Victory - Holy Land Foundation Jihadis Guilty On All Counts

Apparently the second time was the charm... unanimously guilty on all counts.

For those of you who don't remember, the HLF trial is a watershed case involving our basic ability to combat fund raising for jihad against the West here in our own country.

The Holy Land Foundation was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood set up to raise funds for terrorist groups like Hamas here in America. They were also intimately connected with the good folks at CAIR, who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial.

The original trial ended in a mistrial, largely because the government had a somewhat sloppy case that had a tangled narrative and because there was significant jury tampering during deliberations.

This time, the Feds streamlined their case significantly to make all the loose ends easier for a jury to follow...and presented new evidence seized by the Israelis from the Palestinian Authority showing that the HLF were nothing but shills and money launderers for Hamas:

A jury convicted five former officials at the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) on all counts in the Hamas-support case after 8 days of deliberations.

The men, Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.

In the original trial last year, jurors acquitted El-Mezain on 31 of the 32 counts against him, but could not reach unanimous verdicts on any other counts, prompting a mistrial.

Prosecutors made a series of significant adjustments, from dropping 29 counts each against defendants Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, to adding new witnesses who could put the charity support in context. In addition, jurors in this trial saw three exhibits Israeli military officials seized from the Palestinian Authority which showed the PA also considered HLF to be a Hamas financer and that an HLF-supported charity committee was controlled by Hamas. {....}

(I wonder if Abdelrahman Odeh is any relation to PLO shill Sami Odeh?)

Journalist Douglas Farah studied the HLF evidence on behalf of the Nine Eleven Finding Answers (NEFA) Foundation and was the first to identify the significance of a Muslim Brotherhood memorandum outlining the group's ambitions in America. He said Monday's verdict has implications for unindicted co-conspirators in the case – most notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - because it validates what already was "a clear public record of why these groups were founded and how."

The Muslim Brotherhood memo called for "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

CAIR is listed as a member of the Brotherhood's Palestine Committee and founders Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad are included on a telephone list of committee members. CAIR has not refuted the evidence, Farah said. Government officials ought to study that evidence to realize CAIR is not what it presents itself as.

"The main currency CAIR and these groups have is their access," he said. "The time is now, with full justification and with a full public record - not a whispering campaign, not innuendo – for the government to now say without hesitation: you don't have access here. We don't want to deal with you."

After the verdicts were read, jurors were asked to determine whether convictions for money laundering meant HLF assets should be forfeited to the government, the Dallas Morning News reported. Jurors agreed $12.4 million from the defendants' assets shold be forfeited.

'You don't have access here...we don't want to deal with you'..someone ought to whisper that in George W. Bush's ear....maybe accompanied by a little poke in the ribs to get his attention.

As for the five jihadis, considering that they were involved in an organization trying to subvert our country's government and cheerfully raised money to murder women and kids, twenty years seems far too short a time to put them away.

Far better to hang them as conspirators to murder and treason, followed by a pigskin burial as an example to those of like mind who might be tempted to emulate them.