“Rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fund terrorism.”
If ZERO had been President a year ago, the FBI would not have been able to investigate and prosecute the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim "charity" found guily on 108 counts of funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian group Hamas after the Clinton administration in 1995 declared it a terrorist group for sponsoring suicide bombings targeting Israelis.
The convictions were a major counterterrorism victory for the Justice Department, which has failed to get guilty verdicts on the most serious charges in other similar trials around the country.
FOXNEWS has a shocking video of a skit performed by Mufid Abdul Qatar, half brother of Khalid Mashaal, the Hamas supreme commander in exile, and one of the defendants in the HLF trial. In the skit, Qatar says, "I am Hamas. I am going to kill Jews." The skits were put on by the Islamic Association for Palestine, another one of these phony Muslim charities, and is a sister organization of the HLF.
Although this skit took place in 1988, it's clear that Qatar,the defendant, as well as the organization, clearly indicate their desire to carry out genocide against Jews. At the very end of this skit, which is pretty horrifying, Qatar actually kills the Jew; and you can actually hear children in the audience laughing and applauding.
Suspicious of its terrorist ties, U.S. federal authorities began monitoring the Holy Land Foundation in 1996. On September 5, 2001, federal anti-terrorism agents raided InfoCom Corporation, the company that ran the HLF website. According to defectors from the conspiracy, the HLF web server was used also by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and American Muslims for Jerusalem. As Islam scholar
Stephen Schwartz writes, "All these organizations drew from the common financial and technical pool at HLF. All shared a single administrative and technical contact for the maintenance of the web server. They had been erected as political shells around the Hamas hydra-head represented by HLF." (Support for Hamas had become illegal in 1995 as the result of an executive order by President Bill Clinton and subsequent congressional action.)
On December 4, 2001, the Bush administration seized all HLF assets and records because of its Hamas connections. Said President Bush at the time: "Hamas has obtained much of the money that it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States, money originally raised by the Holy Land Foundation.
The Holy Land Foundation ... raised $13 million from people in America last year. … Money raised by the Holy Land Foundation is used by Hamas to support schools and indoctrinate children to grow up into suicide bombers. [It] is also used by Hamas to recruit suicide bombers and to support their families."
In July 2004, federal authorities arrested five former HLF leaders: Shukri Abu Baker (HLF's co-founder and former President and Chief Executive); Ghassan Elashi (HLF's co-founder and former Board Chairman and Treasurer); Mohammed El-Mezain (HLF's co-founder and former Board Chairman); Mufid Abdulqader (the half-brother of Hamas's supreme political leader, Khaled Mashal); and Abdulraham Odeh (HLF's former New Jersey representative).
In a 42-count indictment, these individuals were charged with providing material support for Hamas terrorists to the tune of $12.4 million over a six-year period, and more than $57 million since the late 1988. Two more ex-officials of HLF, Haitham Maghawri and Akram Mishal, managed to escape U.S. jurisdiction and are considered to be fugitives.
According to the indictment, HLF tried to hide its terrorist-financing activities from American law-enforcement by making a few small contributions to innocuous, non-Palestinian entities while reserving the vast majority of its funds for terrorists.
As Shukri Abu Baker told his underlings: "We can give $100,000 to the Islamists and $5,000 to the others." Another HLF program, masquerading as charitable support for needy families and orphans in Palestinian territories, is said to have channeled money to families whose relatives had been killed or captured while waging jihad; some of them were suicide bombers.
In December 2006, two openly pro-Castro organizations -- the Humanitarian Law Project and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- jointly petitioned a federal judge to dismiss many of the charges brought against HLF.
On July 23, 2007, HLF's leaders went on trial. Seven principal individuals were charged with twelve counts of providing "material support and resources" to a foreign terrorist organization. Additionally, they faced thirteen counts of money laundering and thirteen counts of breaching the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which prohibits transactions that threaten American national security.
Along with the seven named defendants, the government released a list of approximately 300 "unindicted co-conspirators" and "joint venturers."
Among the unindicted co-conspirators were groups such as Hamas, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, INFOCOM, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Arab Youth Association, the Islamic Association for Palestine, the United Association for Studies and Research, and the North American Islamic Trust. The list also included many individuals affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and/or Hamas.
Among these were Omar Ahmad, Abdallah Azzam, Yousef al-Qaradawi, Mohammad Jaghlit, Abdurahman Alamoudi, Jamal Badawi, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Ahmed Yassin, and Mousa Abu Marzook. Thirty-nine directors, employees and representatives of HLF were also named.
On October 22, 2007, after a two-month trial and nineteen days of jury deliberation, Judge A. Joe Fish declared a mistrial because the jury had been unable to deliver unanimous verdicts and had failed to convict on a single count brought against the defendants.
When the government retried the case a year later, prosecutors made several key adjustments. Most notably, they dropped some counts against particular defendants; they called several new witnesses; and they displayed three exhibits which Israeli military officials had seized from the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Those exhibits demonstrated that the PA, like the U.S. government, clearly considered HLF to be a Hamas funder; that an HLF-supported charity committee was fully controlled by Hamas; and that the defendants were well aware that whatever money they were raising in the U.S. was earmarked for Hamas.
On November 24, 2008, the jury convicted five former HLF officials -- Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh -- of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
If ZERO steps in and reduces or pardons any of these sentences, I'm going to make sure every Jew in America knows about it. I may do that anyway.