10-25-07 The Holy Land Foundation Verdict

THE HOLY LAND FOUNDATION VERDICT
Criminal Defense Attorneys in Dallas Raise Reasonable Doubt and

Force Mistrial
Under its original name Occupied Land Fund, the Holy Land Foundation
was established in California in 1989 by Ghassan Elashi and other
Palestinian Muslims. The purpose of the Foundation was to provide
assistance to Palestinians displaced by a Palestinian uprising against Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The uprising became known as the
“intifada.” The most aggressive, and violent, resistance in the intifada came
from the Iranian-backed organization called Hamas which had been
established in 1987. The leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook, was
married to Elashi’s cousin.
Three years later, in 1992, Holy Land moved its headquarters to Richardson,
Texas. The Foundation came under the scrutiny of the governments of the
United States and Israel the following year. An Illinois businessman named
Muhammad Salah detained in Israel informed authorities that Holy Land,
which had become America’s largest Muslim charity, was actually a front
for Hamas. While he later claimed that he had provided information to the
Israelis under torture, he told the authorities that Marzook, who was living in
the U.S. at the time, had actually funded the creation of Holy Land with
hundreds of thousands of dollars of start-up money.
Armed with the information provided by Salah, the FBI in October 1993
bugged a meeting at a Philadelphia hotel between Holy Land organizers and
what the agency called “Hamas sympathizers.” The FBI captured
conversations among the participants about how to raise money for Hamas
without attracting undue attention of U.S. authorities. Both groups knew
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies were on “high alert”
following the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
By accident or design, the Salah information was leaked to the news media
in late 1994 linking the Holy Land Foundation to Hamas. The Dallas
Morning News took the lead in the media-based investigations uncovering
ties between the Foundation and Hamas activists. Holy Land and other
American-based Muslim groups expressed outraged, publicly denying any
link between the Foundation and Hamas.
Nonetheless, United States law enforcement agencies stepped up their
surveillance and investigations of the Foundation. In 1995 Marzook was
detained by federal agents at the JFK International Airport in New York.
The United States declared him a “specially designated terrorist.” These
federal investigations developed troubling information that Holy Land was
flying “militant clerics” with Hamas ties into the country to headline charity
fundraisers in the United States. The clerics often called for a violent
“jihad,” or holy war, against Israel. Hamas was promptly declared a
“terrorist organization” by the United States.
Israel responded to these revelations by ordering the closure of a Holy Land

office in 1996 in a Jerusalem suburb. The Israelis said the closure was due to
the Foundation’s fundraising activities for a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Israel pressured the United States to close the Foundation’s Richardson-
based headquarters, but the U.S. refused to directly confront Holy Land.
However, New York Senator Charles Schumer, a lawmaker who openly had
strong ties to the Israeli lobby, stepped up Congressional pressure on Holy
Land by sponsoring legislation that made it a federal crime to raise money
for foreign terrorist organizations. He called for a “federal investigation”
into the “financial ties” between Hamas and Holy Land.
In 1997 the Commerce Department developed information that an Internet

service provider and computer services firm called InfoCom had been set up
in Richardson by Elashi’s family and funded by Marzook. The firm was
located next door to Holy Land. The department had learned that InfoCom
had contacted Saddam Hussein’s government about setting up a domain
name “.ig”. The United States responded to these developments by deporting
Marzook, although he had not been indicted for any criminal wrongdoing.
By 1999 federal investigators had learned that InfoCom had violated export
laws, as the Dallas Morning News reported, “by doing business with
customers in Syria and Libya, both of which the U.S. considered state
sponsors of terrorism.” Pointing out that allegations involving Holy Land
and Hamas had been swirling since 1996, President Bill Clinton’s State
Department considered but stopped short of adding the Foundation to a list
of foreign terrorist organizations which already included Hamas.
Federal investigators continued to work the export law case against InfoCom
for the new two years before shutting the company down just six days before
the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
The firm and its Muslim supporters vehemently protested the law
enforcement action, denying any links to either terrorism or Holy Land. The
FBI responded to the public criticism by pointing out that it had seized from
InfoCom 20 boxes of Holy Land records that included the charity group’s
bank records, correspondence and videos.
The FBI examination of these boxes of documents had barely begun when
the 9/11 attacks occurred. The agency’s investigation surged into warp
speed, pulling together what the Dallas Morning News called “eight years of
intelligence and evidence on Holy Land.” Armed with this evidence and a
political climate bordering on hysteria, the FBI stormed Holy Land’s offices
with search warrants and authority to seize its assets.
Standing in the Rose Garden on December 4, 2001, President Bush

announced that he had ordered the Richardson-based office of the Holy Land
Foundation and its offices in three other cities to be closed. Calling the
group a “front for Hamas,” Bush ordered all its assets frozen. Federal
investigators estimated that the group had raised $57 million between 1992
and 2001 - $12 million of which had been sent to Hamas since 1995 when
that group was designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
On July 7, 2004 Elashi, his four brothers and InfoCom were convicted in
federal court of shipping computers to Libya and Syria and falsifying the
value of other shipments. Marzook, a Louisiana Tech graduate, had been
indicted but deported before the indictment was handed down.
Two and one-half weeks after this conviction, Elashi, five other men, and
Holy Land are named in a 42-count indictment. The indictment charged that
the charity group and its officers had engaged in a conspiracy to deal with
terrorists and launder $12 million to them.
On April 16, 2007 Elashi began serving a 6 ½-year federal prison system
imposed following his conviction in the InfoCom case.
On July 16, 2007 jury selection began in the Holy Land case. Eight days
later U.S. Attorney Jim Jacks told the jury in his opening statement that the
government would prove that Holy Land gave money to “Palestinian zakat
(charity) committees” that were controlled by Hamas. The Dallas Morning
News outlined the following “key points” in the government’s case:
• Former Holy Land CEO Shukari said that “war is deception,”
according to a wiretap of a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia between
Holy Land organizers and what the government says were Hamas
sympathizers. In that conversation, he was speaking about playing
down Hamas ties to keep raising money in the U.S. according to FBI
testimony.
• FBI agents testified that several overseas clerics who were flown to
the U.S. by Holy Land to headline fundraisers were Hamas activists.
At one of these fundraisers, a Holy Land defendant pretended to kill
an “Israeli” during a skit.
• An Israeli government agent testified that the zakat committees to
which Holy Land sent millions of dollars were staffed with well-
known Hamas activists. The Israeli found key chains, videos and
posters that praised suicide bombers inside the committees’ offices.
The “key points” for Holy Land’s defense were cited by the Morning News
as follows:
• Edward Abington, the former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem,

testified that even though he spent years in the region and briefed
daily by the CIA, he was never told that zakat committees were
controlled by Hamas.
• Natalia Suleiman, Holy Land’s former administrative assistant,
testified that the foundation did humanitarian work not only in the
Palestinian territories but also in Lebanon, Jordan, Albania and
Turkey. Projects included food aid and clean water wells, she
testified. All the projects were well-documented and legitimate, she
told jurors.
• Former U.S. Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, who served as attorney to
Holy Land in the late 1990s after it was accused in the media of being
tied to Hamas, testified that he got no help when he asked the FBI and
State Department whether the foundation was under investigation, and
for guidance on new federal anti-terrorism laws.
The jury in the Holy Land case began its deliberations on September 20,
2007. The jury was in turmoil from the very beginning. Four days into the
deliberations the jury foreman sent a note to trial judge Joe Fish saying “the
jury is having trouble staying on task with the charge.” That was clearly
understandable. After sitting through nearly two months of “arcane
testimony,” the jury had to listen to what the Morning News called
“magazine-length legal instructions.” The jury instructions were in fact 54
pages in length – a daunting task to comprehend.
In the September 26 note to trial judge Joe Fish, the jury foreman said that
jurors frequently attacked each other and that “opinions, not facts, are
discussed. Some are closed to deliberations, which shuts off conversations
that are meaningful.”
On October 18, 2007 the jury reached a verdict, but Judge Fish was out of
town attending a conference. He ordered the jury verdict sealed until he
retuned. Four days later the verdict was un-sealed before the judge, but Fish
and courtroom observers were stunned when several jurors told the judge
that they no longer agreed with the jury decision. The jury foreman was even
more stunned.
“When we voted, there was no issue in the vote,” she told the judge. “No
one spoke up any different. I really don’t understand where it is coming
from. All 12 made that decision.”
Judge Fish promptly ordered the jury back into deliberations only to have
the jurors return an hour later with one of them still “uneasy” about the
panel’s decisions. Judge Fish was forced to declare a mistrial.
William Neal is the only juror to speak publicly about the deliberations. He
said he wasn’t surprised by the hold-out juror who, as the Morning News
reported, “sometimes dozed off during the trial.
“She was sleeping during deliberations,” Neal said. “we’d hear her snore,
and we’d say, ‘Wake up!’ she said she was bullied. She felt so threatened,
she would break down. What do you do when someone cries? I stopped
being nice. ‘This isn’t fund and games,’ I told them. ‘This is not about
personal feelings’.”
Neal described for the media an eerie scene in the judge’s chambers after
Fish had declared the mistrial involving the holdout juror.
“She looked at the judge and said she was confused,” Neal reported. “He
[Fish] just looked at her. There’s not much you can say to that. Ignorance is
a formidable weapon. You can’t attack it.”
“I’ve never seen anything like what happened yesterday,” said former Dallas
federal prosecutor John Helms the day after the mistrial. “It looks like they
had four days to sit at home and think about it.”
Some 200 Holy Land supporters, and the Elashi family in particular, were
elated with the trial’s outcome.
“Like Rosa Parks once was persecuted for simply sitting in a front seat of a
bus, my dad was singled out for feeding, clothing and educating the children
of Palestine,” said Noor Elashi, daughter of Ghassan Elashi.
“We’ll be all right,” said Shukri Abu Baker, a former Holy Land CEO, told a
United Church of Christ minister there to support the group.
“We’re in goods hands,” he added, looking up to the ceiling.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic

Relations, compared the government’s action in the Holy Land case to
McCarthyism in the 1950s.
“”Today’s campaign has a different name and a different target,” he said.

“The campaign is anti-terrorism and the target is the American Muslim
community.”
After fourteen years of investigation, nearly two months of trial, 19 days of

jury deliberations, four days of waiting in limbo, and a lone juror holdout
that prompted a mistrial, the government announced it would retry the case.
The government presented its case. At least one juror did not accept that
case. This is reasonable doubt. A retrial serves no legitimate governmental
objective. The Holy Land case has caused incalculable damage to American-
Muslim relations in this country. It is time to bury the proverbial hatchet.
The government’s investigation began with recanted testimony and its
evidence of the Foundation’s support for terrorism was circumstantial at
best. Government resources can better be expended healing rather than
prosecuting.

10-25-07 The Holy Land Foundation Verdict

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

10-25-07 The Holy Land Foundation Verdict

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE HOLY LAND FOUNDATION VERDICT

Criminal Defense Attorneys in Dallas Raise Reasonable Doubt and

Israel responded to these revelations by ordering the closure of a Holy Land

In 1997 the Commerce Department developed information that an Internet

Standing in the Rose Garden on December 4, 2001, President Bush

• Edward Abington, the former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem,

“We’re in goods hands,” he added, looking up to the ceiling.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic

“”Today’s campaign has a different name and a different target,” he said.

After fourteen years of investigation, nearly two months of trial, 19 days of

You might also like