Ghassan Elashi, under arrest in 2002
More on this story. “Guilty verdicts in terror case deal blow to CAIR: Founding director of U.S. Muslim lobby group could face 20 years in prison,” from WND, November 25 (thanks to Doug):
In a major blow to the terror-support network in America, the nation’s largest Muslim charity and five of its former organizers were found guilty of illegally funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinan terrorist group Hamas.
The 108-count verdict against the Holy Land Foundation also deals a blow to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-fundraising scheme.
One of the guilty defendants in the federal case, Ghassan Elashi, was a founding director of Washington-based CAIR, the most powerful Muslim lobbyist group in the nation.
Elashi and the other defendants — Mohamed El-Mezain, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh — could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
For the first time, wiretap evidence heard in the Holy Land case put CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, at a Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and activists that was secretly recorded by the FBI. Participants hatched a plot to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists as charitable giving.
“Government officials ought to study that evidence to realize CAIR is not what it presents itself as,” said Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Indeed it isn’t. Read it all.