Bush
and his friend
Sami, the Terrorist

First, the phony photo

By now everyone has seen the fake photo showing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry seated next to Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally.  And we hope that by now everyone knows this photo is a fake.  If you don't know that, here are the facts.

John Kerry is a Vietnam veteran who returned from Vietnam and became active in the anti-war movement.  The right wing of the Republican Party still looks upon the disastrous Vietnam War as a gallant crusade and they detest anyone who was opposed to that war.  Kerry has come in for vicious, slimy attacks from Republicans because of his anti-war stance.  Of course, the Republicans want us to ignore the fact that George W. Bush dodged the military draft to avoid service in Vietnam -- but that's another story.

Jane Fonda was an active and vocal opponent to the war in Vietnam.  In the later years of the war, she made a trip to Hanoi where she supported the North Vietnamese in their war against the U.S. thereby earning the eternal enmity of many veterans, myself included -- I have no use for her.

The Bush campaign hoped to smear Kerry by tying him to Fonda.  One of their first attempts was this phony photo, distributed by one Ted Sampley of Kinston, NC.

Wow!  How about that!  John Kerry seated alongside Jane Fonda -- obviously this makes him a traitor, unfit to be President.

But wait -- there's more -- the photo is a fake.  It is a composite of two photographs made at different times, different places:

The fake photo was created by merging two different photographs (both available through the Corbis archives) taken at two completely different times and places. The picture of John Kerry was captured by 20-year-old photographer Ken Light and documented Kerry preparing to give a speech at the Register for Peace Rally held in Mineola, New York, on 13 June 1971. The picture of Jane Fonda was snapped by Owen Franken over a year later while the actress was speaking at a political rally in Miami Beach, Florida, site of the Republican National Convention, in August 1972.

Contemporaneous news accounts do not list Jane Fonda as one of the speakers at the 1971 Register for Peace Rally.

Ken Light, the photographer who snapped the original picture of John Kerry used in the above composite, Corbis, the rightsholder to both the original images, and the Associated Press, whose name was invoked in the caption to the spoofed image, have all announced their intentions to identify the perpetrator who created the composite with an eye towards pursuing copyright or trademark infringement claims. Photographer Ken Light also penned an editorial giving his reactions to the issue of photo fakery which was published in the Washington Post.

Now, a real photo

Meanwhile, here's a photo and a story that the Bush people hope you never see.  This photo was taken while Bush was campaigning in Florida during the 2000 campaign.  Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, decided that Bush needed support in the American Muslim community so Rove made a point of having Bush meet with prominent Muslims in several communities.  This photo shows Bush surrounded by friends and family of one Sami Al-Arian.

Dr. Sami Al-Arian is a University of South Florida professor and his son Abdullah was a Duke University student when this photo was taken.

Dr. Al-Arian is the author of this speech: "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."

But, according to the 16 July 2000 Newsweek, during a campaign speech in Tampa, last year, candidate Bush singled out Sami's son, Abdullah, in the crowd, something done for specially selected, pre-screened individuals to which a candidate wants to draw attention. Calling Abdullah, "Big Dude" – one of his trademark nicknames reserved for close advisors and White House press, Bush and wife Laura posed for pictures with the Arian family, standing right next to Dr. Al-Arian.

The problem is, Dr. Al-Arian is the U.S. frontman for one of the largest terrorist-group coalitions in the world – Islamic Jihad – which was declared an international terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and which openly promotes death to Americans.

President of the Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP), Al-Arian headed up the primary U.S. support group for Islamic Jihad, according to "Jihad in America," a 1994 PBS documentary on Arab Muslim terrorists in America, produced and reported by Steven Emerson – a courageous investigative journalist who has worked for the U.S. News & World Report and CNN. "Jihad in America" can be viewed online. (Dr. Al-Arian and his activities are detailed in the last quarter of the hour-long documentary.)

When "Jihad in America" was first set for broadcast in 1994, Arab- and Muslim-American leaders tried to censor PBS and prevent its broadcast. Instead of deploring Arab terrorist groups in the U.S., they demanded and were granted 1.5 hours of PBS airtime to justify these groups and people like Al-Arian. As a result of this documentary and other similar work, Emerson – a real-life Indiana Jones exposing U.S.-based Islamic terrorist groups – received constant death threats from Arab terrorist groups, which the Arab-American community (that today professes a love of America amidst the WTC bombing) refused to condemn.

FBI and INS affidavits accused Sami Al-Arian of, "among other things, 'fraud and misuse of visas' and 'aiding and abetting or assisting certain aliens' involved in terrorism to enter the United States unlawfully." Islamic Jihad's newspaper, "Islam and Palestine," openly promotes jihad against the West, and has listed Al-Arian's ICP as one of its main offices, complete with ICP's Tampa address.

Here are a few of the activities by Dr. Sami Al-Arian's group:

• ICP conferences have featured Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the ringleader of the first WTC bombing in 1993 and now in prison, and Sheik Abdul Aziz Odeh, the spiritual leader to Islamic Jihad and a named unindicted co-conspirator in the first WTC bombing.
• Odeh has also been a guest at Al-Arian's Masjid Al-Qassan Mosque in Tampa, named for a Palestinian terrorist. Al-Arian also heads World Islamic Studies Enterprise, which according to the Wall Street Journal, "brought terrorists into the U.S. and raised funds for Islamic Jihad."
• One of those terrorists was Al-Arian's good friend Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, for whom he arranged a visa, who also became a USF professor and director of WISE, and who is now the head of Islamic Jihad, based in Damascus Syria. Disguised as religious charities, ICP and WISE collaborated with and laundered money for parties involved in the 1993 WTC bombing, including Sheik Rahman. These facts were confirmed by Emerson in sworn congressional testimony on Feb. 24, 1998, and May 23, 2000.
• From 1988-1992, Al-Arian organized a series of conferences featuring "a number of the world's top, terrorist leaders" and worked with "Hamas leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere, and helped oversee terrorist cells in the Middle East."
• Al-Arian's brother in law, Mazen al-Najjar, was jailed for three years for using a University of South Florida Islamic think tank as a front for terrorism. He was released because secret evidence against him was prohibited and is soon to be deported as an illegal alien, but in a hearing to release him, Al-Arian "invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination 99 times," according to the Associated Press.

Newsweek also reports that Al-Arian campaigned for Bush "when Bush decried the use of secret evidence during the campaign" – secret evidence that should've been used to deport Al-Arian. And it details the anger of Muslim-Americans, who walked out of the Bush White House in protest when Abdullah Al-Arian was ejected from a Bush meeting, based on the evidence.

Instead of being embarrassed, Muslim- and Arab-American leaders decried it as profiling, and the Al-Arian family is a cause célèbre for Arab- and Muslim-American leaders. Dr. Al-Arian has become a "civil rights leader" among them. Incredible. Even more incredible, Bush apologized to the junior Al-Arian for ejecting him from the White House, inviting him back. He dispatched the deputy director of the U.S. Secret Service to Congressman Bonior's office to personally apologize to the 20-year-old intern. And, in June, the New York Times reported that Dr. Al-Arian, himself, "was among a group of Muslim leaders admitted to the White House for a political briefing."

"[Bush] has to do something to pay this community back," Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab-American News, protested to Newsweek.

In "Jihad in America," Emerson stood in front of the New York skyline and the WTC was still there. But, unfortunately, no one listened to his documentary's message about Arab terrorist groups in America.  How many more documentaries will he have to make? 

How many more terrorists has George W. Bush embraced?

The Federal Case against Sami Al-Arian

Dr. Sami al-Arian was arrested in February 2003 and charged with over 100 counts of aiding terrorists, providing support to terrorists, and other charges related to assisting terrorists.

Here is a link to the website for the federal court where Sami Al-Arian will be tried in January 2005.

http://www.flmd.uscourts.gov/al-arian/Al-Arian.htm