At the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a charity accused by the U.S. government of financing Hamas, an FBI agent accused a major Muslim non-profit organization of being a front for the charity, Dallas Morning News reported on October 7. The organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was previously listed as a non-indicted co-conspirator in 2007. CAIR denies the accusations of being involved in terrorism and says it is a peaceful, mainstream organization.

Federal prosecutors claim that a government wiretap shows that CAIR’s founder and the group’s current executive director participated in a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia with Holy Land officials. Shukri Abu Baker, one of the defendants in the trial, is recorded as saying new organizations should be created.

According to a transcript of the wiretap, Baker discussed creating a new organization “which can benefit from a new atmosphere, one whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous,” the Dallas Morning News reported.

“In my opinion, we must form a new organization for activism which will be neutral because we are placed in a corner, we are place in a corner. It is known who we are, we are marked and I believe that there should be a new neutral organization which works on both sides,” one of the participants stated during the meeting.

“They also noted the attention paid to how the group would craft its message to Americans. ‘War is deception,’ Baker said at two different times,” The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported.

FBI Special Agent Lara Burns then testified that CAIR matched this description.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reports that Omar Ahmad, the participant who called for the meeting to take place, was a member of the Islamic Association for Palestine, which has been shut down for supporting Hamas. One year after the meeting, Ahmad became one of the founders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The prosecutors accuse the Holy Land Foundation of conspiring to finance Hamas. In making their case, they pointed to the charity’s use of speakers that were members of the terrorist organization and ties between Mousa Abu Marzook, a high-ranking member of Hamas and members of the charity.

“Most of the conduct occurred before U.S. law prohibited dealing with Hamas, but it clearly established HLF's role in a covert committee created by the Muslim Brotherhood to advance the Hamas agenda in the U.S. and the flow of money from the U.S. to Hamas-tied entities,” the IPT report said.

by Ryan Mauro