The Muslim Brotherhood: The Boim Case and the Project

Previously, Take Your Cross has covered the Holy Land Foundation, the Muslim Brotherhood (its parent organization), and the so-called “Palestinians”.

From the Counterterrorism Blog:

On June 16, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the opinion of a three-judge panel, rendered December 28, 2007, which overturned the landmark $156 million judgment against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), other Islamic charities in the U.S., and an alleged Hamas fundraiser. The case arose out of the 1996 murder of David Boim, a 17-year-old American citizen, who was killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in the West Bank. David’s parents sued men who were directly involved in the murder; the Holy Land Foundation (HLF); the American Muslim Society, also known as the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP); the Quranic Literacy Institute (QLI); the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR); Saleh, the alleged Hamas fundraiser; and others (see this summary judgement order from the first trial for the complete list). The June 16 decision will result in a rehearing of the case by the entire court in the near future, thus giving the Boim family a second chance at the appellate level. Download the December 28 decision here and the June 16 decision here.

We discussed the impact of the December 28 decision at a January briefing for Congressional staff and other invitees. I posted this summary and the comments by Victor Comras and Jeffrey Breinholt (before he returned to active service in the Justice Department) and me. We also posted the following immediately after the December 28 appellate decision:

“Landmark Civil Terrorism Decision Overturned – Victory For Holy Land Foundation, Defeat For Terrorism Victims,” my post on December 29, 2007;

“Boim Case Reversal Could Be Major Blow To Victim-of-Terrorism Litigants,” Victor Comras’ post on December 29, 2007; and

“Why the Boim Ruling is a Pyrrhic Victory for the Islamic Charities,” Jeffrey Breinholt’s post on January 2, 2008.

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Read the whole post.

The Counterterrorism Blog has a recording and a written summary of a wonderful panel discussion on the Holy Land Foundation’s ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Excerpts from the written summary follow:

During the course of the trial, federal prosecutors presented an array of internal Muslim Brotherhood documents from the 1980s and early 1990s that give a first-ever public view of the history and ideology behind the operations of the Muslim Brothers (known as the Ikhwan, the Group, or the Brotherhood) in the U.S. over the past four decades. These documents, accepted as valid by the defendants and admitted at trial without protest, discuss recruitment; organization; ideology; and the development of the Group in different phases in the United States. For researchers, the documents have the added weight of being written by the Ikhwan leaders themselves, rather than interpretations of secondary sources.
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The exhibits make four things clear:

1) Many of the existing organizations that have set themselves up as the interlocutors between the Islamic community in the United States and the outside world (including government, law enforcement, and other faiths) were founded and controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood from their inception. Many of them changed their names over time to achieve broader national acceptance.

2) The Brotherhood established a highly-structured organization with many different faces inside the United States while deliberately and continually seeking to hide the Brotherhood’s links to its front groups.

3) The agenda to be carried out by these groups in the United States in reality had little to do with the organizations’ publicly-proclaimed goals, such as protecting the civil rights of Muslims. Rather, the true goal is to destroy the United States from the inside and work to establish a global Islamist society.

4) The primary function of the Brotherhood structures, from the early 1990s forward, was to support, materially and politically, the Hamas movement in the Palestinian territories, as instructed by the office of the general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
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A defining moment for the Brotherhood in the United States (and elsewhere) was the 1987 formation of Hamas as an armed group. What set Hamas apart from other Islamist groups was its public and organic link to the Muslim Brotherhood. Article 2 of the Hamas Charter states that:

“The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement of modern times. It is characterized by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and judgment ,the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.”

A document titled “Annual Report for year 89-1990, Presented to the Organizational Conference,” states that:

“The Central Committee for Palestinian Activism in America is in charge of planning, directing and following up on all work related to and connected to the Group. It includes several committees and organizations, some of which are: The Islamic Association of Palestine, the Occupied Land Fund, The United Association for Studies and Research, the Office of Foreign Affairs, The Investment Committee, The Rehabilitation Committee, the Medical Committee and the Legal Committee.”

This is an unambiguous statement by the Brotherhood (Group) linking the IAP, the OLF (which later became the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development), and the United Association for Studies and Research (USAR), the Group’s main think tank for many years. The same document notes that the HLF invested $100,000 in real estate with an ICNA-affiliated group, further indications of a strong relationship In order to bolster its outreach capabilities, the Group helped form the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in 1994. CAIR is first mentioned by name in the Brotherhood documents as part of the July 30, 1994 agenda of the Palestine Committee. CAIR would grow to become the leading Ikhwan voice in the media and become the most prominent public face of the Group. CAIR’s leadership was taken directly from the IAP and Palestine Committee.
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Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, who co-founded CAIR and serve as CAIR’s chairman emeritus and executive director, respectively, were listed as individual members of the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee in America. Ahmad and Awad also served as president and public relations director of the IAP, respectively. Interestingly, the exhibits show, on Oct. 5, 1994 CAIR received a $5,000 donation from the HLF, with the notation “CBS” in the memo line. Just two days before, CBS had aired a piece identifying the HLF and IAP as groups funding Hamas. The story led to a major outcry by Ikhwan-related groups, protesting the innocence of the groups, and it seems reasonable to assume that the money was given to CAIR to help fund the efforts to counter the CBS story, which included a letter-writing campaign and public protestations of the innocence of the named groups.

What makes the donation notable is that, in written testimony before the U.S. Congress, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad stated that it was “an outright lie” to say CAIR had received any money from the HLF, as Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project had stated. In his testimony, Awad challenged Emerson to produce “even a shred of evidence to support his ridiculous claim” that his group had received any such donation. At the time the existence of the check was unknown to Congressional investigators or the law enforcement community.

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Here is information about the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for world domination, known as The Project.