(MintPress) – Activists with the Committee to Stop FBI Repression rallied in several U.S. cities on Thursday, calling for the release of five Muslim charity leaders serving life sentences for allegedly supporting Hamas, a Palestinian political party labeled as a terrorist group by the United States. Although a Dallas jury originally found the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) to be a legitimate, law abiding charity, prominent organizers were later tried and found guilty of 108 charges, including providing material support to a known terrorist organization and tax evasion.
Now, under popular pressure from family members, supporters and allied activists, the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to decide Friday whether to hear the case of the “Holy Land Five,” a case that has led many to question the legitimacy of the charges. The five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation are currently serving sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years.
The case of the Holy Land Five
The HLF was founded in 1989 during the first intifada, a violent uprising by Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The charitable effort was organized to provide financial and material support to Palestinian refugees displaced because of fighting.
While the group supported Palestinian refugees, the HLF also provided aid to the victims of natural disaster and wars in Turkey, Kosovo and Bosnia. The HLF also came to the aid of victims during the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush seized the $12 million assets of the Holy Land Foundation by executive order on the grounds that the charity illegally supported the work of Hamas, a labeled terrorist organization operating in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.
Hamas was listed as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the U.S. in 1997. Other countries, including European Union countries, the U.K., Canada, Australia, Japan and Jordan all similarly classify Hamas as a terrorist organization.
After being indicted in 2004, five of the principal charity organizers — Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh — were tried on 197 counts, including providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
After a lengthy trial in 2007 that included 19 days of jury deliberation, the defendants were found not-guilty on the majority of charges. On just a fraction of a the more contentious charges, the jurors were unable to reach a verdict.
While the defense heralded the verdict as a victory, the U.S. district attorney in Dallas called the results “a stunning setback for the government.”
The prosecution retried the case a year later and received a dramatically different result. In 2008, the defendants were found guilty on 108 charges including providing material support to terrorists, money laundering and tax fraud.
Now, after nearly 11 years of trials, testimony and petitioning by activists, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether they Holy Land Five will receive new trials as requested by their legal representation.
Rallies were held across the U.S. on Thursday in support of a new trial, including Minneapolis and Dallas, where the HLF charity was previously headquartered.
FBI repression: Censoring free speech
In an Op-Ed written earlier last week, Noor Elashi, the daughter of Ghassan Elashi, commented on her father’s ongoing legal struggle, saying:
“My father, Ghassan Elashi, has told me that when he co-founded the Holy Land Foundation in 1989, he knew it would be challenging because American foreign policy has been in favor of Israel, and thus, Palestinian sovereignty has not been a main concern.”
Elashi continued, writing:
“So as the HLF blossomed, becoming the largest American Muslim charity, it came as no surprise that a campaign was launched against it in the 1990s, a campaign led by pro-Israeli politicians and lobby groups that repeatedly attempted to make connections between the HLF and Hamas. But authorities found no reason to close the charity.”
The U.S. has stepped up surveillance of many Muslim groups in the U.S., including Muslim students on campuses in the northeast. A leaked internal document from the New York Police Department shows that officers have monitored Muslim student correspondence at a bevy of schools, including Yale, Rutgers, the University of Buffalo and 13 other colleges and universities in the northeast.
“I see a violation of civil rights here,” said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse University. “Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has.”
While charities are subject to normal scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Muslim leaders in the U.S. have claimed that other Muslim organizations, especially those with an avowedly political orientation, have come under undue surveillance.
Similarly, the case of the Holy Land Five is one that calls into question Americans’ ability to associate freely, including the ability to make contributions to charities that support legal but controversial political causes.
At the time of the original trial in 2007, when the five were cleared on virtually all charges, David D. Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, questioned the motives of the U.S. government freezing charity assets, saying, “When they have to put their evidence on the table, they can’t convict anyone of anything. … It suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.”
Authorities have continued to expand their surveillance of charities and activist organizations since 2001, including, most notably, the creation of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The indefinite detention clause of the NDAA allows the military and law enforcement to indefinitely detain any U.S. citizen without charge for “substantially supporting” al-Qaida or any organization labeled as a terrorist group.