| Fifth Column |
| Jihad financed on Wall Street |
| 2008-04-06 |
| By Deroy Murdock Turn your clock back 70 years. Imagine that Wall Street banks and brokerages sold Nuremberg-compliant bonds and stock funds in 1938. American Nazi sympathizers bought financial instruments certified by Berlin-based advisers as free of ``Jewish profits'' from, say, Salomon Brothers and Bloomingdale's. In turn, a percentage of such funds' gains underwrote pro-Nazi charities, like the German-American Bund, and similar organizations in the Fatherland, like the Hitler Youth. Seventy years hence, an analogous outrage grows on Wall Street, only this time for real. Sharia-compliant finance (SCF) is expanding among banks and securities houses eager to absorb the hundreds of billions of petrodollars cascading into the Middle East, thanks to $100-per-barrel oil. To lure this cash, financial companies increasingly offer vehicles that neither pay interest nor benefit from gambling, entertainment, alcohol, pork or anything considered ``haram'' or ``un-kosher'' in Islam. Bahrain's International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM) counts $97 billion in Islamic bonds in circulation with another $66 billion forecast through 2008 - and SCF is not limited to the bond market. SCF goes far beyond marketing to Muslims and Middle Easterners. IIFM lists ``wider sharia acceptance'' among its goals. Selling sharia-compliant investments legitimizes a barbaric theocratic orthodoxy that should be defeated, not promoted. Turn your clock back 1,300 years. According to the Koran, sharia means that, with disobedient women, men should ``admonish them, and send them to their beds and beat them'' (Koran 4:34). For those having sex outside marriage: ``The fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them with a hundred stripes'' (24:2). ``Cut off the hands of thieves, whether they are male or female, as punishment for what they have done'' (5:38). Instead of celebrating gay sex with parades and rainbow flags, ``kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done'' (''Reliance of the Traveler'' - Abu Dawud 4447). How do you handle an adulteress? ``Khalid Walid came forward with a stone which he threw at her head, and when the blood spurted on his face, he cursed her'' (''Reliance'' - Muslim 4206). Western financiers have no business complying with this. Nevertheless, SCF advisers help these funds remain sharia-compliant. Unfortunately, these authorities often are Muslim extremists who appear mainstream by consulting for such powerhouses as Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor's. And: [ufaro][mc]In 2002, Caribou Coffee had to explain the ties between its Atlanta-based sharia-compliant owner, Arcapita Inc., and Arcapita's sharia adviser, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. He had defended ``our brothers and children in Al-Aqsa and the blessed land of Palestine generously sacrificing their blood, giving their souls willingly in the way of Allah.'' Qaradawi eventually resigned from Arcapita. Sheik Muhammad Taqi Usmani advises the Dow Jones Islamic Index. He has written: ``The purpose of Jihad...aims at breaking the grandeur of unbelievers and establish(ing) that of Muslims.'' The North American Islamic Trust owns 69.8 percent of the Dow Jones Islamic Fund. The Justice Department identified NAIT last June as an un-indicted co-conspirator in supporting Hamas' murderous anti-Israeli terrorism. NAIT also owns the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany, N.Y. In April 2007, its founder, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, and imam, Yassin Muhiddin Aref, received 15-year prison sentences for assisting an FBI sting operation to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in Manhattan with a shoulder-fired missile. Sharia-compliant funds usually donate 2.5 percent of profits as ``zakat.'' While such money assists peaceful Muslim causes, some of it has gone ka-boom. The Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, all major Muslim charities, were shuttered in December 2001 for allegedly supporting Islamic terrorism. According to ``The Tax Lawyer,'' Yasin al-Qadi - an investor in one Hamas-connected, sharia-compliant company called BMI (not the perfectly legitimate Broadcast Music Inc.) - transmitted $820,000 to Chicago's Quranic Literacy Institute in 1991. QLI employee Mohammad Salah confessed in 1995 that he trained recruits to handle assorted toxins and ``basic chemical materials for the preparation of bombs and explosives.'' ``This is bad for America, bad for capitalism and good for jihad,'' says Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, which is sounding the anti-SCF claxons. CSP's legal analysis by David Yerushalmi richly details SCF's dangers. The last thing America needs is jihad with tailored suits and Excel spreadsheets. It's time to stop the clock on this deadly idea. |
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| Home Front: WoT |
| U.S. court blows terrorists' cover |
| 2004-12-16 |
| Counterterrorism efforts got a major boost last week when a U.S. district court found three Muslim organizations and one individual, mostly based in the Chicago area, guilty of funding Hamas and fined them an astonishing $156 million. The four were found liable for their roles in the murder of an American teenager, David Boim, on May 13, 1996, when he was shot by Hamas operatives as he waited for a bus near Jerusalem. This case is important in itself, providing some measure of justice and relief for the Boim family. Beyond that, it helps fight terrorism in four ways. First, it validates and operationalizes a 1992 U.S. law that prohibits sending any money to terrorist organizations, not just money specifically tied to violence. Even funds used for medical care or education, the logic correctly goes, ultimately forward violence. Judge Arlander Keys established that "the Boims need only show that the defendants were involved in an agreement to accomplish an unlawful act and that the attack that killed David Boim was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the conspiracy." This ruling places other civil cases, most notably the one linking Saudi royals to 9/11, on much firmer legal ground. Second, this marks the first decision by a jury penalizing Americans who support terrorism abroad and making them liable to pay civil damages. Third, as the Boims' lawyer, Stephen J. Landes, explained, it shows that "the American court system is prepared to bankrupt the Islamist terror network," just as it earlier destroyed the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, two extremist and violent organizations, "by bringing unpayably large judgments against them." Finally, the case confirms a pattern of culpability among even the most innocent-appearing of Islamic institutions. Two of the three liable groups have known ties to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group; Holy Land Foundation serves as its fund-raising arm, Islamic Association for Palestine as its political front. But the Quranic Literacy Institute appeared wholly unconnected to Hamas. It is a religious group based in a Chicago suburb that since 1991 has engaged in the pious work of translating Islamic sacred texts from Arabic, then publishing them in English. But appearances can deceive. In June 1998, federal authorities charged QLI with having for nine years supported "a conspiracy involving international terrorist activities and domestic recruitment and training in support of such activities" and seized $1 million of its cash and assets. The FBI found that Yassin Kadi, a Saudi-based financier linked to Osama bin Laden, loaned $820,000 to the QLI in 1991 which the QLI laundered through a series of real estate transactions. QLI cleared nearly $1.4 million, and investigators suspect it planned to use this money in 1993 to fund the rebuilding of Hamas. QLI's complicity in terrorism has great significance, for it is no rogue outfit but a stalwart of the Saudi-backed "Wahhabi lobby" in the United States. QLI's founding president, Ahmad Zaki Hammad, is a scholar of Islam boasting advanced degrees from Cairo's prestigious Al-Azhar University and the University of Chicago. He has served as president of the lobby's largest organization, the Islamic Society of North America, and sat on the board of the North American Islamic Trust, its mechanism for taking over mosques and other Islamic properties. When the QLI's assets were impounded in 1998, leading organizations of the Wahhabi lobby, ISNA, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association leapt to its defense, declaring themselves "shocked at this unprecedented action taken against members of the Muslim community." Nearly 1,000 supporters rallied on QLI's behalf. And yet, we now know that this innocuous-appearing organization did have a key role funneling money to Hamas. Muslim institutions too often are not what they seem to be. The "Progressive Muslim Union" is actually reactionary. Mosques harbor criminals. The lesson is clear: Wahhabi organizations like the QLI cannot be taken at face value but must be scrutinized for extremist, criminal, and terrorist connections. Extensive research, including undercover operations, is needed to find out the possibly sordid reality behind a seemingly benign exterior. |
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