by
NJJN Staff Writer

Stephen Flatow, the West Orange attorney whose 20-year-old daughter Alisa died in a 1995 Gaza bus bombing, said he was “pleased and surprised” at the prison sentence given to Sami Al-Arian, a pro-Palestinian activist and Florida college professor who pleaded guilty to supporting Islamic Jihad, the group held responsible for the attack.

Federal District Court Judge James Moody sentenced Al-Arian to four years and nine months behind bars Monday, May 1, crediting the computer engineering professor with prison time already served.

That makes Al-Arian eligible for release in late 2007, before deportation either to his native Kuwait or to Egypt, where he lived from 1966 until his immigration to America in 1975.

Because Al-Arian was not deemed guilty of any violent crime, a federal statute prevented Flatow from speaking at the sentencing in a Tampa federal court.

But in an April 27 letter, Flatow urged Moody “to impose the most severe sentence possible” on Al-Arian, labeling him “just as culpable as the actual bomber” in his daughter’s death.

“Sami got the max,” Flatow, chair of the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, told NJ Jewish News. “The judge had his head screwed on correctly. In his opinion, he was telling Sami, ‘I would have convicted you.’”

But it was the members of a jury in Tampa — not Judge Moody — who found Al-Arian not guilty of eight of the 17 terrorist conspiracy charges in December 2005. Last month, the defendant pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported. In exchange, prosecutors dropped eight remaining charges against him.

“No one has ever said that Sami Al-Arian was in Gaza the day the bomb went off. And we have never accused Sami Al-Arian of recruiting the suicide bomber, of driving the truck, or pushing the plunger on the bomb that killed Alisa that Sunday morning,” Flatow wrote to the judge.

“However, by pleading guilty to conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds, goods, or services to or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, I believe Mr. Al-Arian at long last admits his role in providing the material means to kill Alisa and seven others that morning and is just as culpable as the actual bomber in her death,” the letter said.

As he sentenced Al-Arian, Moody called him “a master manipulator” and “an active leader” of the Islamic Jihad.

Although his attorneys argued at trial there was no proof that Al-Arian was aware of aiding any acts of violence, and that the only money he helped raise was for Palestinian charities, the judge scoffed.

“Your only connection to widows and orphans was that you create them,” Moody told the defendant.