A Loss for Diversity

Salam Al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, will not serve on a federal panel looking at the prevention and punishment of terrorism after all. House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who named Al-Marayati to the 10-member National Commission on Terrorism, rescinded his appointment after a number of Jewish groups vehemently protested. There’s nothing unusual about politicians caving in to organized pressure. But in this case the pressure was unwarranted, and Gephardt should have found the courage to resist it.

Those who know Al-Marayati know that he is not an apologist for Arab terrorism or a defender of radical causes, as some of the Jewish organizations allege. He is a moderate representative of the Los Angeles area’s large and multinational Muslim community, and he has won the respect of many in the Jewish community with whom he has worked. His sympathies in Arab-Israeli disputes are undisguised and understandable. They might not be to the liking of, say, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), but that has nothing to do with his competence to serve on the commission on terrorism. We are a society whose first and most vital freedom defends diversity of opinion and expression.

There are many, including many U.S. Jews, who do not find the ZOA’s reflexive support of Israel and its attacks on critics of Israeli policies to their liking. That does not disqualify the ZOA from a role in American public life.

The groups that attacked Al-Marayati combed his public statements for evidence of his supposed tolerance of anti-Israel terrorism. The best they could offer in support of their allegations were a few sentences that some might infer to be insufficiently condemnatory. That is hardly grounds for denying Al-Marayati a place on the commission. Surely Gephardt was aware of all this when he appointed Al-Marayati. His retreat from that decision is craven and grossly unfair.