November 24, 2008

Zolfa Elaydi (center) is comforted by her son, Jihad Elaydi, as she and her daughter, Fidaa Elaydi, weep outside the Earle Cabell Federal Building on Monday in reaction to the guilty verdicts in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case.

Justice was finally achieved the second time around in the Dallas federal court re-trail of the Holy Land Foundation matter. See this Dallas Morning report here. Credit it to better jury selection and better presentation of an intelligible case put on by the federal prosecutors. The presentation included witness testimony from the FBI about the Muslim Brotherhood secret 20 year plan to replace the US Constitution with Islamic Sharia law and evidence from Israeli security experts about what Islamic charity funds sent to Hamas as ‘zakat’ ended up being used for-building a terrorist infrastructure.

The unanimous conviction on 108 counts comes after the government prosecutors made a hash of the original trial that ended in a hung jury and allegations that one juror, a graphic designer, was the holdout who cowed his fellow jurors. Doubtless the media, even in this Dallas Morning News report will bend over backwards to accommodate the blandishments of Palestinian and Muslim advocacy groups seeking to overturn this conviction in the court of public opinion. They will argue that all of the ‘zakat’ funds went for humanitarian purposes-health care, hospitals, social services sponsored by Hamas, a foreign organization designated by our State Department as a terrorist group. Note these comments in the Dallas Morning News report from two counter terrorism and legal commentators. They zero in on the real implications of this decision for Muslim Brotherhood groups who funneled the more than $60 million to Hamas via the Holy Land Foundation-the so-called unindicted co-conspirators.

“The government showed in a streamlined case that where special assistance to the families of terrorists is concerned, cash is the moral equivalent of a car bomb,” said Peter Margulies, Roger Williams University law professor who studies terrorism financing cases.
“Going forward, however, the government must be more pro-active about furnishing guidance to Muslim-Americans who merely wish to fulfill their religious obligations,” he said.
Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent who is now an author and terrorism consultant, said that the “trial provides an invaluable forum for publicly showing the true agenda of the international Muslim Brotherhood and its organizations in the United States – the abolition of the United States government as we know it and support for a designated terrorist organization.”

“Given this complete victory for the government … it is now incumbent on U.S. government agencies to stop dealing with them as if they were engaging in benign efforts to push an agenda of tolerance and civil rights.”

One outcome of this decision may be that the benighted US Treasury Department, who a few weeks ago sponsored a Shariah Finance conference, should think twice about trying to get billions from Shariah compliant Sovereign Wealth Funds in the Middle East for its economic bail out needs if a portion is funneled via Islamic charities to designated foreign terrorist groups. Obviously one of the questions remaining is will the Justice Department go after the Muslim Brotherhood Fronts in America, unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land foundation case who collected the zakat that went to Hamas? My bet is that under the incoming Obama Administration whoever is Attorney General may not pursue the matter; even given the obvious compelling evidence presented that led to the successful Holy Land Foundation decision in Dallas, today.