BREAKING : Radical Group Urges Obama to Free Islamic Terror Financiers
By Bob Unruh – WND
A new Internet campaign is urging President Obama to provide clemency to leaders of the former Holy Land Foundation who were convicted of channeling $12 million to Hamas, a federally designated terrorist organization.
The campaign at Change.org, launched by an individual, portrays the Hamas supporters as nothing more than willing volunteers to help direct money to charities in the Middle East.
But the Investigative Project on Terrorism reported, “Islamists in the United States are waging a furious lobbying campaign aimed at securing the freedom of five men convicted of illegally routing millions of dollars to Hamas.”
The petition, which already has the support of more than 4,000 people, blames the prison sentences of the convicted terror supporters on “the anti-Muslim hysteria following 9/11 and the launching of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror.’”
“Ghassan [Elashi] and his colleagues were charged with material support for terrorism in 2004, on the claim, without evidence, that some of the funds they raised went to charities that were associated with Hamas,” the petition contends.
But the IPT noted the five defendants — Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohammed El-Mezain, Abdulrahman Odeh and Mufid Abdulqader — were convicted of using a network of Palestinian charities controlled by Hamas to funnel money to the terrorist group.
IPT said it wasn’t clear whether the clemency request was being considered seriously by the Obama administration. Obama has granted clemency to thousands of convicts already, but they’ve mostly been fraud, embezzlement and drug cases.
“Advocates are pushing social media campaigns and online petitions aimed at securing a pardon, or, short of that, a commutation of the five men’s sentences to set them free,” IPT said. “The campaign also has enlisted support from at least one member of Congress.
“Left unspoken is an undeniable truth behind the pardon/commutation campaign, and behind any ongoing defense of the Holy Land Foundation: Advocates do not believe Hamas support is wrong,” the report said. “The Muslim Legal Fund of American is leading the charge, supported by the Council on American-Islamic Relatinos and pro-Palestinian groups.”
But all the evidence was considered during court proceedings, IPT said.
“Records show, HFL (formerly know as the Occupied Land Fund) was part of a network called the ‘Palestine Committee’ in the United States. They committee answered to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s mandate that global chapters create ‘Palestine Committees’ in their home countries. Their task was ‘to support Hamas from abroad,’ the Fifth Circuit noted in upholding the convictions and sentences.”
The report said CAIR was added to the Palestine Committee following its founding in 1994.
IPT reported:
“The evidence showed that the long-standing connection between HLF and Hamas began in the late 1980s when HLF arose as a fundraising arm for the Palestine Committee …” the appeals court ruling said. “This fact was notably evident from the … [internal Palestine Committee] documents, which showed that HLF was created along with the IAP.” In addition, Palestine Committee bylaws “specifically recognized HLF as ‘the official organization for fundraising.’”
HLF apologists claim the group was merely interested in helping needy widows and orphans. But, the court pointed out, the orphans included Yehia Ayyash’s children. Ayyash was Hamas’s top bomb maker, nicknamed “The Engineer,” before being killed by Israel.
“An audio tape from 1996 that was seized from HLF’s offices contained songs praising Hamas and discussions of suicide bombers as heroes,” the ruling said.
“We believe that a jury could not help but infer from the above evidence that the defendants had a close association with Hamas and that HLF acted to fund Hamas both before and after Hamas’s designation as a terrorist organization.”
WND reported in 2010 when the prosecutors who handled the case were honored that the case resulted in convictions on all 108 felony counts and is considered the largest terrorism financing investigation in U.S. history.
While billed as the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., Holy Land Foundation “was actually the U.S.-based fund-raising arm of the terrorist group Hamas,” the Justice Department said.
Then-Attorney General Eric Holder honored lead U.S. Attorney James T. Jacks, among several others, at the 58th Annual Attorney General Awards Ceremony.
He credited prosecutors with safeguarding the U.S.
Jacks listed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the criminal scheme.
And the U.S. District Court in Dallas found “ample evidence” linking CAIR to the conspiracy.
If there is to be clemency in the case, it probably would have to be before Obama leaves office, as President-elect Donald Trump reportedly is preparing to jumpstart a bill in Congress that would ban the Muslim Brotherhood by declaring it a terror organization.
Trump foreign-policy adviser Walid Phares told Egyptian news outlet Youm7 that the legislation, introduced a year ago by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was held up due to the Obama administration’s support of the Brotherhood. But Trump plans to back the bill.
Cruz’s bill, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2015-16, identifies the Brotherhood and three of its offshoots, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Islamic Society of North America, as a terrorist organization.
The Brotherhood is already banned as a subversive organization in Russia and at least five Arab countries, including Syria, Saudi Arabia and its home base of Egypt. And the Brotherhood’s self-avowed “Palestine” branch – Hamas – was added to the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in 1997.
Former Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, who introduced similar legislation during her last term in office, said such action is long overdue. She said it has been clear since the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial in 2007-08 that the Brotherhood is working through front groups toward an agenda of Islamic supremacy, which the Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad.”
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