Alan Shearer, editorial director of The Washington Post Writers Group, once bragged to me that the newspaper columnists he syndicates do a lot of research for their columns.
But a recent slipshod column by Washington Post Writers Group columnist William Raspberry shows just the opposite.
In fact, Raspberry didn’t do the least bit of research for his Oct. 29 nationally syndicated column, “‘Freak Out’ in Force.” If he had, he’d have learned that Abdullah Al-Arian, the “innocent” example of airport Arab-profiling he’d written about, is actually the son of Islamic Jihad’s U.S. frontman, Dr. Sami Al-Arian – also a University of South Florida professor on tax-paid leave.
As I’ve recently written, Dr. Al-Arian is accused in FBI affidavits of bringing terrorists into the U.S. and raising funds for terrorist groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas, not to mention laundering money for the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. Dr. Al-Arian said, “Let us damn America. Let us damn their allies until death.” He used the name of Allah to preach paying respects to “the river of blood that gushes forth and does not extinguish, from butchery to butchery, from martyrdom to martyrdom, from Jihad to Jihad.”
In a hearing regarding his brother-in-law, a suspected mid-level Islamic Jihad terrorist, Dr. Al-Arian “invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination 99 times,” according to the Associated Press. As leader of an organization that Islamic Jihad listed as its U.S. headquarters, Dr. Al-Arian employed Tariq Hamdi, who – prosecutors and documents in the 1998 trial of the bin-Laden bombings of U.S. Embassies in Africa say – provided a battery instrumental in those bombings.
And that’s just the “Cliff’s Notes” version.
Would you want to be on a flight with his son, Abdullah? I doubt Raspberry would, either – if he’d bothered to look into who Abdullah Al-Arian actually is, before gushing over him, like a drooling civil-rights advocate looking for a convenient cause celebre.
All Raspberry would have had to do was put the name “Al-Arian” in any Internet search engine, and he would have pulled up article after article, column after column, about Dr. Al-Arian and family, and their frightening activities here in America. From the Wall Street Journal, to the Tampa Bay Tribune, to my columns – and many other sources – there is a great deal of documentation on the Al-Arians.
And in his sloppiness, Raspberry missed the real story. He missed the fact that Abdullah’s family, through Hamdi and others, is tied to bin Laden, and that Abdullah’s father who earns only $66,175 annually is suspiciously spending like a Rockefeller. And he missed the fact that in the last several months, even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Abdullah Al-Arian has made something of a career of his phony profiling stories.
Abdullah accompanied Muslim-American leaders to a June White House meeting. But in doing security, the Secret Service apparently pulled up some of his father’s disturbing information, and they promptly removed Abdullah from the White House. Like Raspberry, Arab- and Muslim-American leaders, instead of being embarrassed that they brought with them to the White House the son of a suspected terrorist, protested and accused the White House of profiling – and Abdullah, a Duke University student, became a rising star in their communities.
But, in fact, it wasn’t profiling at all. On the contrary, neither the younger Al-Arian, nor his father – the Islamic Jihad frontman – should ever have been allowed in the White House or anywhere near it. His father, Dr. Al-Arian, who should be jailed or deported, was instead invited to the White House a few weeks later.
Raspberry may like Abdullah Al-Arian, but Abdullah doesn’t necessarily like him. On MSANews, a site of the Muslim Student Association operated out of Ohio State University, father and son Al-Arian often write and communicate to the rest of the Muslim world. The site also sharply criticizes Raspberry for exposing Muslim Arab slavery of black Christians in Sudan, accusing him of “journalistic apartheid.” On that issue, Raspberry was 100 percent right, but here, on Al-Arian, he’s just plain wrong.
Now Abdullah, whose Duke tuition is rumored to be paid by the bin Laden family, is now Raspberry’s new hero. Abdullah, whom Raspberry describes as empathetic, is a so-called “Freak Out” victim, according to Raspberry, because he wrote in the Duke chronicle that he felt stares at the airport.
Stares are mild compared to the chutzpah of Abdullah Al-Arian, whose family takes advantage of our freedoms to foment its hate. And rebuke is mild for the irresponsible columnist, Raspberry, who lionizes him.
