Author: Martin Kramer

Will Germany Release an American-Killer?

On By Martin Kramer

In the next few days, Israel and Hizbullah are supposed to consummate their exchange of prisoners, bodies, and information. Germany has been the mediator in the deal. It wouldn’t be the business of the United States, except now there is a report that the Germans have promised to release a brutal Hizbullah terrorist, who in June 1985 hijacked an American airliner to Beirut, and tortured and killed a U.S. Navy diver.

The report is by Israeli journalist Aluf Benn in today’s Haaretz. Benn states that in return for Hizbullah’s disclosure about the fate of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, Germany has “slated” three persons for release—a Hizbullah operative and two Iranian agents—all imprisoned in Germany for terror attacks. “One of them,” the report goes on to say, “was convicted of murdering an American naval officer; he took orders from Imad Mughniyeh, who coordinates international terror strikes for Hezbollah.” The report relates that Germany has “promised to release” this terrorist, Muhammad Ali Hamadei, now serving a life sentence for the June 1985 hijacking of TWA 847, and for the murder of one of the passengers, Navy diver Robert Stethem.

I have no idea who is feeding Benn with information, but this story follows the newspaper’s lead story from the day before, in which Benn alluded to the same thing. So someone is floating a trial balloon—and it’s time to shoot it down, before it gains any altitude at all.

Who is Muhammad Ali Hamadei? I’m going to let Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) tell you that. This is from a statement he made on the floor of the Senate in May 1989, congratulating a German court for sentencing Hamadei to life imprisonment:

The facts of the Hamadei case shock the conscience. On June 14, 1985, Trans World Airline flight 847 departed Athens International Airport enroute to Rome, Italy with 153 passengers and crew on board, most of them Americans. Approximately 10 minutes into the flight, two hijackers, later identified as Mohammad Hamadei and Hasan Izz-al-din, commandeered the aircraft and ran through the plane brandishing hand grenades and a pistol while randomly striking the seated passengers on the head, neck, and shoulders with their weapons. The hijackers forced Chief Stewardess Uli Derickson to the flight deck area and gained access to the cockpit. The hijackers then pistol-whipped the flight crew inside the cockpit and ordered the pilot to fly to Algiers. The aircraft ultimately flew between Beirut and Algiers several times during the next 2 days while the hijackers retained control of the plane.

Once in control of the aircraft, the hijackers ordered Derickson to collect all passports and separate those of U.S. citizens and military personnel. The terrorists then ordered the military personnel into the first-class section one at a time for questioning, beginning with Navy diver Robert Stethem. The hijackers bound his arms together with an electrical cord, cutting off his circulation, and beat him until he was unconscious. Several other passengers were also beaten. Stethem regained consciousness, only to be shot in the head in cold blood. The hijackers dumped his body onto the tarmac in Beirut before several more hijackers boarded the plane for its flight back to Algiers.

The terrorists eventually abandoned the plane after its final landing in Beirut. Thirty-nine passengers were removed from the aircraft and held hostage in various locations in Beirut for 17 additional days before they finally were freed on June 30, 1985.

Hamadei, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim, was arrested in Frankfurt, West Germany. A number of the Members of this body, including this Senator, believe that the West Germans should have extradited Hamadei to the United States to stand trial in Federal district court, but that did not come to pass. While I regret the West German decision not to honor our extradition request, I commend the Germans for bringing this terrorist to justice and I applaud the West German court for imposing the maximum sentence of life imprisonment upon Hamadei.

A bit more context: the West Germans had arrested Hamadei on January 13, 1987, at the Frankfurt airport, through which he was trying to smuggle explosives. The United States immediately requested his extradition; Hizbullah immediately abducted two West Germans in Beirut, and threatened to kill them if Hamadei were extradited. That pretty much solved the dilemma for the West Germans: they would try Hamadei themselves. Even a personal appeal from President Ronald Reagan to Chancellor Helmut Kohl didn’t change their minds.

It’s been seventeen years since Hamadei’s arrest, and almost fifteen years since his conviction. In fact, there isn’t a sentence long enough for Hamadei, but he was sentenced to life, and life he should serve. He didn’t commit his ruthless crime against Germany or Israel, and Germany has no moral right to pardon or release him. His co-hijacker, Hasan Izz al-Din, is still on the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists for his part in the same hijacking and murder. Izz al-Din’s wanted poster offers a reward of up to $25 million for information leading to his arrest. From the U.S. point of view, the 1985 TWA hijacking is a fresh crime, and now would be a good time to remind the Germans of just that.

Want to send a reminder yourself? Tell Senator Specter to speak out again. (Contact information here.) Back in 1989, on the Senate floor, Senator Specter praised the West German criminal justice system “for convicting Mohammad Hamadei and imposing the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.” The German government should be told exactly what it would hear on the Senate floor, and across the United States, were it ever to free this American-killer.

More background: The failure to secure Hamadei’s extradition in 1987 is taught as a case study in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Many persons were interviewed for the study. The extradition, according to this account, became a bone of contention among the Justice Department, the State Department, and the National Security Council. In the end, Reagan gave Kohl an exit, much to the consternation of Justice.

H.R. 3077: The Dean’s Deception

On By Martin Kramer

Congress is back to business in Washington. That business includes H.R.3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, which the House of Representatives passed unanimously last autumn. Now the bill is in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican. The bill, it will be recalled, would establish an International Advisory Board for the Title VI program, which subsidizes foreign area studies in U.S. universities. The board would advise the Department of Education and the Congress on how Title VI might best meet national needs.

I’ve written a great deal at Sandstorm in support of this legislation, as has Stanley Kurtz over at National Review Online. Recently, other knowledgeable people have come forward to put the the legislation in proper context. Diane Jones, director of the government affairs office at Princeton, has written a piece in the Yale Daily News, calling the reaction of some academics to the bill a “panic.” Her conclusion: “The roles and responsibilities of the International Advisory Board, as outlined in the final version of the House bill, are in alignment with those of other federal advisory boards.” Kenneth D. Whitehead, a former Department of Education assistant secretary, has published a strong endorsement of the bill and the proposed board. Whitehead: “As the federal official who administered and supervised Title VI from 1982 through 1989, I know the program inside and out—and I know that it needs an advisory board.” The message sent by Jones and Whitehead is clear: H.R.3077 falls entirely within the range of sound and responsible legislation.

The creation of some sort of a board now seems inevitable. That has left academic opponents of H.R.3077 with one remaining gambit: revising the composition of the board itself. The House version of the bill envisions a seven-member board. Two members would be appointed by the President pro-tem of the Senate, and two by the Speaker of the House, in both instances on recommendation of the majority and minority leaders. Three members would be appointed by the Secretary of Education, two of whom would represent agencies with national security responsibilities. (In an earlier posting, I explained what that means.)

Whitehead, in his endorsement, called this composition “a perfect formula.” But some academics disagree. They want to rob Congress of any say in appointments, and they want to keep out representatives of any agency that has a role in national security. So they are proposing a different kind of advisory board, comprised of…themselves. Yes, the academics want to be the ones to advise Washington on how to meet national needs.

The champion of this alternative is Professor Lisa Anderson, dean of international affairs at Columbia University. A journalist who spoke to her paraphrased her position in these words: Why an advisory council composed of political appointees? Why not turn supervision over to an august body like the National Research Council? Why not represent nongovernmental organizations or educational institutions themselves, all of which have a stake in the work of international-studies research?

Anderson’s position has been adopted by Columbia itself. The university’s director of government relations, Ellen Smith, has been quoted as saying: “We feel that an advisory board with goals set by an independent body such as the National Academy of Sciences would make most sense.” This proposal apparently has been conveyed to Senator Hillary Clinton, the New York Democrat who also sits on the HELP Committee.

Let me not put too fine a point on it: the Anderson/Columbia proposal would effectively gut H.R.3077. If any variation of it were to creep into the Senate version of the bill, I and others who have supported the legislation would turn against it with a vengeance. Why? It’s a ploy to keep Congress, government departments, and experienced non-academics completely out of the Title VI advisory process.

To understand how it’s a ploy, you have to know something about the National Academy of Sciences and its instrument, the National Research Council. These are august bodies, but they also have absolutely no connection to area studies. They deal exclusively with real science. Look at the governing board of the National Research Council. It’s chaired by a biochemist, vice-chaired by an engineer, and presided over by a physician. Every member of the governing board comes from the hard sciences or engineering.

Professor Anderson knows this perfectly well. She also knows that such a body would come straight to her and the university-based mandarins for “expertise.” The resulting board would be a rubber-stamp for the beneficiaries of Title VI subsidies, instead of a tool for critical scrutiny by independent observers. In the twisted vision behind this proposal, the stakeholders of Title VI are the professors themselves, not the U.S. government or the American people. Whitehead has put it best:

The alternative proposals for a board now floating around academe would all effectively mandate the academic beneficiaries of Title VI to monitor and advise themselves. I know from past experience that such a board would be worse than useless. You cannot set national priorities by peer review. The vast majority of academics have neither the knowledge of nor, apparently, any great concern about the needs of government. The Department of Education doesn’t need more advice from academics; it needs more advice from other government departments and experts with international experience. Only they can tell whether Title VI is pulling its weight.

Senators: the present composition of the board, itself the product of a compromise, strikes just the right balance among competing interests. Don’t be deceived. You have it within your power to launch a new era of area studies in the United States, one of genuine partnership between government and academe—provided the bill passes just as it is.

Addendum: Some Advice for Georgetown. The Washington Post ran an inept article on Middle Eastern studies last week, mixing up everything: Campus Watch, Daniel Pipes, H.R.3077, you name it. The issues were beyond the grasp of the journalist. But there’s a remarkable quote there, from Professor Michael Hudson, director of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). Hudson is reacting to the idea of an advisory board for Title VI:

We are very sensitive to having strings attached to what we do. If an Arab government came to us and said, “We will give you money, but we will have an advisory body check up on what you do with it,” I don’t think we would take the money.

Let’s leave aside the obvious fallacy: the U.S. government is not on par with an Arab government, because it’s our government, and it’s accountable. It has a legal obligation to check up on what is done with taxpayer dollars.

But there’s another fallacy here, Professor Hudson. Your CCAS already has a board of advisors. Its members include Prince Turki Al-Faisal bin Abd Al-Aziz Al-Saud, former head of Saudi intelligence and now Saudi ambassador to London; and Sheikh Abdulrahman bin Saud Al-Thani, former ambassador of Qatar to Washington and a high official in the Emir of Qatar’s protocol office. That establishes what CCAS is prepared to do for a riyal. It’s just a question of the price.

Dr. Rashid and Mr. Khalidi

On By Martin Kramer

On December 11, Al-Jazeera’s program “From Washington” held a discussion on Middle Eastern studies in the United States. Chief guest: Professor Rashid Khalidi, the newly-seated incumbent of the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of that university’s (government-subsidized) Middle East Institute. He said little that was original or surprising—until the end, when he blew a gasket and uttered the sort of thing he would only dare to say in Arabic.

It happened like this. At one point in the discussion, Khalidi criticized think tanks “that don’t want true dialogue with people whose views differ from their own, but who want to force their opinions on American citizens and the world.” He mentioned, by way of example, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which he labelled “the fiercest of the enemies of the Arabs and the Muslims.”

The moderator, Hafiz al-Mirazi, played devil’s advocate. Hadn’t the Institute often hosted Arabs and others holding diverse views? It had provided a podium for Nabil Amr, Palestinian information minister, as well as Egyptian presidential adviser Osama al-Baz. Just recently, Washington Institute mainstay David Makovsky had written a joint op-ed with an Egyptian writer from Al-Ahram (the reference was to Dr. Hala Mustafa, a visiting fellow), on democracy promotion in the Arab world.

At this point, Khalidi boiled over:

By God, I say that the participation of the sons or daughters of the Arabs in the plans and affairs of this institute is a huge error, this Israeli institute in Washington, an institute founded by AIPAC, the Zionist lobby, and that hosts tens of Israelis every year. The presence of an Arab or two each year can’t disguise the nature of this institute as the most important center of Zionist interests in Washington for at least a decade. I very much regret the participation of Arab officials and non-officials and academics in the activities of this institute, because in fact if you look at the output of this institute, it’s directed against the Palestinians, against the Arabs, and against the Muslims in general. Its products describe the Palestinians as terrorists, and in fact its basic function is to spread lies and falsehoods about the Arab world, of course under an academic, scholarly veneer. Basically, this is the most important Zionist propaganda tool in the United States.

This is the intimidating language of Arab boycott, aimed against an institution with entirely American credentials. The Washington Institute is directed by Ambassador Dennis Ross, who was the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He has always been a model of balance (unlike Khalidi, whose forays into politics have always been to advise Yasir Arafat). The Washington Institute is run by Americans, and accepts funds only from American sources. (Contrast with the donors of Khalidi’s chair, whose precise identities Columbia still refuses to reveal.)

And it is outrageous for Khalidi to denounce the Arabs who have come to The Washington Institute as blundering dupes. I was there in the fall, when the Institute brought to Washington a group of Palestinian Fatah activists associated with the Tanzim (an invitation for which Ross took a lot of flak). While in Washington, these Palestinians said things that could hardly be squared with “Zionist propaganda.” Who is Khalidi to tell them they made a “huge error”? For its annual fall conference, the Institute flew in three members of Iraq’s Governing Council, whose country would still be under Saddam’s iron rule if Khalidi had had his way. Who is he to tell them they made a “huge error”? The year before last, my stay coincided with that of Ali Salem, the Egyptian playwright who has faced down Egypt’s entire literary establishment, and who once was detained for his collaboration with democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Who in the world is Khalidi to tell him that he made a “huge error”? I doubt these steel-belted Arabs would ever allow themselves to be intimidated by a pampered prof enjoying the full Columbia treatment.

I note that Khalidi has never made a comparable statement in English, probably for this reason: it would damage his reputation as a bridge-building moderate. To maintain that image, he’s even shared podiums with members of The Washington Institute (to wit, David Makovsky). But Khalidi in Arabic, on Al-Jazeera, is someone else altogether. There he is the bridge-burner, the zealot who would warn other Arabs away from The Washington Institute because it is “Israeli,” and a “Zionist propaganda tool.” Behold, Arab-style McCarthyism.

Khalidi’s crude outburst won’t stop the caravan, but it does put yet another question mark alongside his name. I have never called him an apologist for terrorism, and I respect some of his historical scholarship. But I once heard him speak to a predominantly Arab audience, and it alarmed me. This latest statement confirms something I’ve suspected ever since: he isn’t all he appears to be. Caveat emptor—buyer beware. (Too late for Columbia, but not for the rest of us.)

And speaking of Columbia, what has Khalidi done to promote what he calls “true dialogue” since his September enthronement in the Edward Said Chair? Two Israelis—academic post-Zionists—spoke at his institute this past semester. He and they would have nodded in agreement over Israel’s alleged misdeeds. I don’t think that’s good enough, and it leaves me wondering (again) why his institute gets what The Washington Institute doesn’t get: a $400,000-a-year Title VI handout from the American taxpayer. It’s a dubious mechanism that puts such a hefty subsidy at the disposal of an Arab boycotter. It really should be fixed.