Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace
January 23, 2006

Nahla Al-Arian meets with Desmond Tutu

TAMPA– Dr. Sami Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla Al-Arian, met Archibishop
Desmond Tutu of South Africa last week when he spoke at the
University of South Florida. She gave him a copy of “Conspiring
Against Joseph,” a collection of poems Dr. Al-Arian wrote during his
incarceration at Coleman Federal Penitentiary. “I think there is a
lot of similarities between his struggle in South Africa and our
struggle in Palestine,” Mrs. Al-Arian told the Oracle, USF’s student
newspaper. Below is a column published in the Oracle about the
meeting.

Also, see below an article in the St. Petersburg Times about Dr. Al-
Arian’s co-defendant Sameeh Hammoudeh who was acquitted and will
likely leave the country this week.

I. Tutu’s message would be well served by hitting home
http://www.usforacle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/01/23/43d4d21b12802

by Sebastian Meyer
January 23, 2006

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s visit to the USF campus last week was
celebrated by the University’s administration as a public relations
coup. It was, no doubt, and the University milked the $150,000 event
for all it was worth, cleverly tying it to the yearlong celebration
of USF’s 50th anniversary.

But for many of the attendees, the event was more than a high-
profile photo opportunity. It was encouragement to believe in
peaceful activism, civil liberties and, most of all, forgiveness and
reconciliation  charmingly delivered by a man who was not merely
preaching it, but living it.

Tutu’s speech did not dwell much on the negative experiences he had
when confronting apartheid in South Africa. Even in the press
conference before his speech when reporters attempted to lure Tutu
into making a political statement, Tutu laughed in the charming
fashion that has become his trademark and began enumerating “good
things” that had happened in recent months.

Speaking about Hurricane Katrina, he said many terrible things had
occurred, but “also a lot of good things happened there.” He spoke
of “incredible generosity” and of “people opening their homes” or
giving money to help those in need. He also spoke of the “millions
of people” who protested the war in Iraq.

While many people myself included  often feel overwhelmed by the
uphill battles they face, Tutu found a way to remain true to his
positive outlook on the world and his drive to improve the world we
live in. He even dismissed the allegation that “young people” did
not care enough about their society as “baloney.” According to
him, “some of the most idealistic are young people.” In our own
little corner of the world at USF, such reflection and eventual
reconciliation is desperately needed as well.

Nahla Al-Arian, wife of former USF professor Sami Al-Arian, seemed
to also adhere to or at least hope for such reconciliation when
I spoke to her in one of the cavernous hallways of the Sun Dome on
Tuesday night. Mrs. Al-Arian, while quiet, seemed surprisingly
upbeat even though members of her family had been put through the
justice system without regard for the principle “innocent until
proven guilty.”

She still speaks of America as “this beautiful land” and took hope
from the jury’s verdict. She also spoke with hope of overcoming the
situation Palestinians and Jews alike face every day. As long as the
injustices on both sides continue, she said, so will the situation.

USF President Judy Genshaft later threw a similar chance to call for
such reconciliation to the wind. When I told her of my conversation
with Nahla Al-Arian admittedly in a hurried fashion minutes before
Tutu took the stage she quickly stopped me in my tracks and
said, “Right now what we are doing is hearing Archbishop Tutu.” When
I elaborated and asked if she hoped the lecture would also help
motivate people to reconcile differences here at USF, she repeated
the same phrase three more times without explaining what she meant
by it.

Granted, Genshaft has been under fire for her handling of the “Al-
Arian controversy,” and it’s no wonder she’s on edge as soon as
someone drops the name “Al-Arian” in her presence. But minutes after
I asked Genshaft about reconciliation and was brushed aside with a
stern smile, she took the stage to introduce Tutu and said
that “bringing together” the community by bringing “such an esteemed
member of our global society to USF” was one of the University’s
goals as it enriches the community.

Genshaft further said, “Archbishop Tutu’s message of international
peace and forgiveness is in line with USF’s commitment to one of our
areas of great strength: global outreach.” She also said that it was
her hope that the attendees of the lecture would “leave here tonight
inspired to make a change in our world.”

So why not answer my question with that?

In his speech, Tutu later said the dark chapters are often ignored
in the United States’ past as well as present.

“The wound has not healed,” Tutu said. “Take the risk and open the
wound. This great country would then reach tremendous heights.”

It is obvious that some are quite hesitant about reopening such
wounds and believe that by ignoring a problem, it will go away.

But that’s the wrong approach. Tutu’s words only strengthened my
belief that the seemingly insurmountable ignorance be it conscious
or unconscious, we often face is only an obstacle to be tackled
rather than feared.

In the long run, a spiral of escalating spitefulness will not help
anyone. Only when people on both sides objectively look at mistakes
made can reconciliation and progress truly happen.

Sebastian Meyer is a senior majoring in political geography and a
former Oracle opinion editor.

—

II. St. Petersburg Times
Jan. 23, 2006

Removal ends a family’s nightmare
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/01/23/Tampabay/Removal_ends_a_family.shtm
l

Though he won a jury’s unanimous acquittal on terrorism charges,
Sameeh Hammoudeh is being sent to Jordan with family.

TAMPA – After spending almost three years in prison because of
terrorism charges, Sameeh Hammoudeh was acquitted after a six-month
trial.

Eight weeks after that not guilty verdict, it appears he will
finally be released from jail this week and reunited with his wife
and children, as they begin a 33-hour journey to Amman, Jordan, to
join family.

“At last,” Hammoudeh said.

The strange odyssey, which brings Hammoudeh to this latest juncture,
began Feb. 20, 2003, when he was arrested at dawn at his North Tampa
home. He was indicted for being a terrorist, labeled a “high-
security threat” and placed in solitary confinement.

After a jury acquitted him in a Tampa federal courtroom in December,
Hammoudeh remained in jail awaiting deportation because Immigration
and Customs Enforcement officials said they did not agree with the
jury’s decision.

“I don’t understand. Even if you are acquitted, the government is
like wild wolves picking at you – this in a country with people full
of love and mercy,” he said.

But it appears his nightmare is about to end, with the immigration
announcement that he has been issued “a final order of removal.”

The nightmare began on that chilly February morning almost three
years ago when eight FBI agents banged on the front door of his home
in North Tampa. His six children were asleep. His wife, Nadia, woke
them, telling them “the termite men are here,” to keep them from
being afraid.

But the older girls caught on quickly.

“How can you do this to us?” Doaa, then 15, asked.

It is a question her father is still asking. “If I had done
something, I could accept what happened to me. But I have done
nothing. Nothing,” he said.

The agents moved quickly, filling dozens of boxes with books. They
took the Koran, but left the Bible. They took a book on Palestinian
history but left others, including those by New York Times reporter
Thomas Friedman.

They took the Disney videos but left the “Judy Moody” series
belonging to Noor, then 7. Magazines went, as did photo albums and
stacks of papers, including hundreds of charitable receipts from the
West Bank.

Federal prosecutors called the receipts “plain phony.” The
government said Hammoudeh, now 45, was really sending money to the
occupied territories of Israel to finance the suicide bombings of
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for
hundreds of deaths there. Prosecutors also said the PIJ was paying a
salary of $1,000 a month to Hammoudeh. The government charged him,
along with Sami Al-Arian, Ghassan Ballut and Hatem Fariz, with
furthering terrorism.

But the six-month trial told a different story. Under cross-
examination, FBI agent Michael Wysocki conceded that there was no
evidence the money Hammoudeh sent overseas went to the PIJ.

The agent also said there was information to contradict the
government claim that Hammoudeh received a salary from the PIJ. And,
finally, Hammoudeh’s father, Taha Hammoudeh, produced receipt
duplicates from West Bank charities that prosecutors had
called “phony.”

When the 12-person jury began deliberating, they took several hours
to silently examine the evidence. Then, the foreperson asked for a
show of hands to determine the verdict on Hammoudeh. Without
hesitation, all 12 hands shot up for acquittal on all counts.

“Without talking about it, we had each made up our minds,” said
juror Deaundre, who asked that his last name be omitted.

Swept aside

Hammoudeh, a child of the stateless, was born to a family swept
aside in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, as Jews
turned to Palestine as theirs. Decades of attack and counterattack
followed. Hammoudeh’s father sketched the family’s background in
court testimony.

In the spring of 1948, the family was forced from its home by
Israeli soldiers, when the town was cleared of Palestinians to make
room for Jews settling in the new Israel.

At the same time, Leo Bernstein, the father of Hammoudeh’s attorney,
Stephen Bernstein, emigrated to the United States after surviving
four years in the Nazi concentration camp Dachau. Almost 50 years
later, when Stephen Bernstein considered representing Sameeh
Hammoudeh, the lawyer went to his father for permission. Leo
Bernstein, 86, told his son: “I want you to represent him because I
know what it is to be arrested and persecuted for nothing.”

In 1948, the displaced Hammoudehs went to a small town in the West
Bank where Sameeh was born in 1960. Sameeh went to a local
university and ran a youth program.

In late 1992, at the recommendation of Khalil Shikaki, who teaches
at Brandeis University in Boston, Hammoudeh came to graduate school
at the University of South Florida. Shikaki, a respected Middle
Eastern scholar, is the brother of a PIJ founder. Because of this,
prosecutors said Hammoudeh’s friendship with Shikaki was
conspiratorial, though no evidence backed the claim.

After Hammoudeh came to Tampa, his wife and three girls joined him a
few months later. Three more children were born in Tampa, where
Hammoudeh worked at World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a USF
organization that held forums on the Middle East. Husband and wife
also taught at the Islamic Academy of Florida, where their older
children went to school.

Both the organization and the academy were founded by Al-Arian, a
USF professor whose phones were tapped by the FBI in early 1994,
because of suspicions that he was connected to Palestinian Islamic
Jihad.

The FBI recorded Al-Arian talking to PIJ leaders in 1994 and
searched his home and offices in November 1995, when Ramadan
Shallah, the former director of the World and Islam Studies
Enterprise left Tampa to become the head of the PIJ. But it was not
until eight years later on that February day in 2003 that FBI agents
arrested Al-Arian, along with Hammoudeh, Ballut and Fariz.

“The agents told me I was not the target,” Hammoudeh said. But a
year later, prosecutors charged him in a separate case with omitting
information from visa forms and not paying $8,027 in income taxes
over 11 years. Hammoudeh agreed to a guilty plea when the government
pulled his wife in.

“When they threatened to leave my children without parents, I gave
in,” he said.

In June 2005, Hammoudeh and his wife pleaded guilty to tax fraud.
They agreed to be deported with no jail time. But now immigration
officials say they will be “removed” instead.

Steve Crawford, Hammoudeh’s attorney in the tax evasion case,
said, “It was all about getting Hammoudeh to talk about Sami Al-
Arian.”

But Hammoudeh never did.

During his three-year incarceration, he has been allowed one, two-
hour contact visit with his wife and six children. In October 2003,
Hammoudeh went to the visitors’ cafeteria in the prison and hugged
them. For all other visits, they have looked at each other through a
clear partition and talked on a phone.

“My family is the best. It has been psychological torture to be
separated from them,” he said.

“My baba lives behind glass,” said Muhammad, 4, who can’t remember
ever touching his father.

For the behind-the-glass visits, Hammoudeh holds up newspaper photos
for his small children so they have something to talk about that
takes them away from prison. Alaa, 7, recalled a poem her dad
started: “A guy in a boat had a goat.” Noor, 10, calls the
prison “baba’s office.” Hanan, 15, surfs the Web for news about the
case.

On Feb. 20, 2003, when FBI agents entered Hammoudeh’s home on an oak-
lined street near USF, the tufted titmouse on the kitchen clock
chirped five times, signaling 5 a.m.

With the family huddled in the living room, agents walked past the
parents’ “teacher of the year” plaques in the family room. They
snapped pictures as they went through the French doors into the
screened pool area, where the family played Marco Polo on Sundays.

Doaa, now 17, remembers an agent’s answer when she asked how they
could do this to them. His reply, which she characterizes as “calm,”
was: “We have to do this, so be quiet because your comments won’t
help.”

The older girls went frequently to their father’s terrorism trial.
When prosecutors called him a “terrorist,” they shook their
heads “no.”

“I have never had anything to do with the PIJ or any violence,
anywhere,” Hammoudeh said.

The jury agreed.

When the federal judge read the jury’s acquittal of Hammoudeh, after
reading eight acquittal and nine mistrial verdicts for Al-Arian,
Stephen Bernstein, Hammoudeh’s attorney, sobbed.

“I was so relieved because I believe so much in Sameeh’s innocence
and goodness,” he said.

If the Hammoudehs go to Jordan this week as planned, they will be at
the center of a huge family celebration. There will be roast lamb
with yogurt and vintage family tales – an attempt to forget the past
three years.

They hope to sell their Tampa house and furnishings so that
Hammoudeh can start a bookstore in the West Bank. Weeam, 19, who has
already graduated from Florida International University, hopes to go
to graduate school near Ramallah. Doaa will work on her Arabic so
she can go to college.

“How sad to have to leave our home in the United States in order to
be a family with a future,” Hammoudeh said.