Suffice it to say that the Omar al-Safi resolution was an astonishing blunder, a faux pas about which the ALA now hopes the public at large, particularly after the tragedy of 9-11, will remain ignorant.
But the al-Safi resolution should be neither obscured nor forgotten by the American people, because its passage exposes so much that is wrong and vicious about the American Library Association.
First, Omar al Safi was a terrorist nom de guerre for a convicted felon, with a long and violent criminal record, who was never deported by Israel.
Second, there is nothing to indicate that he was ever a professional librarian, although he seems to have occasionally worked in the library of Bir Zeit, a university that owes its existence to Israel’s administration of the territories. The Jordanians never allowed it to be founded; after June 1967 Israel did.
Finally and most importantly, al-Safi was a member of and recruiter for the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a ruthless terror gang that still calls for the murder of all Jewish Israelis and which only recently took ”credit” for the death of an Israeli child.
One of the many atrocities carried out by that group of sadistic thugs that most readers will surely remember was the 1974 massacre in Maalot of twenty-two Israeli schoolchildren plus several adults.
Thus, the American Library Association — a major organization of professionals who, to a very large extent, work with schoolchildren, and whose conventions are, in part, funded by U.S. taxpayer money — passed a resolution in support of a terrorist from a group with a long history of targeting children for murder.
It must also be pointed out that al-Safi has not been the only terrorist murderer linked to the ALA’s anti-Israel campaigns. An invited guest at a 1992 ALA convention was Khader Hamide, a member of and fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP, which is the parent group of the DFLP murderers, gained particular notoriety in the 1970’s due to its penchant for gunning down civilians in airports and hijacking commercial passenger planes around the world.
Among its many crimes against humanity, the PFLP planned the 1972 Japanese Red Army machine-gun rampage at Ben-Gurion (formerly Lod) Airport, which left sixteen Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims dead, among the other innocents who were butchered. More recently, the PFLP assassinated Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavim Ze’evi.
In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Khader Hamide — the PFLP killer and honored ALA guest speaker — be deported from the United States.
While these revelations are undoubtedly disgusting, what is especially alarming is the fact that this past June the SRRT also tried to get the American Library Association Council to pass a resolution that urged librarians to focus on the acquisition of politically correct — i.e. radical, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. and anti-democracy — materials for their collections. (Fidel Castro’s dictatorship has been lauded by this bunch.)
And while the resolution has not been formalized as official ALA policy, evidence is emerging that far-left librarians have been implementing it in their own unofficial fashion. Especially troubling is what appears to be an unspoken policy of de facto censorship that hinders the public’s access to centrist, conservative and pro-American books and material.
Recently, attorney J. Edward Pawlick did democracy a great service by reporting the results of searches in 35 Massachusetts libraries for eleven important conservative books. Their paucity or absence in library collections led Pawlick to assert, ”The professional librarians appear to be the leaders of the censorship effort.” He further stated, ”If they wish to censor, they don’t have to burn anything. They just refuse buy the book. It’s very tidy and very clean.”
