When Terror Charges Just Won't Stick

A jury vindicates a fiery pro-Palestinian professor. Did the feds just waste their time?

The 1995 double suicide bombing at Beit Lid Junction, Israel, killed 21 Israelis and was one of the bloodiest attacks ever by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.)--which the U.S. soon after designated as a terrorist organization. A few weeks later, according to U.S. court documents, Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian computer-science professor at the University of South Florida (U.S.F.) in Tampa, wrote a letter to an associate in Kuwait bragging that the Beit Lid carnage was "an example of what P.I.J. could do" and soliciting funds for the bombers' families. A year earlier, the records show, al-Arian faxed to Islamic Jihad bosses in...

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