http://www.counterpunch.org/lynchnahla.html
"... Bonior also championed the case of Dr. Mazen Al-Najjar, jailed before Sept. 11 because the FBI and Immigration officials suspected the Gaza native was a mid-level terrorist operative, and because he had violated the terms of his visa.
He was unsuccessful in this endeavor. Al-Najjar was ultimately deported to the United Arab Emirates.
Bonior, who lost a bid to become Michigan's governor, also took campaign contributions from Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor said to be Islamic Jihad's front-man in the United States. Al-Arian and his wife, Nahla, donated at least $3,450 to Bonior's campaigns. Al-Arian also raised funds for Islamic Jihad – an ally of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
What did such campaign contributions buy for Al-Arian? We got a clue in June 2001, just three months before the terror attacks on the U.S. During a White House meeting on President Bush's "faith-based initiatives" that month, a uniformed Secret Service officer felt compelled to remove a 20-year-old Muslim intern working for Bonior. Apparently the young man was seen as a security threat – and understandably so. The intern's name was Abdallah Al-Arian – the son of Sami Al-Arian. .."
Alan Shearer, editorial director of The Washington Post Writers Group, once bragged to me that the newspaper columnists he syndicates do a lot of research for their columns.
But a recent slipshod column by Washington Post Writers Group columnist William Raspberry shows just the opposite. In fact, Raspberry didn't do the least bit of research for his Oct. 29 nationally syndicated column, "'Freak Out' in Force." If he had, he'd have learned that Abdullah Al-Arian, the "innocent" example of airport Arab-profiling he'd written about, is actually the son of Islamic Jihad's U.S. frontman, Dr. Sami Al-Arian – also a University of South Florida professor on tax-paid leave.
As I've recently written, Dr. Al-Arian is accused in FBI affidavits of bringing terrorists into the U.S. and raising funds for terrorist groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas, not to mention laundering money for the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. Dr. Al-Arian said, "Let us damn America. Let us damn their allies until death." He used the name of Allah to preach paying respects to "the river of blood that gushes forth and does not extinguish, from butchery to butchery, from martyrdom to martyrdom, from Jihad to Jihad."
In a hearing regarding his brother-in-law, a suspected mid-level Islamic Jihad terrorist, Dr. Al-Arian "invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination 99 times," according to the Associated Press. As leader of an organization that Islamic Jihad listed as its U.S. headquarters, Dr. Al-Arian employed Tariq Hamdi, who – prosecutors and documents in the 1998 trial of the bin-Laden bombings of U.S. Embassies in Africa say – provided a battery instrumental in those bombings.
And that's just the "Cliff's Notes" version.
Would you want to be on a flight with his son, Abdullah? I doubt Raspberry would, either – if he'd bothered to look into who Abdullah Al-Arian actually is, before gushing over him, like a drooling civil-rights advocate looking for a convenient cause celebre.
All Raspberry would have had to do was put the name "Al-Arian" in any Internet search engine, and he would have pulled up article after article, column after column, about Dr. Al-Arian and family, and their frightening activities here in America. From the Wall Street Journal, to the Tampa Bay Tribune, to my columns – and many other sources – there is a great deal of documentation on the Al-Arians.
And in his sloppiness, Raspberry missed the real story. He missed the fact that Abdullah's family, through Hamdi and others, is tied to bin Laden, and that Abdullah's father who earns only $66,175 annually is suspiciously spending like a Rockefeller. And he missed the fact that in the last several months, even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Abdullah Al-Arian has made something of a career of his phony profiling stories.
Abdullah accompanied Muslim-American leaders to a June White House meeting. But in doing security, the Secret Service apparently pulled up some of his father's disturbing information, and they promptly removed Abdullah from the White House. Like Raspberry, Arab- and Muslim-American leaders, instead of being embarrassed that they brought with them to the White House the son of a suspected terrorist, protested and accused the White House of profiling – and Abdullah, a Duke University student, became a rising star in their communities.
But, in fact, it wasn't profiling at all. On the contrary, neither the younger Al-Arian, nor his father – the Islamic Jihad frontman – should ever have been allowed in the White House or anywhere near it. His father, Dr. Al-Arian, who should be jailed or deported, was instead invited to the White House a few weeks later.
Raspberry may like Abdullah Al-Arian, but Abdullah doesn't necessarily like him. On MSANews, a site of the Muslim Student Association operated out of Ohio State University, father and son Al-Arian often write and communicate to the rest of the Muslim world. The site also sharply criticizes Raspberry for exposing Muslim Arab slavery of black Christians in Sudan, accusing him of "journalistic apartheid." On that issue, Raspberry was 100 percent right, but here, on Al-Arian, he's just plain wrong.
Now Abdullah, whose Duke tuition is rumored to be paid by the bin Laden family, is now Raspberry's new hero.
Abdullah, whom Raspberry describes as empathetic, is a so-called "Freak Out" victim, according to Raspberry, because he wrote in the Duke chronicle that he felt stares at the airport.
Stares are mild compared to the chutzpah of Abdullah Al-Arian, whose family takes advantage of our freedoms to foment its hate. And rebuke is mild for the irresponsible columnist, Raspberry, who lionizes him.
Debbie Schlussel is a political commentator and attorney. She is a frequent guest on ABC's "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher" and Fox News Channel. Click here to participate in an online discussion group of Debbie's commentary, and here to join the unofficial Debbie Schlussel Fan Club.
IMPORTANT: Sean Hannity, on his show today, had a guest who discussed Grover Norquist.....according to her (don't remember her name), Pres. Bush called Al-Arian's son, and APOLOGIZED for this incident......Norquist knew/knows these people's backgrounds and the FBI did not want Al-Arian at the White House, but because of Norquist, Al-Arian has been at the White House. She also said Norquist mostly associates himself only with the Wahhabis (and extremist faction) and other extremist factions. She said no muslim gets to the President but through him, that he is the President's muslim adviser (I believe that is how she put it). I checked Sean's website, he doesn't have any of this info up that I could see, yet; perhaps later or perhaps tomorrow it will be up. I did find this article, however, on Newsmax:
Conservatives Fight Over Islam
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003
The CSP boss took Norquist to task for his involvement with Islamic Institute, through which, Gaffney argued, Norquist and his associates had been instrumental in “promoting and facilitating Wahabbis’ access to the executive and legislative branches of government” and thereby “could prove politically damaging and strategically detrimental to our cause and the well-being of our country.”
Norquist says Islamic Institute “was formed to promote within the Muslim world the fact that the Koran and Islam are perfectly consistent with a free and open society.”
In an interview with NewsMax.com, Norquist said he wrote his letter because the two young White House Muslims whom Gaffney criticized were merely underlings carrying out decisions made by more senior White House officials.
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