Paul Ajlouny

Paul A. Ajlouny is a Palestinian-American publisher and businessman known for launching the now-defunct Palestinian newspaper Al-fajr in 1972 in Jerusalem, and for his extensive work in the field of Palestinian development in both the United States and the Middle East.

Ajlouny was born in Ramallah, Palestine in 1933, but immigrated to the United States in 1946. He earned a degree in Engineering from the University of Kentucky in 1963. He is a United States Navy veteran.

Aljouny founded Al-Fajr newspaper in 1967 to respond to the educated Palestinian professional elite who saw the PLO as their representative. The media environment in Palestine at that time was dominated by broadsheets published by the Jordanian government. By 1993, the Columbia Journal Review described Al-Fajr as "gradually turning into a Palestinian version of Pravda", and the publication lost readership to the more independent-minded Al-Quds and An-Nahar. While running Al-Fajr, Ajlouny was living in New York. Al-Fajr was shut down on June 23, 1993, and Ajlouny claimed he was losing $25,000 per month to keep it operational.[1]

In the 1970s, while living in Hempstead, Long Island, Ajlouny claimed to be an advisor to the PLO. In November 1979, a U.S. district court in Brooklyn found him guilty of attempting to smuggle stolen communications equipment to the Middle East in early 1978. Th equipment, much of it owned by New York Telephone Company, was discovered by customs inspectors in April 1978. Federal prosecutors alleged that Aljouny's smuggling was part of a scheme to set up an independent telecommunications network for the PLO.[2]