The St. Petersburg Example

One of the hallmarks of integrity is the willingness, when one is wrong, to admit it. An admirable example was set by the St. Petersburg Times, a Florida newspaper that had reacted defensively after it was scooped by the their competitor, the Tampa Tribune, and its reporter Michael Fechter, on the news that a terrorist cell had been operating out of the University of South Florida. The St. Petersburg Times's coverage and editorial line had tilted more sympathetic to a professor, Sami Al-Arian, who had claimed his case was a matter of academic freedom.

But after a federal judge accepted a guilty plea from Al-Arian to the federal charge of conspiring to assist Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization that specializes in targeting Israeli and American civilians, the St. Petersburg Times uncorked a whale of an editorial. Al-Arian, it noted, "admits to secretly helping jihadists and lying about it. He admits his 'think tank,' at USF, called World and Islamic Studies Enterprise, received and sent money to known terrorists. He admits feigning shock when a reporter asked him how WISE's chief administrator, Ramadan Shallah, could end up as leader of PIJ. He admits he was lying when he said Shallah 'had been engaged in only scholarly work.' He admits to cryptic phone calls, wary of wiretapping, in which he referred to bank deposits as 'shirts' or 'magazines.'" It concluded that Al-Arian "lived a vulgar lie" and that his academic freedom argument was "self-serving drivel."

What about Al-Arian's other defenders? They include the president of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby, whose organization greeted Al-Arian's arrest back in 2003 with a press release denouncing "profiling" and "specious charges." It has issued no reaction to Al-Arian's guilty plea, and Mr. Zogby didn't return our message seeking comment. Another prominent defender of Al-Arian was this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times.

Mr. Kristof, a tremendous reporter and a fine fellow, traveled to Tampa for a 2002 column describing Al-Arian as "a rumpled academic with a salt-and-pepper beard who is harshly critical of Israel (and also of repressive Arab countries) - but who also denounces terrorism, promotes inter-faith services with Jews and Christians, and led students at his Islamic school to a memorial service after 9/11 where they all sang 'God Bless America.'" The column asserted, "three exhaustive studies of his conduct have found no evidence of wrongdoing."

In a second column, Mr. Kristof blandly cited Al-Arian as "a Palestinian activist in Florida" who happened to think that "the Israeli occupation represents a total humiliation of all the Arab regimes," which explained large protests in the Arab world occurring at the time. Mr. Kristof didn't take our call seeking comment, but his clerk explained that he had not yet had a chance to read the legal documents involved in Al-Arian's guilty plea.

The American Association of University Professors rode to Al-Arian's defense when USF tried to fire him for what the AAUP described as an "active extramural interest in Palestinian and Islamic developments." It turns out the "extramural interest" was unambiguously felonious, but the jury is still out on whether the AAUP will "clarify" its defense of Al-Arian; the organization's general secretary, Roger Bowen, didn't return our call for comment.

The desire to presume innocence until guilt is proven is an understandable, even admirable, American trait, although editorialists and activists need not always operate under the same burden of proof confronting petit juries. But Al-Arian's guilt has now been established, by his own admission to a grave crime. He is culpable for the death of innocents just as surely as the Sudanese that Mr. Kristof won his Pulitzer for criticizing. Why don't Messrs. Kristof, Zogby, and Bowen follow the St. Petersburg example?