- Former deputy mayor of Homeland Security and Public Safety for the City of Los Angeles
- Was responsible for derailing the LAPD's plan to monitor activities within the Los Angeles Muslim community
- Was appointed as assistant secretary for the Office of Policy Development in Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security in 2009
- Became a Professor of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism in 2010
Born (in 1968) in Canada and raised in California by Indian and Pakistani parents, Arif Alikhan graduated from UC-Irvine in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in social ecology. Three years later he received a J.D. from Loyola Law School and was admitted to the California State Bar. He then clerked for U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew of California's Central District.
Alikhan subsequently served as a prosecutor in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office and taught law at the University of Southern California. He also spent time working for the U.S. Department of Justice as the overseer of its Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Program. In 2002 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Alikhan as Deputy Mayor of Homeland Security and Public Safety for the City of Los Angeles, a position he held until 2006.
An opponent of President George W. Bush's prosecution of the war on Islamic terror, Alikhan was responsible for derailing the LAPD's efforts to monitor activities within the city’s Muslim community, where numerous radical mosques and madrassas were known to exist, and where some of the 9/11 hijackers had received support from local residents.
In April 2009, President Barack Obama's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed Alikhan as assistant secretary for DHS's Office of Policy Development. Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Los Angeles branch, praised the "well-deserved" appointment.
Thirteen days prior to his DHS appointment, Alikhan, a devout Sunni Muslim, had participated in a Muslim Public Affairs Council fundraiser titled "Be the Change," to support that organization's leadership-development programs.
In early June 2009, Alikhan spoke at a banquet/fundraiser for the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California (ISCSC). A noteworthy fellow speaker was Agha Saeed, who had previously defended Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian during the latter's prosecution on terrorism charges. At the ISCSC event, Saeed lamented the "Islamophobia" allegedly pervading post-9/11 America, and demanded that the Justice Department stop monitoring U.S. mosques for evidence of extremism.
In November 2010 Alikhan stepped down from his DHS position and took a job as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs in Washington, DC.
- Muslim terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda
- Also known as Palestinian Islamic Jihad
- Supported Saddam Hussein in 2003 Iraq war against U.S.
Islamic Jihad (IJ), also known as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (in Arabic, Harakat al-Jihad al-Islami al-Filastini), is a terrorist organization whose objectives include the destruction of Israel (“the full liberation of the Palestinian lands”); the elimination of all Western influences in the Middle East by means of an armed and uncompromising jihad, or holy war; and the convergence of all Arab and Muslim countries into a single great Islamic state. Based in Damascus and supported financially by Syria and Iran, IJ also maintains offices in Beirut, Tehran and Khartoum. It is most influential in the West Bank (especially in Hebron and Jenin) and the Gaza Strip, where it carries out the majority of its activities. It does not, however, possess the political or social importance of Hamas. IJ has also staged terrorist attacks in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Islamic Jihad's organizational emblem depicts a map of the land to which it lays claim (i.e., present-day Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) superimposed on the images of the Dome of the Rock (the seventh-century landmark believed by Muslims to be the spot from which the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven), two fists, and two rifles.
Islamic Jihad was established in 1979 by three radical Palestinian students, Fathi Shikaki, Abdul Aziz Odeh, and Bashir Moussa, who were studying in Egypt. They formed the group after deciding that the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip was too moderate for their political tastes. In 1981 the Egyptian government expelled Islamic Jihad from the country when it learned that the organization was closely linked to the assassins of President Anwar Sadat. At that point, IJ relocated to the Gaza Strip, where it initiated a new round of terrorist activities.
In 1988, Shikaki and Odeh were banished from Gaza and went to Lebanon. Once there, Shikaki reorganized and strengthened his group’s ties with Hezbollah. IJ continued its terror campaign, attacking a tour bus in Egypt in 1990, killing 11 people, including 9 Israelis.
In 1993, an Islamic Jihad member successfully carried out a major attack on American soil: Ramzi Yousef, along with a cell of Islamic Group terrorists (under the leadership of Omar Abdel Rahman) drove a truck filled with explosives into a parking garage of the World Trade Center and detonated it. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Yousef was later apprehended in Pakistan and brought back to the United States for prosecution. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Shortly after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Islamic Jihad formed an alliance of sorts with Hamas, and the two groups, which had previously been rivals, now began coordinating some of their suicide attacks against Israeli targets.
In October 1995, Fathi Shikaki was killed in Malta, allegedly by Israeli agents. He was replaced by Ramadan Abdallah Shallah, a Palestinian who had previously lived in the United States, where he had co-founded -- along with Sami Al-Arian, Mazen al Najjar, and Khalil Shikaki -- the World Islam Study Enterprise. Though Shallah's lack of charisma and organizational skills diminished Islamic Jihad's reputation among other terrorist groups in the region, the change in leadership did not put an end to IJ's terror campaign. In March 1996, for instance, the organization claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Tel Aviv that killed 20 people and wounded more than 75.
Since September 2000, when the Second Intifada was launched against Israel, Islamic Jihad has staged many suicide attacks inside the Jewish state, including 15 car bombings that killed 25 and wounded close to 400 between the years 2000 and 2006.
Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Islamic Jihad announced that it was backing Saddam Hussein -- in reciprocity for Saddam's support for Palestinian terrorists in Israel (he had given more than $35 million in cash awards to the families of suicide bombers who had attacked Israeli targets -- mostly civilians). Islamic Jihad showed Saddam its appreciation by staging a March 30, 2003 suicide bombing at a crowded pedestrian mall in the Israeli costal town of Netanya, and proclaiming the act "a gift to the heroic people of Iraq."
In 2003 Islamic Jihad announced that it was sending suicide bombers to Iraq to help fight what it called the "American invasion" there. According to Nafez Azzam, the IJ leader in Gaza and the West Bank, "The Islamic Jihad movement is interested in intensifying attacks in this phase to make it clear to Arabs, Muslims, and the whole world that what is going on here in Palestine is the same as what is happening in Iraq."
After Israel withdrew its military presence and all its settlements from Gaza in 2005, Islamic Jihad promptly initiated a campaign of near-daily rocket barrages sprayed randomly into southern Israeli border communities, in hopes of drawing blood somewhere. The rockets are imprecise and thus are designed only for terrorist purposes; they could, and do, land anywhere -- in a field, in a school, in a hospital, in a home. As of late 2007, Islamic Jihad had fired more than 2,000 of these rockets into Israel.
On December 17, 2007, Israeli aircraft killed Islamic Jihad’s top commander and nine of his fellow terrorists in a Gaza attack. In response, all of Gaza City’s mosques played verses from the Koran over loudspeakers, in honor of the fallen jihadists. Thousands of Gazans took part in funeral processions that featured Islamic Jihad members firing long barrages of bullets into the air and vowing that “revenge is coming soon.” Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Hamza said, “The blood of our comrades will be the fuel for the rockets that will bring death and destruction to the Zionists.”
Among the more notable Islamic Jihad members of recent times was Sami Al-Arian, who headed the organization's North American operations while he worked as a professor at the University of South Florida.
- Former professor at the University of South Florida
- North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad
- Active in the Islamic Society of North America, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations
- Co-founded the World and Islam Studies Enterprise
- Created the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom
- Former Chairman of the Islamic Academy of Florida
Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents on January 14, 1958, Sami Al-Arian was educated in Egypt and then came to the United States in 1975. Three years later he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical sciences and engineering from Southern Illinois University. He thereafter earned advanced degrees in computer engineering at North Carolina State University -- a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D. in 1985. As of 1981, he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1986 he was hired as a professor of computer science by the University of South Florida (USF), where he eventually earned tenure.
As an academic, Al-Arian has published more than forty articles in his field of study. He is also a civil liberties activist who has been a key player in various Islamic-interest organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America (which he co-founded), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Islamic Academy of Florida (which he once chaired). In 1991 he co-founded (with Khalil Shikaki and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah) the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE).
In 1997 Al-Arian created the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) in an effort to challenge the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, which was the predecessor to the Patriot Act of 2001. Pursuant to the Anti-Terrorism Act, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (a.k.a. PIJ, or simply Islamic Jihad) had been declared a terrorist organization; “material support” for terrorist organizations had been made explicitly illegal; the government’s use of secret evidence in terrorist cases had been authorized; and Professor Al-Arian’s brother-in-law Mazen al-Najjar had been arrested and incarcerated for his terrorist connections. Other key members of Al-Arian’s anti-Patriot Act coalition included the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). CCR’s lead spokesman in the coalition was David Cole, Professor of Law at Georgetown University and the lawyer for Mazen al-Najjar.
Al-Arian himself had been the subject of an FBI investigation since 1996. He 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.
In his book American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, Emerson gives evidence of how, at USF, Al-Arian founded and headed various terrorist fronts that operated as "the American arm of Islamic Jihad," and how Al-Arian damned the United States and Israel rhetorically while raising funds for terrorism overseas.
Emerson also had surreptitiously videotaped Al-Arian at a rally exhorting attendees, in English, to donate $500 so that a Palestinian terrorist could be financed to kill an Israeli Jew. Former U.S. attorney John Loftus, meanwhile, had obtained videotapes of Al-Arian exhorting murder in Arabic, and Loftus initiated a lawsuit to pressure the U.S. government to prosecute Al-Arian for complicity in international terrorism. The government was slow to act, however, partially because of Saudi pressure.
But on September 26, 2001, Al-Arian appeared on Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor. The host confronted Al-Arian with his videotaped calls for terrorist jihad and declared, “If I was the CIA, I’d follow you wherever you went.” The ensuing public uproar produced enough embarrassment to USF officials that they finally suspended Al-Arian from his professorship, with pay, on December 19, 2001.
Al-Arian responded to the suspension by adopting the posture of a victim: “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 Al-Arian’s defense. Their efforts included articles in The Nation and Salon.com, whose reporter Eric Boehlert lamented “The Prime Time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian.” The head of Georgetown’s Middle East Studies program, Professor John Esposito, expressed concern that Al-Arian not be made a “victim of … anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry.” And Professor Ellen Schrecker characterized Al-Arian’s suspension as an example of “political repression.”
Others who joined the Al-Arian defense chorus included the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the USF faculty union, and the American Association of University Professors, the latter of which threatened to challenge USF's accreditation on grounds that the school had “violated” Al-Arian’s “academic freedom.” Meanwhile, faculty at Duke University invited Al-Arian to be the featured speaker at an academic symposium on “National Security and Civil Liberties.”
In its investigation of Al-Arian, the FBI raided WISE headquarters and seized some 500 videotapes of conferences in which Al-Arian had participated, where funds had been raised to aid terrorism efforts overseas. One FBI surveillance video of Al-Arian’s fundraising tour of American mosques showed him being introduced as “the President of the Islamic Committee for Palestine … the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement.” In addition to others in the video who praised the killing of Jews and Christians, Al-Arian declaimed, “God cursed those who are the sons of Israel ... Those people, God made monkeys and pigs ... Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.” In another videotaped speech, 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.”
The FBI further learned that Al-Arian had connections to the blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993; to Hamas official Mohammed Sakr; to the high-ranking Sudanese terrorist Hassan Turbai; and to Islamic Jihad co-founder Abdel Aziz-Odeh.
In February 2003 a federal grand jury handed down a 50-count indictment against Al-Arian and six others in Tampa, Florida who were believed to be fellow leaders of PIJ.
In Al-Arian's 2005 trial (which began in June and went on for 5 months), his attorney conceded that the client was an operative for PIJ. A reporter covering the trial summarized: “The trial exposed the professor as having been deeply enmeshed in the internal workings of Palestinian Islamic Jihad …” On December 6, 2005, Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of the seventeen counts against him, including "conspiracy to murder and maim people abroad," which was the most serious charge. The remaining nine counts ended in what was considered a mistrial, as the jury was deadlocked on them.
On February 28, 2006, Al-Arian signed a plea agreement in which he agreed to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to "make or receive funds ... for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad." He was sentenced to 57 months in prison, (which included 38 months that he had already served). The judge who sentenced Al-Arian made reference to PIJ suicide bombings and told the defendant: "Anyone with even the slightest bit of human compassion would be sickened. Not you, you saw it as an opportunity to solicit more money to carry out more bombings." Vis a vis Al-Arian's claim that he had raised money for charities, the judge said: "Your only connection to widows and orphans was that you create them."
In June 2008, Al-Arian was indicted for criminal contempt after he repeatedly refused to testify before a federal grand jury investigating terror financing in northern Virginia. Al-Arian argued that his 2006 guilty plea contained an agreement absolving him of any future obligations to provide information to the government, either voluntarily or as a result of a court order. But Al-Arian's claim was rejected by the judge who had sentenced him in Tampa, by another judge in Alexandria, and by their respective circuit courts of appeal. Moreover, Al-Arian's attorneys have never produced any written evidence supporting their client's claim.
In April 2012, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reported: "The case has been frozen in limbo ... by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema's refusal to rule on defense motions to dismiss the contempt case despite repeated promises to deliver a written order as far back as the spring of 2009."
Also in April 2012, Al-Arian issued a statement "on behalf of all victims of injustice," in which he named a number of "innocent" Muslims who had been "targeted ... because of their beliefs, opinions, associations, and advocacy":
"Today Ali Al-Tamimi is serving life for giving a religious fatwa. Tarek Mehanna is serving 17 years for translating a document. Mufid Abdel Kader is serving 20 years because he had a beautiful voice and sang for Palestine. Ghassan El-Ashi and Shukri Abu Baker are serving 65 years each for feeding and clothing hungry Palestinian children ... Aafi (sic) Siddqui was sentenced to 86 years after she was shot and nearly died."In response to Al-Arian's statement, IPT set the record straight:
"Al-Tamimi's fatwa urged followers to wage war against American troops and help the Taliban. Mehanna was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida, providing material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country. Abdel Kader, Elashi and Baker each were convicted for their work with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which illegally routed more than $12 million to Hamas before being shut down in 2001. Aafia Siddiqui was apprehended in Afghanistan in possession of plans for a 'mass casualty attack' in the United States, including a list of New York City landmarks. Prosecutors say she grabbed an Army officer's M-4 rifle and fired it at another officer and other members of a U.S. interview team at an Afghan police compound in July 2008."
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