A grand jury yesterday indicted eight people on terrorism charges, among them Sami Amin Al-Arian, a professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida. Mr. Al-Arian is a “Palestinian activist” who had come to be something of a cause celebre for those who beleive that any scrutiny of radical Muslims in America is the symptom of a nascent police state.

Mr. Al-Arian gained national attention after September 11, when videotaped comments calling for “Death to Israel” led his university employers to begin the process of attempting to fire him. His supporters claimed that he was being unfairly persecuted for his political beliefs and challenged his dismissal. Mr. Al-Arian is now accused by the government of being the head of the American arm of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group that, according to Attorney General Ashcroft, “is responsible for the murder of over 100 people in Israel and the occupied territories, including at least two Americans: Alisa Flatow, age 20, and Shoshana Ben-Yishai, age 16.”

Prominent among Mr. Al-Arian’s defenders in his fight with the University of South Florida was Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. “Officials at the University of South Florida…have started proceedings to fire him — essentially for being a fiery Palestinian activist who embarrasses them,” Mr. Kristof wrote in a March 1, 2002, column. “A university, even a country, becomes sterile when people are too intimidated to say things out of the mainstream.”

Himself, Mr. Al-Arian seems never to let anything halt his anti-Jewish rants. Complaining that the university’s decision to fire the professor could “justify the ouster of a gay professor — or, a few decades ago, a black professor,” Mr. Kristof suggested that President Bush “have a word with his brother Jeb, who has endorsed the firing of Professor Al-Arian.” Six weeks later Mr. Kristof quoted Mr. Al-Arian approvingly in a column, calling him merely a “Palestinian activist in Florida” — no mention of his alleged terror ties.

The Times’s editorial board jumped on the Al-Arian case as well. Under the title “Protecting Speech on Campus,” the Times accused Governor Bush of “dishonor[ing] the ideals of public universities.” The editorial called the university’s efforts to get rid of Mr. Al-Arian “groundless” and “a mockery of free speech.” “If Mr. Al-Arian were a moderate receiving threats from militant Muslims, there is little doubt that the university would stand up for him,” the Times posited. It concluded, “Firing a professor because his views are causing others to criticize or threaten the university is a betrayal of the academic code.”

Federal civil rights officials warned the university that the firing may lead to a cut in federal funding. “They may not like what he says or teaches, but they cannot terminate a tenured professor like that,” the regional director of the civil rights commission, Bobby Doctor, was quoted by the Tampa Tribune as saying. A spokesman for the American Muslim Alliance, Eric Vickers, called the “bigotry that is being perpetrated against Sami Al-Arian,” a symptom of “bigotry and prejudice against the entire Muslim community.”

The ACLU jumped in, suggesting that the university had decided “speech is only free if it’s not controversial.” Not to be left out, the associate general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, Jordan Kurland, lamented that, “People who have expressed views sympathetic to the Palestinian authorities have been branded as terrorists very quickly.”

When federal agents raided a series of homes and offices in March of 2002, looking for evidence of Mr. Al-Arian’s terrorist links and for other terrorist front groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called the raids a “fishing expedition by federal authorities using McCarthylike tactics in a search for evidence of wrongdoing that does not exist.”The secretary-general of the Muslim American Society, Shaker Elsayed, was quoted by the St. Petersburg Times as saying “This is becoming a war on Muslim institutions.”

“McCarthyism” was the favored term of an attorney for the American Muslim Council, Ray Busch. McCarthy came up again in a cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Blaming the Victim?” It quoted a Yeshiva University professor calling the Al-Arian case “political repression.” “Can academic freedom and free speech withstand attacks from those outside the university? Will administrators have to choose between a peaceful campus and diversity of thought?” the Chronicle mused.

Beneath an ominous “First They Came for the Immigrants…” heading, the Village Voice said that Mr. Al-Arian was fired for “having expressed hotheaded anti-Israel views a dozen years ago” and that “shock-jocks had recklessly denounced Al-Arian for fomenting jihad under the Tampa palms.”

It is certainly the case, indeed, it is an American bedrock that in this country a man is innocent under the law until he is proved guilty. The burden rests entirely on the American people to prove their case against Mr. Al-Arian and the others indicted yesterday. But it is going to be something to see how the case against Mr. Al-Arian plays out in the liberal papers. It will no doubt give us all a glimpse of how invested the opinion elites in this country have become in the idea that he’s innocent.

His arrest hasn’t given a moment’s pause to the Muslim American Society, which yesterday said the arrests “spoke more to the government’s targeting of Muslim leaders and civil liberties than the fight against terrorism.” Mr. Al-Arian was being quoted yesterday as saying it’s “all about politics.” Calling Mr. Al-Arian a “prominent community leader and outspoken defender of civil liberties,” the Muslim American Society blames the arrests on — you might have guessed it — “pro-Israel advocates.”