A wife of a known terrorist

 

+ One of the lies the Adams administration used to justify the paramilitary raids on Columbia was that “a wife of a known terrorist” was inside Hind Hall with the protesters. NYC media ran with this obvious lie. This morning Deputy Police Commissioner Rebecca Weiner said the woman wasn’t in Hind Hall, wasn’t part of the protests, but had been seen on campus last week and that they “have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part.”

+ The woman Adams slanderously smeared was Nahla al-Arian wife of Sami-al Arian, the former professor of computer engineering at South Florida (and CounterPunch contributor), who was never convicted of a crime by a jury but pled to one count after a mistrial, then was wrongly held under house arrest for refusing to testify in a federal case…the charges were later dismissed. Adams falsely Sami al-Arian was “arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level” and implied that Nahla, a retired elementary school teacher, had somehow helped to train the students in civil disobedience. In fact, she was in NYC with her two daughters Laila and Lama, both journalists, stopped by the encampment for about 20 minutes and, according to her daughter Lama, had some hummus and left because she was tired. Nahla called the Columbia students “beautiful and busy.”

+ “The whole thing is a distraction because they are very scared that the young Americans are aware for the first time of what’s going on in Palestine,” Nahla Al-Arian said. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope that at last the Palestinian people can get some justice. I sat and I felt happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine.”

+ According to Lama, one of the best young documentary filmmakers around, her mother found out this week that more than 200 of her relatives have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

+ Anyone who wants to know more about the bogus case against Sami Al-Arian and the decades-long harassment of his family should watch the documentary, The USA v. Al-Arian, which shows how in the post-9/11 mass hysteria the Patriot Act was used against a university professor for merely knowing someone who was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad years earlier.

+ Two days after the raid, Adams was still being pushed to name how many “outside agitators” had been arrested by the NYPD. Adams had no answers, because there weren’t any and shrugged off the questions, saying: “I don’t think that matters…One professor poisoning a classroom of students is just as bad as 50.”

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR