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Charity Seeks to Transfer Money Frozen by Treasury

Apr 18, 2004 7:52 am By Robert Spencer

They just want the donors’ money to go for what it was intended. The New York Times reports:

The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, one of three charities whose assets have been frozen because they are suspected of funneling donations to terrorist organizations, has asked the Treasury Department for permission to transfer some of its charitable assets to another nonprofit organization.

If the department approves, the foundation will give $50,000 to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which works to bring medical services to needy children in the Mideast.

“This is the donors’ money and it should go where donors wanted it to go, to good, charitable causes,” said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which has been lobbying for the release of the frozen money to other charities.

The Times paints a pretty picture of the group to whom the money would go:

Steve Sosebee, president and chief executive of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, said that if the charity received the money, it would use it to provide immediate relief services like the program it is running in Hebron to deliver powdered milk to malnourished mothers and children.

This year, the fund underwrote 15 medical missions in which doctors from Italy, New Zealand, the United States and elsewhere have performed plastic surgery on burn victims and repaired cleft lips and palates.

It works to match children to medical services around the globe, covering travel expenses, arranging lodging and handling paperwork, among other logistical services.

Mr. Sosebee said the money would be particularly helpful now. The fund-raising environment for charities over all has been difficult over the last three years, and the relief fund has been hit by several other negative trends as well.

The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund is an interfaith organization. Mr. Sosebee, its founder, was raised as a Roman Catholic but says he is now agnostic. The fund’s name has hurt it somewhat since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he said. Revenues had steadily climbed to a peak of $895,000 in 2001 but dropped 33 percent to $598,000 in 2002, according to the organization’s tax returns.

Muslims, whose religious tenets oblige them to donate 2.5 percent of their annual income to charity, have been wary of making donations that might attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities.

Mr. Sosebee said the fund had been hard hit by a steep drop in contributions in the Persian Gulf states and other Middle Eastern countries and to a lesser extent among its patrons in the United States.

The organization is also concerned that the NBC movie “Homeland Security,” which made its debut last Sunday, is going to have a negative effect on its revenues. In one scene, an investigator asks a professor who is suspected of having links to Al Qaeda about his support for “the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.”

He responds that “P.C.R.F. is a front for Islamic Jihad,” a terrorist organization, and vehemently insists that he does not support that organization’s policies or tactics.

Mr. Sosebee said he had received many phone calls and e-mail messages after the program was broadcast, asking how the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund spent its money.

“This is starting to build up into a big deal because all the organizations working in the Middle East are feeling like we’re being attacked,” he said. “I don’t have any politics or any political agenda, so I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about anything.”

An NBC spokeswoman said, “We’re looking into the situation.”

But Joe Kaufman in FrontPage painted a different picture of Sosebee and PCRF last summer:

In 1991, the PCRF considered two entities “ASSISTING ORGANIZATIONS”– The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and Global Relief Foundation — that were closed down by the U.S. government for funding terrorist groups. Another assisting organization, the International [Islamic] Relief Organization, was raided by the FBI, accused of filtering money to al-Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The New York Post records that the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) has been named in a lawsuit put forward by the families of the 9/11 victims for having “played key roles in laundering of funds to the terrorists in the 1998 African embassy bombings” and having been involved in the “financing and “˜aiding and abetting” of terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” On its website, the PCRF says it “works with these organizations” and acknowledges their “support and cooperation.”

In addition, the PCRF received thousands of dollars from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). “Throughout the 1980s, the [ADC] lent its name to political-support campaigns for Soviet-backed guerrilla organizations around the world from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the PFLP to Marxist revolutionaries in Latin America,” according to the December 17, 2001, edition of Insight Magazine.

On March 17, 2001, Steve Sosebee spoke on behalf of the PCRF, at a “˜Conference on Palestine,” held at the University of Michigan. The event was co-sponsored by the Global Relief Foundation (described above), the International Action Center (the parent of ANSWER), the Islamic Association for Palestine (a front for Hamas), CAIR (an off-shoot of the Islamic Association for Palestine), and others. Also speaking at the event was Ibrahim Hooper, the National Communications Director for CAIR and a man that claimed the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa was the result of a “misunderstanding.” The event kicked off with the showing of a video entitled “˜The New Uprising,” code words for the second intifada against Israel.

In addition, Sosebee represented the PCRF at an antiwar rally held at Kent State University, on May 4, 2002, although he claims he does not have “any political designs.” The event included a “solidarity speech” made by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, the group founded by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), who has stated, “Zionism is the enemy of humanity.” There was also a speech given by the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, the youth wing of the Revolutionary Communist Party. This group that was included in New Black Panther Khalid Muhammad’s heavily anti-Semitic “Million Youth March” in 1998.

Besides his attendance at conferences and rallies, Steve Sosebee is also a thrill seeker. In October of 2000, Sosebee, along with his wife, a team of doctors and his four-year-old daughter Deema trekked all the way to some of the most terrorist-laden areas located within the Palestinian territories. Sosebee’s personal highlights of the trip included: sightseeing at a police station, where just one day earlier, two Israelis were brutally beaten to death by an angry mob; sitting and waiting for another car to come, “so they could go first and be hit by stones”; keeping Deema busy in the playground, as ambulances sped passed with sirens blaring; putting on a Cuban Che Guevarra t-shirt to ensure his “acceptance among the youths”; driving across a dangerous rocky road, as his wife presses Deema to the floor of the car for protection; and applauding as Palestinian children hurled stones at Israeli soldiers, noting “every decent toss.”

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