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.
Harvard and its Center for Middle Eastern Studies did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Multiple departments at Georgetown University, Brown University, the University of Chicago and George Mason University, as well as George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies and many others are also listed as event organizers.
The above universities did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Harvard is already on thin ice with the Trump administration over its alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus and failure to properly disclose its foreign funding. Despite facing the loss of billions of federal dollars, the university is determined not to acquiesce to the administration’s demands and is attempting to beat the government’s actions in court rather than relinquish its academic freedom and free speech rights.
Columbia University’s settlement with the Trump administration, a battle similarly revolving around the university’s handling of anti-Israel protests, included “a comprehensive review of Columbia’s portfolio of programs in regional areas, starting with those relating to the Middle East.”
Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla Al-Arian, who is also a former teacher, was reportedly seen at the Columbia encampment just before they erupted into a violent clash with police.
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