Brandeis Stands Behind Scholar Accused of Ties to Terror

WASHINGTON
A Palestinian academic affiliated with Brandeis University dismissed allegations that he's linked to Islamic Jihad, and says he's not worried about attempts to persuade Jewish groups to cut him off.

Khalil Shikaki's employment at the Boston-area, Jewish-sponsored university came under fire from the Zionist Organization of America, which called on donors to reconsider their relationship with Brandeis. ZOA alleged that Shikaki distributed funds on behalf of figures associated with Islamic Jihad.

Shikaki flatly denied this: "There was no transfer of funds."

Shikaki, who heads the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah in the West Bank, co-teaches a course at Brandeis on peacemaking with an Israeli and an Egyptian academic.

He said the FBI interviewed him in 2003, showing him transcripts of conversations in 1995 with Sameeh Hammoudeh, who was acquitted Dec. 6 in a Florida court of charges that he helped fund the Palestinian terrorist group. Shikaki said the conversations, secretly recorded by the FBI, concerned funds for an orphanage in the West Bank city of Nablus run by his in-laws. The FBI never contacted him again, he said.

His efforts to fund the orphanage came from "a personal desire to help people," according to Shikaki.

'No Taint at All'
The government argued in its case against Hammoudeh and three others that "orphanages" was a code word for Islamic Jihad, an organization led by Shikaki's brother Fatih until he was slain by Israeli agents in Malta in 1995.

The revelation of the tapped conversations in the New York Sun this week led the ZOA and some individuals to call on Brandeis, a university with a strong Jewish donor base, to cut off Shikaki.

Brandeis says it is standing by Shikaki, noting that U.S. law enforcement never pursued any action against him.

"We believe that we still live in a country where people are presumed innocent until proven guilty," said Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz in a statement.

But Morton Klein, president of the ZOA, said the university's standard was too low. "The standard shouldn't be 'innocent until proven guilty' - that's woefully inadequate. There should be no taint at all."

Stephen Flatow, whose daughter Alisa, a Brandeis alumnus, was killed in a 1995 Islamic Jihad terrorist attack in the Gaza Strip, also criticized the university, the Forward reported, though he stopped short of endorsing a boycott.

Shikaki, whose polls have uncovered strains of moderation among Palestinian voters, stated that he often has been the target of such campaigns by supporters of Israel who oppose compromise with the Palestinians. Another such campaign did not prevent him from addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in 2004, he added.

"I'm aware of people who have tried to prevent American Jewish groups from associating with me," he said. "In all cases, they have failed."

He suggested that such groups fear Palestinian moderation will hasten Israeli withdrawals from land the Palestinians claim.

Depicted as a Moderate
Shikaki often works with Jewish groups. He's been a frequent guest of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank with a pro-Israel emphasis.

In 2003, a mob ransacked Shikaki's Ramallah offices and injured him after he published a poll showing that very few Palestinian refugees would actualize a "right of return" to Israel even if it were granted.

But Klein rejected the depiction of Shikaki as a moderate.

"We're upset about his being at Brandeis because the evidence is too strong he is involved with terrorist groups, and I've never heard him unequivocally condemning the Palestinian Authority for not dismantling terrorists," he said.

The transcripts reported in the New York Sun suggest that the contact with Hammoudeh and his colleagues made Shikaki uncomfortable.

In fact, he wound up cutting off Hammoudeh five days after President Clinton signed an order in late January 1995 designating Islamic Jihad as a terrorist group.