Sami Amin al-Arian (14 January 1958-) was a Palestinian-Kuwaiti professor and activist.
Biography[]
Sami al-Arian was born in Kuwait in 1958 to Palestinian refugee parents, and his family moved to Egypt in 1966. Al-Arian was educated in Cairo before leaving Egypt in 1975 to study in the United States. He became a professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida in 1986 and a permanent resident of the USA in 1989, and he became an imam for a local mosque and a community activist leading the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE). He campaigned for George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential election because his belief that Bush was the most likely candidate to end discrimination against Arab-Americans, but he opposed the Iraq War and criticized neoconservatism and Israel's existence. In a September 2001 interview, he defended his 1988 statement "Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Revolution. Revolution until victory. Rolling to Jerusalem," by saying that his comments were within the context of resisting "apartheid" and "occupation", resulting in the interviewer Bill O'Reilly calling for the CIA to shadow him. Al-Arian was indicted for racketeering for Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 2003, and he pled guilty to contributing services for the benefit of PIJ in exchange for five years of imprisonment and three years of supervised release. He protested the ruling with a 62-day hunger strike, and he faced several additional charges for criminal contempt. He was deported to Turkey in 2015, where he founded the Center for Islam and Global Affairs.