The fifteen year struggle of the law enforcement system against the Holy Land foundation has entered a new phase. The defendants have been found guilty on all counts:
After more than 15 years of investigation and two trials, the Holy Land Foundation and five of its former organizers were found guilty of illegally funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The verdicts by a Dallas federal jury are a significant victory for the Justice Department, which streamlined its case after a mistrial last year and worked hard to carefully educate jurors on the complex evidence presented in the massive case.
Guilty verdicts were read on 108 separate charges.
Despite the happy noises that are being made in some quarters about a “victory for the legal system” or some sort of victory against the funding of terrorism I don’t believe a bit of it.
Nobody will be deterred by this. For a deterrent to work it must be swift and certain. Here’s one organization among, no doubt, hundreds or even thousands whose leaders have been found guilty and that after a period of fifteen years. Make no mistake: this case isn’t over. There will be legal challenges and appeals until those convicted have been released, they’ve served their sentences, or have died of old age. Maybe longer.
No one who isn’t already favorably predisposed towards us will find this anything but politics masquerading as justice. Here’s what the families and friends of the convicted are saying already:
li>”It’s a sad day,” said Mohammed Wafa Yaish, Holy Land’s former accountant and a defense witness. “It looks like helping the needy Palestinians is a crime these days.”
- “The community sentiment … was that this was a political trial trying to achieve a government policy,” said Mohamed Elibiary, president of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, a Muslim group based in Plano.
I’d wager that’s how this story will be covered outside the United States, in the Muslim world in particular. Just one more bit of evidence that shows how much Americans hate Muslims.
So far our experience with law enforcement as a means for fighting terrorism has been mixed at best.
Years ago whenever you went into an Irish pub here in the States at some time or other in the course of the evening somebody would pass the can for contributions. They were purportedly to help orphans and widows in Northern Ireland but everybody with a lick of sense knew exactly how the money would be used: to fund the IRA. I always pretended to contribute or contributed something trivial because I knew and my conscience wouldn’t allow me to fund terrorism even if a little of the money might go to help people who were genuinely deserving of help.
I hope that American Muslims will use their heads, look into their hearts, and reach the same judgment. However benign the purported motives unless you can tell with real confidence how the money will be used don’t contribute to “charities” that are in all likelihood connected to terrorist organizations.
