Hamas Front, The Holy Land Foundation, Guilty On All Charges
The most important terrorism trial of recent times has ended in a conviction:
A jury on Monday determined that the Holy Land Foundation and five men who worked with the Muslim charity were guilty of three dozen counts related to the illegal funneling of at least $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The unanimous verdicts are a complete victory for the government, which streamlined its case and worked hard to carefully educate jurors on the complex, massive evidence presented in the trial. Guilty verdicts were read on 108 separate charges.
…
Opening statements at the Earle Cabell Federal Courthouse in downtown Dallas began Sept. 22. Over the past two months, prosecutors attempted to prove that five former charity organizers used Holy Land, once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., to funnel an estimated $60 million to the militant group — most of it before 1995.
Hamas was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1995, and the trial centered on the $12 million the government said Holy Land and supporters funneled to the group after that date.
Defense attorneys argued that the foundation was a legitimate, non-political charity that helped distressed Palestinians under Israeli occupation. They accused the government of bending to Israeli pressure to prosecute the charity, and of relying on old evidence predating the 1995 designation.
Holy Land was formed in the late 1980s, and was shut down by U.S. government regulators in December 2001. The case was indicted in 2004.
…
“I suspect that they will be viewed much the same way that Mandela was viewed by the black South African population — as freedom fighters who have dedicated their lives to the liberation of Palestine,” William Moffitt, the Virginia defense attorney who represented two former university professors, Abdelhaleem Ashqar and Sami Al-Arian, said before the Holy Land verdicts.
If the nature of the defence was that the murderous, theocratic terrorist group, Hamas, is the equivalent of the African National Congress, I am not surprised the jury convicted.
I will have more to say about the significance of the success of this federal prosecution over the next few days. In short, the trial did not simply look at the involvement of the named defendants in the funding of Hamas. It considered the whole apparatus that was constructed around pro-Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood advocacy and activism in North America, and named a number of ‘unindicted co-conspirators’, who each had a role to play in the process.
One of those named was the erasatz civil rights organisation, the Council on American Islamic Relations.
The documents disclosed during the Holy Land Foundation trial demonstrated that Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood has been pursuing a strategy of setting up a series of front groups, with innocuous sounding names - some posing as cultural associations, some as civil liberties outfits - with the aim of fundraising and advocating for their Islamist terrorist politics. You may remember that they described their aim, thus:
The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood is pursuing precisely the same strategy in this country. Just as in the United States, CAIR has been invited, at its own urging, to partner with the State, the British Muslim Brotherhood front groups have worked in exactly the same way.
In Scotland, the Muslim Brotherhood and Scottish Nationalist Party PPC, Osama Saeed’s Scottish Islamic Foundation is hosting a mini-tour:
Belief in Action Tour with CAIR
Date: 26th November 2008
Time: 19:00 - 21:00
Location: Aberdeen, Dundee and KirkaldyTwo senior members from the Council on American Islamic Relations will be touring Scotland in advance of their appearance at the Scottish Muslim Futures conference.
CAIR are arguably the most advanced Muslim organisation in the West at dealing with public affairs.
Yaser Tabbara is Director of Community Development at CAIR’s Washington DC HQ.
Ahmed Rehab is is the Council on American Islamic Relations-Chicago’s Executive Director and CAIR’s National Strategic Communications Director
I’ll have more to say on the improbably named Ahmed Rehab in a later post, as well.
Incidentally, shouldn’t somebody now revoke their visas, quickly?
It is a sign of how well the “Grand Jihad” is going in Scotland, that the Osama Saeed was invited to participate in the Scottish Nationalist Party’s anti-Trident commission, as a representative of the SIF. It has also received a grant from the SNP Government of £400,000.
The guilty verdicts in this trial, should be the tug that starts the whole sweater unraveling. The BBC has picked up the story.
I wonder how many lessons will be drawn from it.
Comments
| 24 November 2008, 10:40 pm |
Great News! Made my day!
| 24 November 2008, 10:51 pm |
Perhaps Alex Salmond may look more carefully where he puts his cash.
And the Guardian may have to stop paying some of its contributors.
| 24 November 2008, 11:07 pm |
I bet Bungle’s head is exploding right about now. :D
| 24 November 2008, 11:13 pm |
Well it’s questionable whether lessons are learned. Will anyone learn from
this
The Malloch Browns, patrician FO types like to tell us this sort of thing is just not possible: extreme Sunni Jihadists allying with extreme Shi’ite Jihadists. No doubt 70 years ago they were telling us Hitler could never do a deal with his ideological enemy Stalin.
I hope people are now less sceptical about the possibility that Al Queda worked closely with Saddam Hussein’s regime.
| 24 November 2008, 11:16 pm |
I have to say, I very much hope that direct parallels will be drawn between the methods used by the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, and the techniques of this political party, and of Jamaat-e-Islami in the United Kingdom.
What I fear, though, is that this period merely marks the end of the charade, in which Muslim Brotherhood advocates equivocate and deny their identity, and when they move on to proclaiming openly what they stand for.
I recommend that you rewatch the Panorama programme, A Question of Leadership, and in particular, this exchange:
Dr Azzam Tamimi: I don’t glorify killing anybody. I explain, I… my job is to explain. I explain why people resort to certain tactics in certain contexts.
John Ware: So when you said for example: ‘For us Muslims, martyrdom is not the end of things but the beginning of the most wonderful of things.’ That’s more than explanation, that’s glorification, isn’t it. Glorification?
Dr Azzam Tamimi: Martyrdom is an Islamic concept. You cannot rule it out of Islam. If people abuse it, or use it in the wrong place, or kill innocent people and call it martyrdom, that’s something else. But martyrdom is definitely an Islamic concept.
John Ware: ‘The blood of martyrs provides nourishment and sustenance for those who continue this struggle.’ That’s more than explanation, isn’t it, that’s glorification - isn’t it?
Dr Azzam Tamimi: Well if you.. if you occupy other people’s lands, people have to..
John Ware: No, I’m sorry, just answer the question. You said all you do is explain, you don’t glorify it, and I’m saying that what you’ve said goes further than that, I think it does glorify.
Dr Azzam Tamimi: So what?
I think that the strategy now will be to say:
Yes, we’re Hamas. We are the true representatives of Muslim people all over the world.
So what?
| 25 November 2008, 12:01 am |
Anyone with a pulse has known what Tamimi is for years.
It didn’t stop Seumas Milne commissioning him,and making sure his “profile” excluded all references to Hams or the MB.
And presumably he was paid
| 25 November 2008, 12:02 am |
Hamas, not Hams
| 25 November 2008, 12:28 am |
Thanks for this post. Checked all the main online network news sites, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, & ABC; curiously none of them had anything on the trial and its verdict. Not that I am too surprised by this lack of coverage.
| 25 November 2008, 12:48 am |
Hamas, not Hams
Freudian slip there, Tim?
| 25 November 2008, 2:24 am |
I am appalled at this verdict, and the abuse of process which has led to it.
It is a plain fact that Israel’s 40 year occupation of Palestine is illegal. What this group were doing, above all, was to try and ameliorate the abysmal conditions into which Israel has driven millions of entirely innocent Palestinians.
This, and similar prosecutions, contrast starkly with the failure of the Western Community to take ANY effective action whatsoever against Israel as a state or any Israeli as an individual for the numerous continuing grave breaches of Article 147 of Geneva 4 as we are required to do by Article 146. This miserable failure makes hypocrites of us. The emergence of “Islamist” terrorism over the last decade is hardly surprising. If people are unable to achieve justice through the Law they will eventually turn to the gun.
I have spent a lot of time in Palestine. If anyone treated me, my family or my community like that I would not rest until they were utterly vanquished.
I write as one who was once an unequivocal supporter of Israel, but the more I’ve learned the worse it has got. Unsurprisingly there is a strong correlation between how well informed people are and their level of opposition to the practice and policies of Israel with respect to the occupied territories (you can find references to this by Israeli officials). On the whole US citizens are extremely ill-informed about this issue (and many others) which is why they are so often startled at the level and intensity of animosity directed towards them and their country.
For most of my life I have believed that the US was, in general, a force for good in the world. The last eight years have utterly shattered that, and the election of Barack Obama alone is not going to restore it. Imagine how angry you would be if France had kidnapped US citizens from Wyoming transported them to some Pacific Island, held them in inhuman and degrading conditions for YEARS and denied them any justice beyond the personal fiat of the President. Well that’s what the US, your country, has done, and I am apoplectically angry. The only thing that could restore ANY moral authority of the US is the prosecution of those responsible. I do not mean the unjust prosecutions of ordinary soldiers we have already seen. They were doing what their leaders had led them to believe needed to be done. I mean the prosecution of those responsible for instigating the crimes.
I should say that the US military as an institution deserves considerable credit for the restraint it was able to exercise on the madness of its civil commanders, but that they needed to do so hardly reflects well on US society as a whole.
God, I’m still so angry about all this!
| 25 November 2008, 2:35 am |
“Incidentally, shouldn’t somebody now revoke their visas, quickly?”
Somebody like a traffic warden,boy scout or dental nurse,perhaps?
Keep it greasy,David T and friends.
| 25 November 2008, 2:52 am |
Ignore Milez Stuart. He is up past his bedtime and is quite cranky from lack of sleep.
| 25 November 2008, 3:12 am |
I write as one who was once an unequivocal supporter of Israel, but the more I’ve learned the worse it has got. Unsurprisingly there is a strong correlation between how well informed people are and their level of opposition to the practice and policies of Israel with respect to the occupied territories (you can find references to this by Israeli officials). On the whole US citizens are extremely ill-informed about this issue (and many others) which is why they are so often startled at the level and intensity of animosity directed towards them and their country.
Funny I could write:
I write as one who was once an unequivocal supporter of the Palestinians, but the more I’ve learned the worse it has got. Unsurprisingly there is a strong correlation between how well informed people are and their level of opposition to the practice and policies of Muslim powers with respect to the occupied territories. On the whole UK citizens are extremely ill-informed about this issue (and many others).
| 25 November 2008, 4:08 am |
“hams” hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahah! love it!
| 25 November 2008, 4:28 am |
Milez Stuart:
“The emergence of “Islamist” terrorism over the last decade is hardly surprising. If people are unable to achieve justice through the Law they will eventually turn to the gun.”
So, they replaced pseudo-socialist secular terror with Islamist terror. Plus ca change.
| 25 November 2008, 5:27 am |
I hope one day there is a trial to convict the war criminals who put these people in a concentration camp and then starved them, bombed them and beset them with disease.
But don’t analyze this Mr. Toube. Find an Islamic fundamentalist and link him to some far-left group and then break it all down for your fawning fans.
| 25 November 2008, 5:55 am |
Until recently, Milez Stuart was an unequivocal supporter of Israel. For most of Milez Stuart’s life, Milez Stuart believed the US was, in general, a force for good in the world. Milez Stuart has spent a lot of time in Palestine. Milez Stuart justifies Milez Stuart’s endorsement of those who will not rest until they are utterly vanquished. Milez Stuart doesn’t need to clarify who Milez Stuart means by “they”, or what Milez Stuart means by “utterly vanquished”. Because Milez Stuart doesn’t need to. God, I’m still so angry about all this!
| 25 November 2008, 6:25 am |
Josh:
Thanks my dear.
| 25 November 2008, 6:30 am |
Josh:
PS: How many relatives and friends have you lost in Israel or have suffered injuries in bombings? I’ve got one dead and 2 injured, one a mother whose jaw was blown off in a pizza parlor. The dead man, a British citizen and relative by marriage, donated his organs - one of which saved a Palestinian girl.
In death he did more than any Palestinian bomber ever did.
| 25 November 2008, 6:31 am |
PS: That email was not meant to be an attack on you BTW.
| 25 November 2008, 7:00 am |
Milez Stuart
God, I’m still so angry about all this!
Yes.
He has a lot to answer for.
| 25 November 2008, 7:19 am |
I bet Bungle’s head is exploding right about now. :D
Shhh!!! That’s next week on the Central Line.
| 25 November 2008, 7:27 am |
am appalled at this verdict, and the abuse of process which has led to it.
It is a plain fact that Israel’s 40 year occupation of Palestine is illegal. What this group were doing, above all, was to try and ameliorate the abysmal conditions into which Israel has driven millions of entirely innocent Palestinians.
Milez will you make a solemn promise to make posts like this every day because it causes so much fun and delight for some of us to argue with you about your abuse of the commonly accepted meaning of words.
A piece of advice, you need to use the words ‘apartheid’, ‘murder’, ethnic cleansing’ and ‘Nazis’ a bit more and not keep it back.
As for It is a plain fact that Israel’s 40 year occupation of Palestine is illegal - you obviously don’t know what “Palestine” is.
What did you think of the illegal occupation of Palestine by Jordan and Egypt up to 1967 in direct contradiction of The Mandate For Palestine which states that no foreign power may control any part of Palestine.
Actually, you will do better to post and run. I don’t think you can handle the truth.
| 25 November 2008, 7:34 am |
I hope one day there is a trial to convict the war criminals who put these people in a concentration camp and then starved them, bombed them and beset them with disease.
But I don’t see the UN actually putting UNWRA on trial for this. As for getting the leaders of Hamas into the International Courts at the Hague I don’t see it happening.
I think the obvious solution is for Israel to launch an incursion into Gaza, smash Hamas and then get UNWRA to give teh Gazans actual cash each and then they can go and shop at the same type of supermarket that Lauren Booth went to. They’ve got LOADS of food.
I also think that UNWRA need to start up a diet programme for all those liberated Gazans who will probably go wild on the sweets and so create an obesity crisis in Gaza.
Hey, its only opinions!
| 25 November 2008, 7:37 am |
You sick bastards. The Palestinians will win their self-determination eventually!
| 25 November 2008, 7:47 am |
You sick bastards. The Palestinians will win their self-determination eventually!
Indeed there will be a Palestinian State in which Jews will also live. They will achieve it by going back and following The Roadmap.
If Hamas continue rocket attacks then there is no alternative but to smash Hamas and liberate Gaza.
If you insist in posting absolute bollocks you are going to get a severe beating. If you can’t take it (as I suspect you can’t) you always have the choice of posting at MPAC UK where they will love your stuff.
We love it too BTW because you illustrate the kind of attitudes that we love exposing.
| 25 November 2008, 7:56 am |
Matt,
Righteous indignation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The Palestinians were offered self-determination as long ago as 1947 and as recently as 1993, but both times there was a catch: Jews would have self-determination too. That was too much for the Palestinians to swallow, and so we are where we are.
Sucks, even for sick bastards like us.
| 25 November 2008, 8:07 am |
Why is the right to self-determination manifested in the murdering of Israelis and attacking them with rockets.
Perhaps Matt could explain why the Palestinians resort to terrorism when they could have a State via The Roadmap without a single fingernail getting broken.
Why does someone kill to get something they can get without killing?
Seems to me that the Palestinians would rather kill (because it kills Jews) than honour any peace process.
BTW Palestinians broke The Roadmap by NOT “immediately and unconditionally renouncing violence and incitement”. In fact they killed it on the same day they signed it.
| 25 November 2008, 8:34 am |
Maven
“We love it too BTW because you illustrate the kind of attitudes that we love exposing.”
Indeed. Hysterical, insincere sixth form politics really isn’t the way forward. The moment you start spouting about concentration camps in Gaza you just look like a moron.
MattG (no relation to Matt)
| 25 November 2008, 9:11 am |
I don’t really have anything to add, I just popped in to have a quick fawn.
Mmmm, that’s better.
| 25 November 2008, 11:26 am |
Quote: “The Palestinians will win their self-determination eventually!”
They already have. What they have now is what they have unremittingly dedicated themselves to achieving over the last sixty years.
PS. Backward pre-industrial peasant that I am, I haven’t yet puzzled out how to do bold, italics and that quote mechanism on this site. Any generous soul care to spell it out for me in the simplest possible language?
Tks
JC
| 25 November 2008, 12:04 pm |
Indeed. Hysterical, insincere sixth form politics really isn’t the way forward. The moment you start spouting about concentration camps in Gaza you just look like a moron.
And note that the immaturity just shines by putting together a few slogans, a bit of name calling and then buzz off back to the common room to complete the Obama homage and “9/11 was an inside job” montages.
| 25 November 2008, 1:31 pm |
Very good news. However, giving the boot to Brotherhood front groups and various ‘charities’ is just the beginning.
The big struggle will revolve around resisting and prohibiting any forms of sharia finance.
Sharia banking is a complete fraud, but one which will, if it is allowed to set up shop, channel a pourcentage of each transaction, no matter how small, into jihad.
Another front are the dog ‘n pony shows of interfaith gabfests, ones at which naieve non-muslim clerics bestow legitimacy and respectability on clerical fascist thugs.
For instance, in the U.S. some liberal rabbis have been sucked into a CAIR inspired programme of twinning, wherein one rabbi and synagogue are twinned with an imam and mosque in an effort to show a united Muslim-Jewish front.
Imagine a Rabbi so liberal he’ll allow himself and his congregation to be twinned with a member of a kind of islamist gestapo?
Islamists just love to cosy up with various liberal groups and personalities because it allows them to dissimulate their Far Right reactionary platforms and to merge it all into one big amorphous atmosphere of progressivism.
Islamists kite their clerical-fascist strategies on unwitting progressives, liberals, social activists and left-wing nationalists.
| 25 November 2008, 1:39 pm |
“For instance, in the U.S. some liberal rabbis have been sucked into a CAIR inspired programme of twinning, wherein one rabbi and synagogue are twinned with an imam and mosque in an effort to show a united Muslim-Jewish front.
Imagine a Rabbi so liberal he’ll allow himself and his congregation to be twinned with a member of a kind of islamist gestapo”
and a look in the mirror:
“For instance, in the U.S. some liberal imams have been sucked into a CAIR inspired programme of twinning, wherein one rabbi and synagogue are twinned with an imam and mosque in an effort to show a united Muslim-Zionist front.
Imagine an imam so liberal he’ll allow himself and his congregation to be twinned with a member of a kind of Zionist gestapo”
blessed are the peacemakers indeed.
| 25 November 2008, 1:43 pm |
a member of a kind of Zionist gestapo
Rotary or Lions Clubs?
| 25 November 2008, 1:47 pm |
I have spent a lot of time in Palestine.
Really? I’ve spent a lot of time in Narnia. Small world, huh? We should totally do each other’s hair and stuff.
| 25 November 2008, 1:54 pm |
a member of a kind of Zionist gestapo
Rotary or Lions Clubs?
Good one, Morgoth!
These twinnings target unsuspecting and trusting left-wing Rabbis, and are a desperate effort on the part of radical islamists to refurbish Islam’s tattered image and to re-brand Muslims as the ‘new Jews’.
However, I’ve heard that these left-wing Rabbis are being brought up to speed very quickly and am confident the programme will be exposed for the charade it is and promptly abandonned.
Imagine an imam so liberal he’ll…
Well, I’m imaginative, but not to that point!
| 25 November 2008, 2:38 pm |
“Rotary or Lions Clubs?”
Coca-Cola Employees association.
| 25 November 2008, 3:26 pm |
It has also received a grant from the SNP Government of £400,000.
All in good time. For the moment, it’s just the Scottish Executive.
| 25 November 2008, 5:29 pm |
“It is a plain fact that Israel’s 40 year occupation of Palestine is
illegal.”
Which has what bearing on a US court case? Oh, and by the way, your reasoning is exactly the reasoning that certain Americans used to support the IRA.
“Imagine how angry you would be if France had kidnapped US citizens from Wyoming transported them to some Pacific Island, held them in inhuman and degrading conditions for YEARS and denied them any justice beyond the personal fiat of the President.”
That would really depend on exactly which US citizens those were. I know I’m supposed to get upset about that kind of thing, but I am pretty sure I can think of instances where I would feel grateful instead. I wish someone had done that with James Dobson or Pat Robertson YEARS AGO. And considering the level of support, to the point of operational integration, that the FBI has ben getting from its French counterpart, there may be some of that kind of feeling in some quarters in France.
“On the whole US citizens are extremely ill-informed about this issue (and many others) which is why they are so often startled at the level and intensity of animosity directed towards them and their country.”
Ah, the clueless all-knowing European mind-reader who knows exactly why americans react one way or another. This surpise you refer to cannot have anything to do with the fact that Americans tend to have fairly mellow opininons of other countries, even pits of festering anti-American racial bigotry like Germany, can it, no connection at all? Americans are ill-informed about the level of hatred directed at them in SOME countries (usually evaporates with the chance of a green card) but someone else is even more ill-informed if he thinks this all began with Bush.
And Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should all die in jail, nevertheless. The Germans, God bless them, have a warrant out for Rumsfeld. He should lose his US citizenship and be repatrtiated. Volksdeutshcer filth.
| 25 November 2008, 11:37 pm |
If “It is a plain fact that Israel’s 40 year occupation of Palestine is illegal.” So then is Britain’s 400 year occupation of Northern Ireland.
| 26 November 2008, 8:58 pm |
MilezStuart “It is a plain fact that Israel’s 40 year occupation of Palestine is illegal…” and
“Unsurprisingly there is a strong correlation between how well informed people are and their level of opposition to the practice and policies of Israel with respect to the occupied territories (you can find references to this by Israeli officials)…”
What an arrogant prick you are. Your average mouth breathing eejit on CiF with an IQ no bigger than his/her shoe size is opposed to the practice and policies of Israel as regards the occupied territories and if there is a strong correlation between being informed and mindless opposition then it’s a negative one.
So you used to support Israel did you? I think she’s better off without you.
Matt, don’t tell lies. Gaza is not a concentration camp, neither is it inflicted with disease.
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