A Dallas jury convicted five former officials at the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) on all counts related to the illegal funneling of at least $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The men, Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face life in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.
Jurors in this trial saw three exhibits Israeli military officials seized from the Palestinian Authority which showed the PA also considered HLF to be a Hamas funder and that an HLF-supported charity committee was controlled by 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.
The prosecution victory is also a major one for the lame duck administration of President George Bush, whose efforts at fighting terrorism financing in court have been troubled, even though the flow of funds seems to be effectively shut down.
The Justice Department is likely to claim victory not only with the verdicts, but by trumpeting the shutdown of what prosecutors say was a robust and unsettling American network of terrorist funding. Holy Land, regardless of the verdict, is defunct. And other international terrorism financing pipelines have been interrupted.
“The government has achieved an awful lot of success here,” said Dennis Lormel, who created the FBI’s Terrorist Financing Operations Section after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and is now a security consultant.
“A lot of people will only look at the win/lose of the jury verdict,” said Mr. Lormel, of IPSA International Inc. “I’m looking at it from the perspective of the flow of funding through charities to terrorists. There’s been an incredible amount written and attention put out on this. That’s a deterrent to those who want to fund terrorism.”
The case revealed this Muslim Brotherhood memo exposing the agenda of the jihadist, Muslim Brotherhood and their affiliated organizations in North America as of 1991. Excerpted points:
In order for Islam and its Movement to become "a part of the homeland" in which it lives, "stable" in its land, "rooted" in the spirits and minds of its people, "enabled" in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established "organizations" on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain "the keys" and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a "Civilization Jihadist" responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.
The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. 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 God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands- until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.
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