Still, controversy did not abate: "The death threats are not subsiding," Genshaft sighed in early October. And as the controversy rose, so did the political stakes: Genshaft's boss, after all, is Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. Over the summer, Bush had stopped by the USF campus and delivered a speech on academic freedom, but that was then and this was now.

Finally, on Dec. 19, the school let drop the other shoe: Al-Arian was fired, effective immediately. The professor, Genshaft said, had not made it clear on Fox that he was speaking for himself and not the university.

It was a peculiar accusation: Professors who appear on TV programs are hardly expected to issue such boilerplate disavowals. But Genshaft won immediate support from her boss. "Professors have the right to say things that are unpopular," Bush said. "But they do not have the right to disrupt the life of a university." Al-Arian, he declared, "continues to make very provocative statements" -- as if provocative statements are grounds for firing a scholar. None of the Florida press corps, apparently, thought to point out that it was threatening callers, not Al-Arian, who were doing the disrupting -- or that Al-Arian's offending rhetoric had been uttered when today's USF students were still in elementary school.

While Genshaft may have pleased Bush, her decision to fire Al-Arian elevated the case into a high-profile academic freedom controversy. And in a bizarre irony, one of the first to leap to the professor's defense was ... Bill O'Reilly. "You don't sack a tenured professor for saying stuff you don't like," he growled on his program. "This president of the University of South Florida should resign. She's a coward."

For Al-Arian's family, the firing comes at a particularly painful time. In late November the INS rearrested his brother-in-law Mazen Al-Najjar. No secret charges of terrorism this time: Instead, the INS is moving to deport him for overstaying a long-expired student visa. But as a stateless Palestinian he has nowhere to go, and supporters say the Justice Department is using his case to create a precedent for unlimited detention of Palestinian deportees.

In some ways, as a civil liberties issue, Al-Arian's firing pales beside his brother-in-law's second detention. After his earlier three-and-a-half-year stint in prison, with secret charges against him, again Al-Najjar is accused of no crime. But he is now being held in solitary confinement, in a maximum-security federal prison, strip-searched twice daily and forbidden contact visits with his family.

Yet the firing of a university professor for his views, past or present, has its own profound and disturbing echoes of witch hunts past. The plight of the Al-Arian family -- one member jailed awaiting deportation, the other fired from his teaching post -- recalls the precise conditions that inspired the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union during World War I: on the one hand, roundups of immigrant radicals, and on the other hand, the firing of antiwar academics like James McKeen Cattell, the founder of Columbia's psychology department, and political scientist Scott Nearing, who after being fired from the Wharton School of Business, achieved cult status for books on "Living the Good Life" in rural Vermont and Maine.

The very institution of academic tenure was created to ensure that scholars feel free to speak out on public controversies, whether in or outside their official academic portfolio. What's more, in a world haunted by terrorism, the stakes in the Sami Al-Arian case go beyond civil libertarian abstraction. If anything helps fuel terrorism, it is a sense that politics cannot work. Sami Al-Arian may be a militant Palestinian nationalist -- but he is a militant who proved to himself, and to his communities both in the US and abroad, that politics and democratic institutions like courts can work, by clearing his name and freeing his brother-in-law. Firing Al-Arian because of public hysteria over spurious charges turns the hiring and firing at USF over to a gang of hecklers and telephone thugs. And like the rearrest of his brother-in-law, it sends a disquieting worldwide message that democracy will betray those most clamoring for it.

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