Every once in a while there occurs one of those clarifying moments, when a public official rises to a difficult occasion and speaks on a highly fraught subject with an inspiring clarity. Rarely have we, in a long newspaper life, encountered a moment as satisfying as the remarks that were made at the sentencing of Sami Al-Arian by the United States district judge in the case, James S. Moody Jr. He’s one of those Americans Abraham Lincoln was talking about when he uttered his famous line about how you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. There was no fooling Judge Moody.

It was Judge Moody who presided during the months in which Al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor, was tried on terrorism charges for his role in Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The trial ended when a jury acquitted Al-Arian on many of the counts and deadlocked on the remainder. Jubilation erupted in Al-Arian’s camp and among those in the press who reckoned the professor had merely been exercising First Amendment rights. But a courageous team of United States prosecutors refused to abandon the case, eventually winning a confession from Al-Arian that he had indeed helped Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Some of Al-Arian’s supporters then reacted by suggesting that he had pleaded to only a minor charge, but Judge Moody swept aside all the hypocrisy and posturing and put the matter in plain English in the statement that we reprint on the adjacent page. Al-Arian had made his own statement, claiming that “this process,” to quote the transcript published by St. Petersburg Times, “affirmed my belief in the true meaning of a democratic society, in which the independence of the judiciary, the integrity of the jury system, and the system of checks and balances are upheld, despite intense political and public pressures.”

Judge Moody would have none of it. “Dr. Al-Arian,” he said. “I find it interesting that here in public in front of everyone you praised this country, the same country that in private you refer to as ‘the great Satan’; but that’s just evidence of how you operate in the face of your friends and neighbors. You are a master manipulator. You looked your neighbors in the eyes and said you had nothing to do with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This trial exposed that as a lie. Your backup claim is that your efforts were only to provide charities for widows and orphans. That, too, is a lie. The evidence was clear in this case that you were a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You were on the board of directors and an officer, the secretary. Directors control the actions of an organization, even the PIJ; and you were an active leader.”

The judge then sketched a devastating reprise of how, when Iran, the major funding source of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, became upset over PIJ’s failure to account for its money, Al-Arian “leaped,” as the judge put it, “into action,” taking a whole series of steps to account for Iran’s money. “But,” the judge said, “when it came to blowing up women and children on buses, did you leap into action then? Did you offer to form a committee to protect the innocent? Did you call your fellow directors and enlist their aid in stopping the bombing or even to stop the targeting of the innocent? No. You lifted not one finger, made not one phone call. To the contrary, you laughed when you heard about the bombings, what you euphemistically call ‘operations.’ You even pleaded for donations to pay for more such operations.”

He talked about one specific bombing, the double suicide bombing at Beit Lid in 1995, when a second bomber waited to attack the ambulance crews who’d rushed in to help the wounded and dying. “Anyone with even the slightest bit of human compassion would be sickened. Not you. You saw it as an opportunity to solicit more money to carry out more bombings. . . . And yet, still in the face of your own words, you continue to lie to your friends and supporters, claiming to abhor violence and to seek only aid for widows and orphans. Your only connection to widows and orphans is that you create them, even among the Palestinians; and you create them, not by sending your children to blow themselves out of existence. No. You exhort others to send their children. Your children attend the finest universities this country has to offer while you raise money to blow up the children of others.”

To those who sometimes get discouraged in this age of degraded political debate, take heart in the words of Judge Moody. His is the authentic American voice. New Yorkers have been following this case since Jonathan Mahler began reporting it in the Jewish Forward newspaper in the 1990s. It took a long time. But when the facts in this case were tried, the truth came out. America finally had the last word in the case of the terrorist professor, and Judge Moody’s statement contains the words America spoke – a lesson for all of us to bear in mind as other Al-Arians press their claims to be admirers of America’s freedoms while manipulating the debate with lies and laying in support for the killing of innocent Americans, Israelis, and Palestinian Arabs.