Holy Land Foundation Hamas Support Convictions Affirmed

Given the lengths to which the current administration goes to portray the Muslim Brotherhood — inside and outside the United States — as a “moderate,” “largely secular” organization, it’s nice to see any part of government recognize it for what it is: an Islamist conglomerate dedicated to the destruction of Israel and committed to raising millions of dollars to support accomplishing that end through a jihadist war.

In Texas today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Fifth Circuit has upheld the convictions of five jihadists behind the Holy Land Foundation, the piggy bank set up by the Brotherhood in the U.S., under the guise of “charity,” to fund Hamas to the tune of tens of millions of dollars during the deadly intifada.

The three-judge panel’s unanimous 170-page opinion recounts that Hamas was created by Brotherhood operatives in 1987 as the Brotherhood’s “Palestinian branch.” Thereafter, “the Muslim Brotherhood directed its world-wide chapters to establish so-called ‘Palestinian Committees’ to support Hamas from abroad.” In the U.S., the “Palestine Committee” was led by Mousa Abu Marzook (who, for a time in the early Nineties, actually ran Hamas from his home in Virginia). The Palestine Committee created not only the Holy Land Foundation but a number of other Islamist entities in the U.S. The leaders of one of those entities, the Islamic Association for Palestine, subsequently created CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was cited as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.

As the Fifth Circuit further explains, after the Oslo Accords were signed, Brotherhood operatives in the Hamas support network met in Philadelphia to try to figure out how they could “derail the peace process.” The meeting featured “an aura of deception and an intent to hide a connection to Hamas” — manifested by a decision to refer to Hamas only as “Sister Samah” (Hamas spelled backwards). Subsequently, documents recovered by the FBI at the home of a Brotherhood operative established the Brotherhood’s overarching role in the Hamas support scheme, including bylaws showing that the “Brotherhood had directed the collection of ‘donations for the Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e., Hamas].’”

Also recovered at that time was the internal memorandum in which the Brotherhood’s American leadership asserted:

The Ikhwan [i.e., the Brotherhood] 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.

That is why I called my book about the Muslim Brotherhood’s war on the West The Grand Jihad. It is what the Brotherhood and its affiliated organizations are about wherever in the world they operate. When you cite the undeniable facts out here in journalism world, they call it “Islamophobia.” Fortunately, in American courtrooms, it is still possible to see it for what it is: overwhelming evidence.