Shikaki, by the way, has been lionized for years as a moderate Muslim voice. From the New York Sun, with thanks to Looney Tunes:
WASHINGTON – Concern is mounting about the possible connections between a prominent Palestinian Arab scholar, Khalil Shikaki, and leading members of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Government wiretaps introduced at the trial of a Florida professor accused of operating the American wing of PIJ, Sami Al-Arian, show Mr. Shikaki distributed money in the West Bank for Al-Arian associates allegedly tied to PIJ – conversations the federal government argues may represent terrorist activity.
Mr. Shikaki is, among many scholarly affiliations, the founder and director of a prominent polling institute, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, and last year was named a scholar at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Among Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s more notorious acts was an April 1995 bombing in Israel that killed a Brandeis student, Alisa Flatow.
He is also the brother of the assassinated founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shikaki, and a former director of the Florida-based World & Islam Studies Enterprise. WISE was founded by Mr. Al-Arian and connected to several other figures involved in the recent PIJ terrorism trials in Tampa, Fla., during which Mr. Al-Arian and three co-defendants were acquitted.
Mr. Shikaki has not been indicted on any criminal charges in America, and has repeatedly denied any connection to his brother’s terrorist operation; any knowledge of the connections between WISE and the Islamic Committee for Palestine – both alleged by the government to be front groups for Islamic Jihad – and PIJ, and any knowledge that top figures in the organization with whom he had associated, including its current leader, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, and an Al-Arian associate affiliated with WISE, Sameeh Hammoudeh, were at all involved in PIJ. Mr. Hammoudeh was one of the co-defendants in the Al-Arian case, and was acquitted on all counts.
Wiretaps of conversations between Messrs. Shikaki, Shallah, and Hammoudeh introduced as evidence at the Al-Arian trial, however, suggest that Mr. Shikaki distributed money in the West Bank for Al-Arian associates, who raised the funds in America, and then stopped the money transfers in January 1995, shortly after PIJ was declared a blocked terrorist organization by President Clinton.
Read it all.