When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence supported either claim, and both were the opposite of the truth.

The unsubstantiated claims that the author misrepresented his subjects and that his text is factually inaccurate were also categorically dismissed by one of the academics profiled. Dana Cloud, a professor of communication studies at the University of Texas, led a protest against the book’s author when he spoke at her campus. She has been candid about her use of the classroom for political agendas. But she was firm in her conclusion that The Professors was an accurate account of what its subjects proposed: “There are the organizations and professors who have devoted themselves to refuting Horowitz’s ‘facts’ about their publications and activism,” wrote Professor Cloud; “I believe this also is a wrong approach because his ‘facts’ about faculty syllabi and political affiliations are not in question.”

The new paperback edition of The Professors corrects the few trivial errors its critics unearthed. Since it can be assumed that the book was reviewed by a hundred and one subjects with an axe to grind, virtually all of them with PhDs, it can be said that few books have come under more copious scrutiny. This is what its detractors discovered: In addition to mistaking the date of Professor Aptheker’s secret resignation from the Communist Party, the text referred to Professor Emma Perez as “Elizabeth” Perez in one of three mentions of her name; it identified Dean Saitta as the director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Denver in 2005 when he left the post in 2003; it described Beverly Aminah McCloud as a member of the Nation of Islam when she is only an admirer of the Nation of Islam and its racist leader Lewis Farrakhan; and it misattributed a quote from a symposium on 9/11 to Eric Foner, whose sentiments, expressed in the same seminar (and on the same page of the London Review of Books) were identical (and are now included in the present text). That is an accounting of all the errors unearthed, which the author’s academic detractors have described as “numerous” and evidence of the untrustworthiness of his research.

The new text has one significant change. The profile of Dr. Sam Richards, a lecturer in sociology at Penn State University, has been dropped. Like many other subjects, Richards was profiled initially because of his commitment to incorporating ideological agendas into his lessons. Richards was also criticized for teaching a course in race relations, despite his lack of formal academic training. The author met Richards on a visit to Penn State in April 2006 and corresponded with him afterward. Richards has since prepared a new curriculum on race relations that does not impose on students a leftist paradigm to the exclusion of others. His profile, accordingly, is no longer part of the text.

Since there were 102 profiles in the original text—including those of Ward Churchill and Cornel West, which were included in the explanatory chapters—the omission of Richards leaves a count of 101 in the paperback edition. Consequently, the title has been left unchanged. Of course, none of these numbers are meaningful since the author estimates that tens of thousands of active professors fit the book’s criteria. The basis for this estimate is spelled out in the chapter titled, “The Representative Nature of the Professors Profiled in This Volume.”

Professor Sami al-Arian, University of South Florida

• Professor of engineering at the University of South Florida
• North American head of Palestine Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group responsible for the suicide bombing murders of more than 100 civilians in the Middle East
• “Civil liberties activist.”

Before being arrested for his terrorist activities, Osama (Sami) al-Arian, a Palestinian, was a professor of engineering who operated out of the University of South Florida. Professor al-Arian created two non-profit organizations, a think tank associated with the University called the World Islamic Studies Enterprise and the Islamic Committee for Palestine, which raised funds and recruited soldiers for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Professor Sami al-Arian was, in fact, the North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the principal terrorist organizations in the Middle East, and responsible for suicide bombings that have taken the lives of more than a thousand hundred people, including two Americans, aged 16 and 20. An FBI surveillance video of Professor al-Arian’s fundraising tour of American mosques shows him being introduced as “the president of the Islamic Committee for Palestine... the active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement.”

Along with others in the video who praise the killing of Jews and Christians, Professor al-Arian declaims, “God cursed those who are the sons of Israel, through David and Jesus, the son of Mary... Those people, God made monkeys and pigs...” And further: “Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.” In another speech, Professor al-Arian said, “We assemble today to pay respects to the march of the martyrs and to the river of blood that gushes forth and does not extinguish, from butchery to butchery, and from martyrdom to martyrdom, from jihad to jihad.” As one of the tapes reveals, at one of Professor al-Arian’s fundraisers to “sponsor” Palestinian martyrs, a spokesman “begged for $500 to kill a Jew.”

One board member of Professor al-Arian’s academic think tank was also a Palestinian professor at the university named Khalil Shiqaqi. His brother, Fathi Shiqaqi, was the well-known founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its military leader in Syria. When Fathi Shiqaqi was assassinated, his replacement as head of the terrorist organization was Professor Ramadan Abdallah Shallah, another director of Professor al-Arian’s think tank and also a member of the faculty of the University of South Florida.

In 1997, Professor al-Arian founded the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. Its specific purpose was to oppose the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act”—the predecessor to the Patriot Act—which had been passed in 1996 following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 175 innocent people. Under the Act, Palestinian Islamic Jihad was declared a terrorist organization. The Act also made “material support” for terrorist organizations illegal and authorized the use of secret evidence in terrorist cases. Professor al-Arian’s brother-in-law Mazen al-Najjar—also a think tank member—was arrested under the terms of the Act, held for three and a half years, and eventually deported after 9/11.

Professor al-Arian was the spearhead of the civil liberties coalition that formed to oppose the Patriot Act, which was, in effect, an extension of the Clinton anti-terrorism law. Professor al-Arian’s coalition partners included the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose lead spokesman in the coalition was David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University and the lawyer for Professor al-Arian’s terrorist brother-in-law, Professor Mazen al-Najjar.

Professor al-Arian had been under investigation by the FBI since 1996 and had long been publicly identified as a terrorist by close observers of the Islamic jihad movement, including reporters for the Miami Herald and Investigative Project Director Steven Emerson. When Emerson began warning the public about Professor al-Arian’s terrorist efforts, he was ferociously attacked for “Muslim-bashing” and “McCarthyism” by prominent figures on the political Left, among whom al-Arian was by now a familiar colleague. On September 26, 2001, Professor al-Arian made the mistake of appearing on FOX News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor. The host confronted Professor al-Arian with videotaped calls for terrorist jihad and declared, “If I was the CIA, I’d follow you wherever you went.” The ensuing public uproar embarrassed the University of South Florida officials enough that they finally suspended al-Arian from his professorship with pay.

Professor al-Arian responded to the suspension by adopting the victim's posture: “I’m a minority,” he said. “I’m an Arab. I’m a Palestinian. I’m a Muslim. That’s not a popular thing to be these days. Do I have rights, or don’t I have rights?” The American left sprang to Professor al-Arian’s defense. Their efforts included articles in The Nation and Salon.com, whose reporter Eric Boehlert called it “The Prime Time Smearing of Sami al-Arian” and explained, “By pandering to anti-Arab hysteria, NBC, Fox News, Media General, and Clear Channel radio disgraced themselves—and ruined an innocent professor’s life.” The leftist head of Georgetown’s Middle East studies program, Professor John Esposito, expressed concern that al-Arian is not a “victim of... anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry,” and Professor Ellen Schrecker, the foremost academic expert on the McCarthy era (who regards American Communists as well-meaning social reformers and innocent victims of government persecution) called al-Arian’s suspension “political repression.”

Others who joined the al-Arian defense chorus for Professor al-Arian included the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the University of South Florida faculty union, and the American Association of University Professors, which threatened to challenge the university’s accreditation because it had “violated” Professor al-Arian’s “academic freedom.” Meanwhile, faculty at Duke University invited Professor al-Arian to be the featured speaker at an academic symposium on “National Security and Civil Liberties.” Professor al-Arian was the featured (and university-sponsored) speaker as an expert on civil liberties.

Professor Sami al-Arian was arrested for his terrorist activities in February 2003. In December 2005, he was acquitted of eight of the seventeen charges, and a mistrial was declared on nine others when the jury disagreed. In his summation, al-Arian’s attorney conceded that al-Arian was an operative for Palestine Islamic Jihad. A reporter covering the trial summarized: “The trial exposed the professor as having been deeply enmeshed in the internal workings of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group that has killed well over a hundred people in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, mostly through its favored technique of suicide bombings.”

References:

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz