the mostly Jewish crowd boo longtime pro-Israel hawk Paul Wolfowitz, now a deputy defense secretary, merely for suggesting at a Washington rally that innocent Palestinians hurt in the current conflict deserve some sympathy too. The crowd clearly opposed Secretary of State Colin Powell’s peace mission, as well as President Bush’s attempts to get Sharon to rein in his military operation.
The boos for Wolfowitz were a measure of how embattled many pro-Israel American Jewish hawks feel, especially given Bush’s call last week for Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories “without delay” (a call, it must be noted, that Sharon has ignored with impunity). Clearly Israel’s media lobby is not having the success it once did calling the shots in Washington and maintaining public support.
The dynamics could soon change, particularly if another wave of suicide bombers is unleashed. But for now, a Palestinian perspective that was once almost completely absent from America’s mainstream press is being heard by Americans.
Make no mistake, recent polls show Americans still despise PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, condemn the tactics of suicide bombers, and blame Palestinians for the current wave of violence. Yet they remain strangely open-minded about the Palestinian struggle and uncomfortable with Israel’s West Bank invasion — especially with Sharon’s continued defiance of Bush after he called for Israel to withdraw its troops. News footage of the devastation of the Jenin refugee camp, broadcast widely on cable news stations Tuesday, may well shift public opinion even more.
It’s already clear that an increasingly open debate is underway here about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a debate the conservative press has long tried to stifle. As Eric Alterman recently wrote at MSNBC.com, “For reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction, the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel.”
You know who they are: William Safire of the New York Times; George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Kelly at the Washington Post; Lally Weymouth of Newsweek; Martin Peretz of the New Republic; Daniel Pipes and Andrea Peyser at the New York Post; Peggy Noonan and Robert Bartley at the Wall Street Journal; William Kristol of the Weekly Standard; Mortimer Zuckerman at U.S. News and World Report; Morton Kondracke, Fred Barnes, Brit Hume and Tony Snow at Fox News; and William Bennett, a paid CNN contributor, just to name a few.
They still cannot imagine criticizing Israel. But others can. Conservatives could not have enjoyed watching pro-Israel advocate Daniel Pipes getting grilled recently by Fox News’ self-styled blue-collar moderate Bill O’Reilly. In what until recently would have been considered an unthinkably aggressive stance regarding Israel, O’Reilly, who’s made no secret of his suspicion of American Muslims post-Sept. 11, belittled Pipes’ claim that the Israeli incursion into the West Bank was analogous to America’s bombing of Afghanistan, took issue with his suggestion that 90 percent of Palestinians “want Israel destroyed,” and pressed Pipes about what people were supposed to think when they saw Page 1 photographs of Israeli policemen clubbing peace activists in Tel Aviv. (Of course, Fox News also adopted Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer’s suggestion that suicide bombers be called “homicide bombers,” to make clear that they’re killing others, not just themselves — a case of pandering to the pro-Israel side that might counter O’Reilly’s rare independence.)
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, usually a fan of the mainstream’s conventional wisdom, recently derided the claim that Arab leaders would privately welcome a U.S. action in Iraq, as “neo-con claptrap.” Matthews has gotten increasingly fed up with uncritical defenders of Israel as well as proponents of an immediate Iraq invasion. Both O’Reilly and Matthews pride themselves on their scrappy, common-sense approach to politics, so their change of heart spells trouble for staunch defenders of Ariel Sharon.
Perhaps more worrisome for the Israeli media lobby is that, at least for the moment, it has lost some of its pull inside the White House. And worse, lost it to its least favorite Cabinet member, Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Just as the current crisis was unfolding, the Weekly Standard’s Kristol, along with more than two dozen other conservatives, sent Bush an open letter advising him how to proceed. The letter suggested that the U.S. treat Arafat as a terrorist, that Bush give Israel unconditional support, and that he move ahead swiftly on his plans to topple Saddam Hussein.
To date, none of those recommendations have been embraced, which is why the Israeli punditocracy in America has been lashing out at the White House, washing its hands of Powell’s trip and publicly ridiculing the administration. While there’s some suspicion that Powell does not have full White House backing for his peace mission, the fact that he’s there at all, meeting with Arafat, riles pro-Israel hawks in the press.
“Colin Powell’s upcoming trip to the Middle East is bound to fail embarrassingly,” read one recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed column, by Reuel Marc Gerecht. “Powell’s trip to the Middle East is shaping up to be a disaster,” agreed Kristol at the Weekly Standard, even before Powell had set foot in Israel. “Bush is continuing the bankrupt policy of treating Arafat as a legitimate leader and seeker of peace,” complained George Will in print.
Almost as bad for the neoconservatives was the fact that the Bush administration, led by Powell’s State Department, altered its Middle East policy at least partly because of the chaotic unrest on the Arab street, as frustration over the Palestinian problem erupted into violence in capitols throughout the region.
That’s anathema to neoconservatives who adopted the views of Princeton’s Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, and spent months arguing that the Arab street was irrelevant (“a con” as Ajami put it) and ought to be ignored by the White House.
Elsewhere, the neoconservative media’s demonizing of Yasser Arafat (“His behavior is increasingly reminiscent of Hitler in 1945,” said National Review Online in one of its countless Arafat screeds), is producing only partial political success. Let’s be clear: Americans don’t like Arafat. According to recent polls, most doubt that the PLO president wants to achieve peace, and his minuscule approval rating in a CBS survey might actually be zero, since his 2 percent standing falls within the margin of error.
Yet at the same time, the vast majority, according to a Newsweek poll, don’t believe Arafat controls the actions of the suicide bombers. The notion that the Palestinian leader could call off the bombings in an instant has been talking point No. 1 from the Israeli lobby and the conservative press for weeks, but they haven’t convinced the public.
In poll after poll Americans continue to express steadfast support and sympathy for Israel’s struggle for security. But if you venture beyond the generalities, cracks emerge — cracks the conservative press has been unable to mend.
According to recent surveys:
- Sixty percent think the U.S. should reduce economic aid to Israel if it does not withdraw military forces from Palestinian cities. (Time-CNN)
- Despite howls of protest from conservatives, the vast majority of Americans (70 percent) are in favor of Powell’s trip to the region. (Time-CNN)
- Three-fifths say Israel should give back the lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War if Arab countries would fully normalize relations. (MSNBC)
- A majority of Americans don’t think the Sharon government is willing to make concessions to make peace. (CBS)
- More Americans support keeping quiet rather than criticizing Palestinians and their leader Yasser Arafat. (CBS)
- Less than 50 percent think Israel’s “actions in the current conflict” are “mostly justified.” (CNN)
There’s more. Asked about U.S. policy toward Israel, more Americans (39 percent) told CNN they think we should “apply strong pressure to Israel to stop military actions against the Palestinians,” rather than “actively support Israel in what it’s doing” (32 percent).
In other words, just 3 out of 10 Americans subscribe to the neo-con approach of supporting Israel unconditionally.
Perhaps most surprising is the fact that nearly 40 percent of Americans consider the violence committed by Israel against Palestinians to be terrorism, according to an ABC News poll. The Israeli lobby’s pundits have for weeks argued relentlessly that Israel is merely fighting terrorism alongside Uncle Sam. Yet 4 out of 10 Americans think Israel is conducting terrorism in the West Bank.
Right before Israel’s recent military incursion, GOP pollster Frank Luntz was asked about the generally split public opinion among Americans regarding who’s to blame for the unrest between Israelis and Palestinians. He told MSNBC’s Matthews, “It was never this close in the past.” He noted that American opinion “absolutely should have” turned more pro-Israeli at this point, and the fact that it hasn’t must “be alarming to Israeli interest in this country.”
The reason? “The poor response by the Israeli public-opinion machine,” said Luntz. “The inability of Israelis to explain what is really happening over there.”
Fox News’ Morton Kondracke says the same thing, suggesting Palestinians are “doing a much better job of stating their case than the Israelis.”
But the notion that Palestinian spokesmen — who often speak English with clipped, occasionally unintelligible accents and inevitably have to explain or defend repugnant suicide bombers — are outflanking a cadre of well-groomed Israeli representatives on the American airwaves seems to be a stretch.
In fact, there’s evidence that Americans are seeing through the rhetoric of pundits on both sides, and viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a long-running, nationalistic battle for land, with plenty of blame on both sides, and one in which both sides will have to compromise to reach peace.
And that realization may be precisely what the pro-Israel media lobby in America most dreads.
When Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor at the University of South Florida and a Muslim community leader in this Tampa suburb, agreed to go on Fox News’ popular “O’Reilly Factor” Sept. 28, he thought he’d be discussing American Muslims’ reaction to Sept. 11. Instead he found himself denounced by host Bill O’Reilly as a patron of terrorists for his work on behalf of Palestinian statehood, with O’Reilly demanding an explanation for incendiary anti-Israel remarks Al-Arian made 15 years ago.
And that was only the beginning of what has become the most intense debate anywhere in the nation about academic freedom in the wake of Sept. 11. Al-Arian’s “O’Reilly” appearance triggered hundreds of phone calls and e-mails (as well as death threats) from critics outraged that USF would employ the supposed “terrorist.” Three days after his Fox appearance, university president Judy Genshaft suspended the Palestinian-born Al-Arian with pay, ostensibly for his safety and that of the university community; just before Christmas, she fired him.
Genshaft made no pretext that Al-Arian’s academic performance was at issue; he is both tenured and popular with his students. Al-Arian was terminated, she said, for failing to make clear he was speaking for himself and not the university when he appeared on Fox, thus making USF the vortex of right-wing fury about his views. “We are experiencing a level of disruption that no university anywhere is set up to deal with on an ongoing basis.”
The question raised by Al-Arian’s firing — Can a university punish controversial speech by one of its professors? — is not only polarizing Tampa Bay, it is sounding alarm bells throughout academe; and the story of how this local spat caught fire like autumn leaves suggests how fragile the national psyche remains four months after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The firestorm has pulled in Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who personally appoints USF’s trustees and has praised Genshaft’s move, and Fox attack-dog Bill O’Reilly himself, who has defended the Palestinian academic’s right to his views and denounced the university president for firing him.
The firing has been criticized by the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. On Thursday, Al-Arian will get a chance to defend himself to the university’s administration in an appeal required under his union contract.
The Al-Arian story, like so much about Sept. 11, did not begin with the hijacking of those four airplanes. Instead, it goes back nearly a decade. In the early 1990s, Al-Arian, along with other Palestinian exiles in the Tampa area, founded an Islamic studies center at USF, inviting speakers ranging from mainstream to radical. “What we were trying to do,” Al-Arian recalls, “was foster dialogue” across the broad range of Islamic political opinion. Al-Arian himself — who taught in the university’s engineering school since 1986, and also serves as the imam of the Islamic Community of Tampa, where he founded a well-regarded parochial school attended by over 200 children — emerged as a passionate defender of the Palestinian intifada, occasionally given to the kind of hotheaded rhetoric familiar from liberation movements the world over. And he helped establish a charity to raise money for the families of Palestinians killed in the uprising.
USF first caught heat for its professor’s political commitments in 1994. That year, terrorism maven Steve Emerson produced a controversial PBS documentary called “Jihad in America.” It interspersed video footage of one of Al-Arian’s anti-Israel speeches with images of Sheik Abdul Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, who had once appeared at one of the USF center’s conferences. Emerson, citing anonymous sources, labeled Al-Arian’s center “the primary support group in the United States” for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Emerson, it should be noted, is no neutral observer of the Islamic scene; a New York Times review of his 1991 book “Terrorist” found it “marred by factual errors and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.” He lost much of his credibility as a journalist when he rushed to proclaim Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing the work of Muslim terrorists, but his stock recently rose again thanks to the insatiable hunger for “terrorism experts” post-Sept. 11, and he regularly appears on cable news shows. Al-Arian considers his 1994 documentary “a classic example of guilt by association,” and traces his present plight to Emerson’s never-proven allegations.
Controversy returned a year later when the former co-editor of the USF center’s journal, who had disappeared after just six months’ work, turned up in Syria as general secretary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The FBI, apparently convinced the center was a front for terrorism, seized its computers, videotapes and files and froze its accounts; USF, painted by the media as “Jihad U,” suspended Al-Arian with pay and hired a prominent Tampa lawyer to conduct its own independent investigation. After 15 months the FBI and the university both cleared the center of any connection to terrorism or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A federal judge later affirmed their findings, calling Al-Arian’s enterprise — which by then had folded its tent — “a reputable and scholarly research center.”
But that wasn’t the end of the saga. Apparently still hoping for pay dirt, Tampa FBI officials decided to arrest Sami Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, a soft-spoken scholar named Mazen Al-Najjar, for unspecified terrorist associations. Al-Najjar — the brother of Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla — had arrived at Tampa in 1981 and earned a doctorate at USF. Al-Najjar was arrested under then new antiterrorism laws allowing suspects to be held on the basis of secret evidence, without the precise charge being revealed in court. For the next three and a half years, Al-Najjar would remain in Bradenton prison without anyone — not his lawyers, not even the judge — ever seeing the purported evidence against him.
The secret-evidence arrest of his brother-in-law galvanized Al-Arian and his family. While continuing to teach at USF, Al-Arian threw himself into building a national effort to challenge such cases. “The whole idea of secret evidence,” he recalls, “was so repugnant, such a repudiation of everything we thought the American system stood for.” The radical campus speaker evolved into a canny coalition-builder, winning friends in Congress ranging from the liberal David Bonior to conservatives like Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and rallying Tampa religious leaders to the case. Indeed, prior to September 11 Congress was close to passing a bill sharply restricting secret-evidence trials.
In May of 2000, a no-nonsense federal judge declared Al-Arian’s brother-in-law’s detention unconstitutional, an immigration judge declared the terrorism charge unfounded and a year ago December Mazen Al-Najjar at last went home to spend Ramadan with his family.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001. The terror attacks on New York and Washington left Al-Arian and his family both sickened and fearful. “This is un-Islamic by every definition, to have innocent people being killed. I don’t see anyone who can claim religion here. This is an evil act,” he told local papers. Members of the mosque donated blood, and Al-Arian helped organize an interfaith service. Muslim schools in the area immediately received threatening calls. “This is worse than any nightmare could be,” brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar told a reporter. “I am sad for every reason, for what happened to the victims, for what happened to the world.”
It was, Al-Arian thought, to talk about the Islamic community’s response to the attacks that he agreed on Sept. 28 to appear on “The O’Reilly Factor,” a show he had never seen. Instead, host Bill O’Reilly peppered him with the very charges from 1996 that had long ago been discarded by the FBI and discredited by a federal judge. The transcript is almost comic in its crude tabloid-like melodrama: USF “may be a hotbed for Islamic militants,” O’Reilly warned his audience. He quoted a speech Al-Arian gave 15 years ago: “You did a little speaking engagement in Cleveland, and you were quoted as saying Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Did you say that?” Al-Arian tried gamely to defend himself, saying that “death to Israel” meant “death to occupation, death to apartheid.” He also tried to point out how similarly incendiary President Bush’s talk of a “crusade” seemed to much of the Muslim world.
O’Reilly wasn’t having any of it. “I appreciate your coming on the program, but if I was the CIA I’d follow you wherever you went. I’m saying I’d be your shadow, doctor.”
In a sense, that was exactly what happened. O’Reilly’s interview, and several Fox rebroadcasts, inspired hundreds of e-mails and calls to USF, and numerous death threats. That barrage of mail landed on the desk of USF’s president, Judy Genshaft, who had taken the job just 18 months earlier. And Genshaft was faced with a dilemma: How to balance those threats with the tradition of academic freedom?
Genshaft’s initial response, three days after the O’Reilly show, was to suspend Al-Arian with pay. It was, she declared, a step designed to protect both professor and campus. “I will protect this university as a safe and secure learning environment,” she said, and pointing out that Al-Arian was not under any investigation by the FBI or police.
In retrospect, it seemed a move designed to buy time. And it didn’t work. After O’Reilly, the Tampa Tribune — the more tabloid of the area’s two major newspapers — decided to make a crusade of its own, ressurecting the years-old charges in its editorial pages and news columns, branding Al-Arian a “hate-monger” in its headlines. (By contrast, the more sedate St. Petersburg Times, while criticizing his old speeches, declared that Genshaft’s “first responsibility” was to protect an academic’s right to speak.) Soon the university changed its tune from protecting Al-Arian and the campus to protecting the campus from Al-Arian, warning him in an October letter that he risked disciplinary action should he even set foot on campus after hours.
Still, controversy did not abate: “The death threats are not subsiding,” Genshaft sighed in early October. And as the controversy rose, so did the political stakes: Genshaft’s boss, after all, is Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother. Over the summer, Bush had stopped by the USF campus and delivered a speech on academic freedom, but that was then and this was now.
Finally, on Dec. 19, the school let drop the other shoe: Al-Arian was fired, effective immediately. The professor, Genshaft said, had not made it clear on Fox that he was speaking for himself and not the university.
It was a peculiar accusation: Professors who appear on TV programs are hardly expected to issue such boilerplate disavowals. But Genshaft won immediate support from her boss. “Professors have the right to say things that are unpopular,” Bush said. “But they do not have the right to disrupt the life of a university.” Al-Arian, he declared, “continues to make very provocative statements” — as if provocative statements are grounds for firing a scholar. None of the Florida press corps, apparently, thought to point out that it was threatening callers, not Al-Arian, who were doing the disrupting — or that Al-Arian’s offending rhetoric had been uttered when today’s USF students were still in elementary school.
While Genshaft may have pleased Bush, her decision to fire Al-Arian elevated the case into a high-profile academic freedom controversy. And in a bizarre irony, one of the first to leap to the professor’s defense was … Bill O’Reilly. “You don’t sack a tenured professor for saying stuff you don’t like,” he growled on his program. “This president of the University of South Florida should resign. She’s a coward.”
For Al-Arian’s family, the firing comes at a particularly painful time. In late November the INS rearrested his brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar. No secret charges of terrorism this time: Instead, the INS is moving to deport him for overstaying a long-expired student visa. But as a stateless Palestinian he has nowhere to go, and supporters say the Justice Department is using his case to create a precedent for unlimited detention of Palestinian deportees.
In some ways, as a civil liberties issue, Al-Arian’s firing pales beside his brother-in-law’s second detention. After his earlier three-and-a-half-year stint in prison, with secret charges against him, again Al-Najjar is accused of no crime. But he is now being held in solitary confinement, in a maximum-security federal prison, strip-searched twice daily and forbidden contact visits with his family.
Yet the firing of a university professor for his views, past or present, has its own profound and disturbing echoes of witch hunts past. The plight of the Al-Arian family — one member jailed awaiting deportation, the other fired from his teaching post — recalls the precise conditions that inspired the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union during World War I: on the one hand, roundups of immigrant radicals, and on the other hand, the firing of antiwar academics like James McKeen Cattell, the founder of Columbia’s psychology department, and political scientist Scott Nearing, who after being fired from the Wharton School of Business, achieved cult status for books on “Living the Good Life” in rural Vermont and Maine.
The very institution of academic tenure was created to ensure that scholars feel free to speak out on public controversies, whether in or outside their official academic portfolio. What’s more, in a world haunted by terrorism, the stakes in the Sami Al-Arian case go beyond civil libertarian abstraction. If anything helps fuel terrorism, it is a sense that politics cannot work. Sami Al-Arian may be a militant Palestinian nationalist — but he is a militant who proved to himself, and to his communities both in the US and abroad, that politics and democratic institutions like courts can work, by clearing his name and freeing his brother-in-law. Firing Al-Arian because of public hysteria over spurious charges turns the hiring and firing at USF over to a gang of hecklers and telephone thugs. And like the rearrest of his brother-in-law, it sends a disquieting worldwide message that democracy will betray those most clamoring for it.
