At the London Review of Books, in an article titled Low-Hanging Fruit, Francis FitzGibbon looks at the case of the Holy Land Foundation.Operated in the United States by Palestinian-Americans, the HLF raised money for food, clothes and education to be distributed in Gaza and the West Bank by what’s called zakat charitable committees. Less than three months after 9/11, the Treasury Department closed it down and charged it with funneling the money to Hamas. End result: in 2008, the HLF’s two leaders were convicted and are serving 65-year sentences.
The prosecution did not actually “contend that the HLF was funding Hamas directly or that its money was used (or was intended to be used) to support suicide bombings or other sorts of violence.” Then what was the charge? Only that the United States government “maintained that Hamas controlled the zakat committees” thus helping “Hamas win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Palestinian people.”
Pretty flimsy pretext with which to file terrorism charges, wasn’t it? In fact after Hamas had been designated a terrorist organization, the HLF
… sought guidance from the US government on how best to carry on its work with these committees, but received no advice. The foundation continued to make sure that the Treasury Department knew what it was doing and who it was dealing with.
Furthermore
The US consul general testified that he visited the West Bank zakat committees and received regular briefings about Hamas. He stated that he had never heard of a link between Hamas and the committees.
In fact
The United States Agency for International Development provided funds for many years to the committees named in the indictment, while itself scrupulously avoiding contact with Hamas. This funding continued after the government closed the HLF in 2001, until at least 2004, when the indictments against the HLF five were laid.
Nor was the prosecution able
… to prove that the money raised by the HLF actually went to Hamas: it asked the jury to infer it, on the basis of other evidence. Shukri Abu Baker’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, says that ‘the government traced every penny from the Holy Land Foundation directly to charity. No guns, no suicide belts, no explosives. Yet, because this charity went to families in Palestine, it was a crime.’
To sum up, FitzGibbon writes, “as a tale of legal chicanery by a government, of moral panic and of complicity on the part of the judiciary, what happened to the HLF is hard to beat.”