Harvard Co-Sponsors Event Featuring Activist Who Helped Palestinian Suicide Bomber Org

Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and several other prominent schools are co-sponsoring an event featuring a Palestinian activist who pleaded guilty to conspiracy with a designated terrorist organization.

The event, titled “Teaching Palestine Today: On Zionism,” is hosted by the Gaza in Context Project and National Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and is meant to discuss the question ““What have we learned about Zioinism in the past year+?” One of the speakers, Sami Al-Arian, pleaded guilty in 2006 and was sentenced to 57 months in prison for conspiring to violate federal law by associating with and performing “various services” for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a designated terrorist organization.

Al-Arian admitted to “knowing that the PIJ had been designated as a Specially Designated Terrorist and that the PIJ engaged in horrific and deadly acts of violence” in his guilty plea, the Department of Justice stated. Al-Arian helped PIJ members file for immigration benefits, hid the identities of PIJ associates and provided “assistance for an individual associated with the PIJ.” The judge presiding over Al-Arian’s case called him a “master manipulator” and a “leader of the PIJ.”

PIJ is based in the Gaza Strip and has been known to engage in various attacks against Israel, using rockets, guided missiles and suicide bombers, among other things.

Al-Arian was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida before his arrest in 2002.