• 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. 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, 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.

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. In his summation, Al-Arian’s attorney conceded that Al-Arian 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 …”