The National Press Club should be Freeped mightily for giving these ex-cons, misfits, and traitors a soapbox.
In 1995, Al-Najjar was completing his doctorate in industrial management at the University of South Florida, where he taught Arabic as an adjunct professor. A Palestinian refugee born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he had lived in the United States on a student visa for 10 years.
He worked as a volunteer researcher with his brother-in-law, USF colleague and fellow Palestinian Sami Al-Arian.
The two men were devoted to Al-Arian's brainchild, a USF-sponsored research center called the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, or WISE. Both say the purpose of the center, which operated out of a cramped USF office on a budget of about $20,000 a year, was to bring U.S. and Middle Eastern scholars together to discuss political and economic issues in that part of the world.
Today, at 43, Al-Najjar is still battling deportation, a process that could take years. In the meantime, the government is refusing to give him a work permit. He and his wife are living on her salary as a pharmacist and what little he can make as a translator and lecturer.
He also teaches at the Islamic Academy of Florida, a small school where Al-Arian, his former WISE colleague, is the principal. Islamic Academy of Florida faculity and staff