Al Arian To Be Deported After Serving Jail Term
Wire services are reporting that former Florida University professor Sami Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison (of which he has already served 38 months) before being deported from the U.S for conspiracy to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian was previously found not guilty in eight of 17 charges brought against him, but agreed to a plea bargain on April 14 in which he would agree to be deported and plead guilty to one of nine remaining charges in exchange for dropping the other charges.
AP reports that:
As part of the plea agreement, Al-Arian admitted to being associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the late 1980s and providing “services” for the group, which included filing for immigration benefits for key members, hiding the identities of those men and lying about his involvement.
Reuters writes that:
In his ruling, [Judge]Moody harshly criticized al-Arian for doing nothing to stop bombings perpetrated by Islamic Jihad.
“You lifted not one finger. To the contrary, you laughed when you heard of the bombings,” he said.
“You are a master manipulator. The evidence is clear in this case. you were a leader of the PIJ.”
CAMERA previously criticized apologists for Al-Arian.
Some news agencies are still at it–now trying to characterize Islamic Jihad’s terrorist nature as arguable. A news database search shows, for example, that Agence France Presse (AFP) headlined its feature on Al Arian’s sentencing by placing the term “terrorist” in quotation marks:
Arab-American gets 57 months for aiding Palestinian ‘terrorist’ group
The first sentence similarly discounts the designation of Islamic Jihad as a terrorist organization:
An Arab-American former university professor was sentenced in Florida Monday to 57 months in jail and deportation for conspiring to aid a Palestinian group designated as “terrorist” by the United States.
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