http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/102101/uga_1021010106.shtml
As University of Georgia scholars planned a conference six years ago to promote understanding of the Muslim world, they looked for people who could speak knowledgeably from Islamist and Arab points of view -- not just Americans who had studied the area, looking at the world of Islam with Western preconceptions.
The speakers included a former U.S. attorney general, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States and some of the top scholars on the Middle East and Islam in the world.
One of them was a University of South Florida professor, a Palestinian exile with a Ph.D. in economics who had lived in the United States since 1990.
At the conference, the professor spoke eloquently and knowledgeably of what drives people to become terrorists. But participants in the January 1995 UGA conference "Islam and the West" didn't know just how knowledgeable Ramadan Abdullah was until later in the year.
That was when the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement announced its choice to replace Fathi Shaqaqi, assassinated by an Israeli agent in 1995.
The new leader was the South Florida panelist, Ramadan Abdullah -- now using his full name, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah.
Islamic Jihad has been blamed for the deaths of dozens of Israeli soldiers and civilians and at least one American.
Islamic Jihad and Shallah are also among the groups called by the United States government "specially designated terrorists," worthy of special law enforcement and surveillance attention, and whose assets have been frozen, if found by U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Shallah and his colleagues at a defunct Florida-based Palestinian think tank, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, or WISE, have also been linked to some of the terrorists blamed for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- at least according to a lawyer for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, who told a judge that some of the planners of the bomb attacks were participants in conferences sponsored by WISE.
A brother of Islamic Jihad founder Shaqaqi helped found WISE, which was linked contractually to Tampa's University of South Florida until a St. Petersburg, Fla., newspaper raised allegations about the think tank's ties to terrorist groups.
Shallah left for Syria six years ago, but controversy and suspicion continues to surround some of his colleagues at WISE.
The INS held one WISE member in custody for more than three years on secret evidence, using provisions of a controversial 1996 federal anti-terrorism law that allows federal officials to hold suspected terrorists in custody without revealing the evidence against them. In this and similar cases, civil rights lawyers have argued that the anti-terrorism law is a clear violation of the American right of the accused to confront his accusers in a trial decided by a citizen jury.
The man imprisoned on the secret evidence, suspended University of South Florida professor Mazen Al-Najjar, was finally freed by a federal judge's ruling late last year.
Another WISE member, University of South Florida engineering professor Sami al-Arian, was put on indefinite suspension with pay following the Sept. 11 terror attacks -- for his own protection and the safety of the university, according to university officials.
None of the WISE members has been charged with terroristic activities.
UGA political science professor Loch Johnson organized the 1995 Athens conference with Betty Jean Craige, head of UGA's Center for Humanities and Arts. He learned of Shallah's new role in life when he picked up his Nov. 13, 1995 New York Times, Johnson said. In it was an article about Shallah that followed up on a report in a New York Jewish weekly.
One part of the article seems eerily prescient today -- an observation by a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. In 1988, Islamic Jihad and similar organizations began moving some of their members not directly involved in terrorism abroad, the researcher said.
Johnson remembered Shallah when he saw his photo in the Times, but nothing of what he said.
But it was disturbing, Johnson recalled.
"It's just unnerving that someone could be a guest of our university (that) clearly must have had ties to extremist groups," he said.
It's also one more example of the kind of failures that have occurred much too often in America's intelligence agencies in the post-Cold War era, said Johnson, an authority on intelligence gathering.
Johnson wasn't the only one who was shocked to learn about Shallah's new job.
Another was Emory University political science professor Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, who recommended Shallah to the organizers.
Wickham met Shallah and other members of WISE at an academic conference two years earlier. Shallah asked her if he could translate one of her papers into Arabic and print it in a journal the think tank published, she said.
She remembered being unhappy with the translation, and spending a lot of time talking to Shallah trying to get the translation closer to the original.
She learned of Shallah's new job when the FBI followed up on Shallah's telephone records after word got out that he was the new head of Islamic Jihad. An agent called her husband at work, asking, "What is your connection to Ramadan Abdullah?" she recalled.
"I was actually quite disturbed," she said -- not so much that the FBI was calling, but because she just hadn't considered that Shallah's blunt criticisms of the United States and Israel would go that far beyond speech.
"I felt deceived at some level," she said. "He did not hide his very critical American policy perspective in the region, or what he viewed as Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land. I guess I had just failed to understand someone could be a serious intellectual counterpart and condone terrorist acts on civilians. I did not think of him as a committed terrorist."
Born 43 years ago in Gaza, an area now occupied by Israel, Shallah criticized Western "secularism" in his discussions at the UGA conference -- and defended another Palestinian extremist group allied with Islamic Jihad -- Hamas.
"Every student of Middle East studies, when (he) opens any textbook about the Middle East will find something called Palestine prior to 1949. And when we pass that date in the pages of the textbook, we lose that name on the map. Where is Palestine? The attempt to answer this question was sometimes by guns, conflict, everything," he said on the last day of the UGA conference, Islam and the West.
"The reason for any kind of atrocities ... or any kind of bloodshed, it is the issue of resistance," he said.
"What Hamas is doing in Palestine or in the Gaza strip is legitimate. It is better to concentrate on the reasons behind any kind of violence. This is the way to solve this problem. Look for the reasons for the problem. The root of the problem is, there is a kind of injustice."
Shallah cited four kinds of injustice that fuel terrorism, recalled UGA religion professor Alan Godlas, who met Shallah when Godlas moderated the panel "Islamic Society" on which Shallah was a speaker.
Among other things, Shallah criticized the West's double standards in the Middle East, proclaiming the ideal of democracy while supporting authoritarian regimes such as Egypt's rulers. Shallah also considered American capitalism a "take-no-prisoners, cutthroat form of capitalism," Godlas said.
Godlas was impressed by Shallah's experience -- "someone who has firsthand knowledge of the injustices he has talked about, and a scholar who has studied," he said -- but the religion professor also noted an act of kindness.
One of the panelists became ill during the conference, and Godlas at one point visited the sick man in his Georgia Center for Continuing Education hotel room. Shallah came along on the spur of the moment, Godlas said.
The episode raises questions about openness and security, Johnson said.
"The strength of America is based on the immigrants that have come here," he said.
Yet clearly, "the United States needs to learn more about people who are trying to get permanent U.S. residency," he said. "Maybe he still might have slipped through the net, but I believe in a thorough checking."
Craige agreed.
"I think ultimately the best way for us to be more secure is for us to all get to know each other better. I think the CIA needs be identifying these people as much as possible but I don't think closing our borders is the way. Globalization will take us (toward) desegregating all of our societies," she said.
Godlas has one more memory of Shallah at the 1995 conference, heavy with irony and symbolism today.
At the final plenary session, all the participants gathered on a stage at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education, and Shallah wound up sitting next to a participant from Israel.
"Of all these people, these two most resembled each other. They could have been brothers," Godlas said.