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HAMAS GOES TO FOGGY BOTTOM
New York Post – New York, N.Y.
Date: Sep 15, 1998
Why have several American propagandists and front groups for Muslim terrorist organizations been invited to two State Department ceremonies today?
The groups – among them the American Muslim Council (AMC), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council – are to attend events inaugurating the department’s new Office of International Religious Freedom.
CAIR co-sponsored the Brooklyn College slimefest in May at which a speaker called for a jihad against “the Jews, descendants of the apes.” The group has also denounced the arrest of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the World Trade Center bombing ringleader, as an anti-Muslim hate crime – even as one of its board members, Siraj Wahaj, was described by U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White as a possible conspirator in that bombing.
The AMC has championed Hamas, which it insists is a “charitable” group with no links to terror. Its leader, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, told a 1996 pro-Hamas convention in Chicago:
“If we are outside this country, we can say, “Oh, Allah, destroy America.'” He was the chief fund-raiser for deported Hamas leader Mussa Abu Marzook, and joined CAIR in denouncing the “anti-Muslim” sentences handed down by Federal Judge Kevin Duffy in the World Trade Center case.
FBI Director Louis Freeh says Hamas, the most vicious of the Palestinian terror groups, raises “substantial cash funds from the United States to areas in the Middle East where we can show Hamas receipt and even expenditure of such funds” – fund-raising by front groups masquerading as charitable or civil-rights organizations.
Why are these people – these anti-American anti-Semites – being welcomed by theState Department?
The problem is that such groups have been legitimized – both by government and the media – as civil-rights groups fighting anti- Muslim discrimination and stereotyping. Unfortunately, their definition of such discrimination consists of anyone who writes about the existence of – or tries to investigate – radical Islamic terrorist groups and their allies on these shores.
Case in point: In June, prosecutors seized properties and $1.5 million in cash from bank accounts in the name of Mohammad Salah and the Quranic Literacy Institute.
The institute claims its sole purpose is to translate sacred Islamic texts; Salah says he is a computer analyst for the group. But federal prosecutors maintain that Salah has been an important financial agent and courier for Hamas since 1991, using the institute to send hundreds of thousands of dollars to the West Bank terrorist outfit. The feds have linked his weapons purchases to specific terror attacks in Israel.
Salah served five years in an Israeli prison after admitting he had purchased weapons for Hamas, recruited potential suicide bombers and received training in poisons, chemical weapons and remote- control explosive devices. (He now claims his confession was “coerced.”)
Arab-American groups have denounced these grand-jury investigations as – what else? – religious discrimination. But prosecutors maintain they are just the tip of the iceberg in what appears to be a massive Hamas money-laundering operation conducted in this country using Islamic charity groups.
Like the ones getting red-carpet treatment at the State Department today.