Counterterrorism Blog: HLF and CAIR, a Supplement to Mainstream Reporting

http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/08/hlf_and_cair_a_supplement_to_m.php

In an article titled Terror trial hurts group's funding, AP reporter David Koenig gives a megaphone to Parvez Ahmed, the current chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), to complain about his organization's inclusion as a an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF).

Piggybacking on CAIR's filing of an incredibly disingenuous amicus brief in an effort to have the organization removed from the list, Ahmed proceeds to whine about how prosecutors are on a mission to shut his organization down, without acknowledging any of the plentiful reasons as to why CAIR ended up on the Department of Justice's radar screen as a co-conspirator in the first place.

As Koenig reports, "[t]he Council on American-Islamic Relations has come up several times in testimony. An FBI agent said two founders of the group were present at a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia at which Hamas supporters plotted how to derail a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians." Ahmed, of course, "denied any link to Hamas by the council or the two founders who were in Philadelphia," and protests that the government is "trying to damage his group's reputation and chill Muslim opposition to the prosecution of Holy Land Foundation leaders."

Ahmed's denials are, of course, laughable on their face, and perhaps due to word limits and deadlines, there may not be enough space and time in mainstream reports to conclusively demonstrate exactly why. But as the CT blog has no such constraints, here is the background:

CAIR was founded by high ranking officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a Hamas front group effectively shut down after losing a $156 million civil judgment in a case brought by the parents of an American teenager murdered by Hamas terrorists. HLF was also a defendant in that case, and the ties between CAIR, IAP and HLF run very deep.