MUSLIM CHARITY
The Saudi Connection
How billions in oil money spawned a global terror network
U.S. News & World Report
By David E. Kaplan
12/15/03
The CIA's Illicit Transactions Group isn't listed in any phone book. There are no entries for it on any news database or Internet site. The ITG is one of those tidy little Washington secrets, a group of unsung heroes whose job is to keep track of smugglers, terrorists, and money launderers. In late 1998, officials from the White House's National Security Council called on the ITG to help them answer a couple of questions: How much money did Osama bin Laden have, and how did he move it around? The queries had a certain urgency. A cadre of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists had just destroyed two of America's embassies in East Africa. The NSC was determined to find a way to break the organization's back. Working with the Illicit Transactions Group, the NSC formed a task force to look at al Qaeda's finances. For months, members scoured every piece of data the U.S. intelligence community had on al Qaeda's cash. The team soon realized that its most basic assumptions about the source of bin Laden's money--his personal fortune and businesses in Sudan--were wrong. Dead wrong. Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the task force director, was "a constant fundraising machine." And where did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable: Saudi Arabia. America's longtime ally and the world's largest oil producer had somehow become, as a senior Treasury Department official put it, "the epicenter" of terrorist financing. This didn't come entirely as a surprise to intelligence specialists. But until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials did painfully little to confront the Saudis not only on financing terror but on backing fundamentalists and jihadists overseas. Over the past 25 years, the desert kingdom has been the single greatest force in spreading Islamic fundamentalism, while its huge, unregulated charities funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to jihad groups and al Qaeda cells around the world. Those findings are the result of a five-month investigation by U.S. News. The magazine's inquiry is based on a review of thousands of pages of court records, U.S. and foreign intelligence reports, and other documents. In addition, the magazine spoke at length with more than three dozen current and former counterterrorism officers, as well as government officials and outside experts in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Among the inquiry's principal findings:
Starting in the late 1980s--after the dual shocks of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet war in Afghanistan--Saudi Arabia's quasi-official charities became the primary source of funds for the fast-growing jihad movement. In some 20 countries, the money was used to run paramilitary training camps, purchase weapons, and recruit new members.
The charities were part of an extraordinary $70 billion Saudi campaign to spread their fundamentalist Wahhabi sect worldwide. The money helped lay the foundation for hundreds of radical mosques, schools, and Islamic centers that have acted as support networks for the jihad movement, officials say.
U.S. intelligence officials knew about Saudi Arabia's role in funding terrorism by 1996, yet for years Washington did almost nothing to stop it. Examining the Saudi role in terrorism, a senior intelligence analyst says, was "virtually taboo." Even after the embassy bombings in Africa, moves by counterterrorism officials to act against the Saudis were repeatedly rebuffed by senior staff at the State Department and elsewhere who felt that other foreign policy interests outweighed fighting terrorism.
Saudi largess encouraged U.S. officials to look the other way, some veteran intelligence officers say. Billions of dollars in contracts, grants, and salaries have gone to a broad range of former U.S. officials who had dealt with the Saudis: ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, even cabinet secretaries.
Washington's unwillingness to confront the Saudis over terrorism was part of a broader strategic failure to sound the alarm on the rise of the global jihad movement. During the 1990s, the U.S. intelligence community issued a series of National Intelligence Estimates--which report on America's global challenges--on ballistic missile threats, migration, infectious diseases; yet the government never issued a single NIE on the jihad movement or al Qaeda.
Propaganda. Saudi officials argue that their charities have done enormous good work overseas and that the problems stem from a few renegade offices. They say, too, that Riyadh is belatedly cracking down, much as Washington did after 9/11. "These people may have taken advantage of our charities," says Adel al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to the crown prince. "We're looking into it, and we've taken steps to ensure it never happens again."
To understand why the Saudis would fund a movement that now terrorizes even their own society, some history is in order. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was born of a kind of marriage of convenience between the House of Saud and the strict Wahhab sect of Islam. In the 18th century, Mohammed ibn Saud, a local chieftain and the forebear of today's ruling family, allied himself with fundamentalists from the Wahhab sect. Over the next 200 years, backed by the Wahhabis, Saud and his descendants conquered much of the Arabian peninsula, including Islam's holiest sites, in Mecca and Medina. Puritanical and ascetic, the Wahhabis were given wide sway over Saudi society, enforcing a strict interpretation of certain Koranic beliefs. Their religious police ensured that subjects prayed five times a day and that women were covered head to toe. Rival religions were banned, criminals subjected to stoning, lashing, and beheading.
The Wahhabis were but one sect among a back-to-the-roots movement in Islam that had limited attraction overseas. But that began to change, first with the flood of oil money in the 1970s, which filled Saudi coffers with billions of petrodollars. Next came the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979. Most ominously for the Saudis, however, was a third shock that same year: the brief but bloody takeover by militants of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
Threatened within the kingdom, and fearful that the radicals in Tehran would assert their own leadership of the Muslim world, the Saudis went on a spending spree. From 1975 through last year, the kingdom spent over $70 billion on overseas aid, according to a study of official sources by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think tank. More than two thirds of that amount went to "Islamic activities"--building mosques, religious schools, and Wahhabi religious centers, says the CSP's Alex Alexiev, a former CIA consultant on ethnic and religious conflict. The Saudi funding program, Alexiev says, is "the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted"--dwarfing the Soviets' propaganda efforts at the height of the Cold War. The Saudi weekly Ain al-Yaqeen last year reported the cost as "astronomical" and boasted of the results: some 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 colleges, and nearly 2,000 schools in non-Islamic countries.
Key to this evangelical tour de force were charities closely tied to Saudi Arabia's ruling elite and top clerics. With names like the Muslim World League and its affiliate, the International Islamic Relief Organization, the funds spent billions more to spread Wahhabism. The IIRO, for example, took credit for funding 575 mosques in Indonesia alone. Accompanying the money, invariably, was a blizzard of Wahhabist literature. Wahhabist clerics led the charge, causing moderate imams to worry about growing radicalism among the faithful. Critics argue that Wahhabism's more extreme preachings--mistrust of infidels, branding of rival sects as apostates, and emphasis on violent jihad--laid the groundwork for terrorist groups around the world.
Princely giving. If the Saudis' efforts had been limited to pushing fundamentalism abroad, their work would have been cause for controversy. But some Saudi charities played a far more troubling role. U.S. officials now say that key charities became the pipelines of cash that helped transform ragtag bands of insurgents and jihadists into a sophisticated, interlocking movement with global ambitions. Many of those spreading the Wahhabist doctrine abroad, it turned out, were among the most radical believers in holy war, and they poured vast sums into the emerging al Qaeda network. Over the past decade, according to a 2002 report to the United Nations Security Council, al Qaeda and its fellow jihadists collected between $300 million and $500 million--most of it from Saudi charities and private donors.
The origins of al Qaeda are intimately bound up with the Saudi charities, intelligence analysts now realize. Osama bin Laden and his followers were not exactly holy warriors; they were unholy fundraisers. In Afghanistan, Riyadh and Washington together ponied up some $3.5 billion to fund the mujahideen--the Afghan fighters who took on the Soviets. At the same time, men like bin Laden served as fundraisers for the thousands of foreign jihadists streaming into Afghanistan. By persuading clerics across the Muslim world to hand over money from zakat, the charitable donations that are a cornerstone of Islam, they collected huge sums. They raised millions more from wealthy princes and merchants across the Middle East. Most important, they joined forces with the Saudi charities, many already moving aid to the fighters.
Afghanistan forged not only financial networks but important bonds among those who believe in violent jihad. During the Afghan war, the man who ran the Muslim World League office in Peshawar, Pakistan, was bin Laden's mentor, Abdullah Azzam. Another official there was Wael Julaidan, a Saudi fundraiser who would join bin Laden in founding al Qaeda in 1988. Documents seized in raids after 9/11 reveal just how close those ties were. One record, taken from a Saudi-backed charity in Bosnia, bears the handwritten minutes of a meeting between bin Laden and three men, scrawled beneath the letterhead of the IIRO and Muslim World League. The notes call for the opening of "league offices . . . for the Pakistanis," so that "attacks" can be made from them. A note on letterhead of the Saudi Red Crescent--Saudi Arabia's Red Cross--in Peshawar asks that "weapons" be inventoried. It is accompanied by a plea from bin Laden to Julaidan, citing "an extreme need for weapons."
After the Soviets left Afghanistan in disgrace, bin Laden moved his fledgling al Qaeda to Sudan, in 1992. By then a perfect storm of Islamic radicalism was gathering across the Muslim world. Some "Afghan Arab" veterans of Afghanistan now eyed radical change in their homelands, where secular and corrupt regimes held sway. Others set out for lands where they saw fellow Muslims oppressed, such as Kashmir and Bosnia. Saudis rich and poor responded with donations at thousands of zakat boxes in mosques, supermarkets, and schools, doling out support for besieged Muslims in Algeria, Bosnia, Kashmir, the West Bank, and Gaza. Millions poured in.
The Saudi charities opened offices in hot spots around the globe, with virtually no controls on how the money was spent, U.S. officials say. The donors funded many worthy projects, supporting orphanages and hospitals, and providing food, clothing, and medicine to refugees. But by 1994, Riyadh was starting to get complaints--from the French interior minister about Saudi funds reaching Algerian terrorists and from President Clinton about their funding of Hamas, whose suicide bombers were wreaking havoc on the Middle East peace process. More concerns surfaced in the Philippines, where an investigation of an al Qaeda plot to murder the pope and bomb a dozen U.S. airliners led to the local IIRO office. Its director was a brother-in-law of bin Laden's, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, who was busily funneling cash to the region's top Islamic guerrilla groups, Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Who's who. It was Bosnia, though, that finally caught the sustained attention of the CIA. In the early '90s, the ethnic-cleansing policies of the Serbs drew hundreds of foreign jihadists to the region to help defend Bosnian Muslims. Saudi money poured in, too. Saudi donors sent $150 million through Islamic aid organizations to Bosnia in 1994 alone, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh reported. But large sums were winding up in the wrong hands. A CIA investigation found that a third of the Islamic charities in the Balkans--among them the IIRO--had "facilitated the activities of Islamic groups that engage in terrorism," including plots to kidnap or kill U.S. personnel. The groups were a who's who of Islamic terrorism: Hamas, Hezbollah, Algerian extremists, and Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, whose spiritual head, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, later earned a life sentence for plotting to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks.
In a classified report in 1996, CIA officials finally pulled together what they had on Islamic charities. The results were disturbing. The agency identified over 50 Islamic charities engaged in international aid and found that, as in the Balkans, fully a third of them were tied to terrorist groups. "Islamic activists dominate the leadership of the largest charities," the report noted. "Even high-ranking members of the collecting or monitoring agencies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan--such as the Saudi High Commission--are involved in illicit activities, including support for terrorists."
As front organizations, the charities were ideal. Some provided safe houses, false identities, travel documents. Others offered arms and materiel. Nearly all dispensed sizable amounts of cash, according to the CIA, with little or no documentation. And they were, it seemed, everywhere. By the mid-1990s, the Muslim World League fielded some 30 branches worldwide, while the IIRO had offices in over 90 countries. The CIA found that the IIRO was funding "six militant training camps in Afghanistan," where Riyadh was backing a then obscure sect called the Taliban, whose religious practices were close to Wahhabism. The head of a Muslim World League office in Pakistan was supplying league documents and arms to militants in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Another Saudi charity had begun funding rebels in Chechnya.
"Chatter." Although they called themselves private foundations, these were not charities in the sense that Americans understand the term. The Muslim World League and the IIRO, for example, are overseen by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, the kingdom's highest religious authority. They receive substantial funds from the government and members of the royal family and make use of the Islamic affairs offices of Saudi embassies abroad. The Muslim World League's current secretary general, Abdullah Al-Turki, served as the kingdom's minister of Islamic affairs for six years. "The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully government-funded organization," the IIRO's Canadian head testified in a 1999 court case. "In other words, I work for the government of Saudi Arabia."
The year of the CIA report, 1996, was also when Osama bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan, after a four-year sojourn in Sudan. Protected by the Taliban, and with money pouring in, bin Laden, finally, went operational. He opened new training camps, and sent cash to established terrorist groups and seed money to start-ups. Then he began plotting strikes against the United States, even issuing a long fatwa, or religious edict, summoning devout Muslims to wage jihad on America. The fatwa received little publicity, but bin Laden now had alarm bells ringing at the CIA. "He seemed to turn up under every terrorist rock," remembers a senior counterterrorism official. At CIA headquarters, the agency set up a "virtual station" on bin Laden, pooling resources to track his operations.
U.S. intelligence agencies, meanwhile, were picking up disturbing "chatter" out of Saudi Arabia. Electronic intercepts of conversations implicated members of the royal family in backing not only al Qaeda but also other terrorist groups, several intelligence sources confirmed to U.S. News. None were senior officials--the royal family has some 7,000 members. But several intercepts implicated some of the country's wealthiest businessmen. "It was not definitive but still very disturbing," says a senior U.S. official. "That was the year we had to admit the Saudis were a problem."
Despite the mounting evidence, the issue of Saudi complicity with terrorists was effectively swept under the diplomatic rug. Counterterrorism experts offer several reasons. For one, this was five years before the 9/11 attacks, and terrorism simply wasn't seen as the strategic threat it is today. Only a dozen or so Americans were killed each year in terrorist attacks. Moreover, in many of the jihad struggles, Washington was neutral, as in Kashmir, or even supportive, as in Bosnia. When Saudi money began financing jihadists headed to Chechnya, Washington responded with "a wink and a nod," as one analyst put it. The level and impact of all the Saudi funding were also difficult to discern. "We knew the outlines," explains Judith Yaphe, a senior Middle East analyst at the CIA until 1995. "But before 9/11, much of it had to be intuited. It was like the blind man examining the elephant."
There were other reasons. In much of official Washington, a growing movement of Third World religious zealots was just not taken seriously. For years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, those running U.S. intelligence were "Soviet people" still fighting the Cold War, says Pat Lang, who served as chief Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency during the 1990s. "The jihadists were like men from Mars to them." Peter Probst, then a senior counterterrorism official at the Pentagon, agrees. "Any time you would raise these threats, people would laugh," he recalls. "They would say I was being totally paranoid."
The fact that the movement was based on Islam made it more difficult to discuss. "There was a fear that it was too sensitive, that you'd be accused of discrimination," Probst says. "It was political correctness run amok." Others say the message was subtle but clear. In the CIA, merely getting permission to prepare a report on a subject can require up to five levels of approval. On the subject of Saudi ties to terrorism, the word came back: There was simply no interest. The result, says a CIA veteran, was "a virtual embargo."
The FBI fared little better. By 1998, a sprawling investigation in Chicago into terrorist fundraising had led federal agents to $1.2 million looted from a local chemical firm. The money, they suspected, had been sent to Hamas. The G-men found the source of the cash curious: a Saudi charity, the IIRO, which had funneled the money through the Saudi Embassy. Senior Justice Department officials expressed concerns about "national security," and the case, eventually, was dropped. "Did someone say to me we can't do this because it would offend the Saudis? No," says Mark Flessner, a prosecutor on the case. "But was that always an undertone? Yes. Was that a huge issue? Yes."
It didn't hurt that the Saudis had spread money around Washington by the millions. Vast sums from Saudi contracts have bought friends and influence here. In his recent book Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, former CIA operative Bob Baer calls it "Washington's 401(k) Plan." "The Saudis put out the message," Baer wrote. "You play the game--keep your mouth shut about the kingdom--and we'll take care of you." The list of beneficiaries is impressive: former cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and CIA station chiefs. Washington lobbyists, P.R. firms, and lawyers have also supped at the Saudi table, as have nonprofits from the Kennedy Center to presidential libraries. The high-flying Carlyle Group has made fortunes doing deals with the Saudis. Among Carlyle's top advisers have been former President George H.W. Bush; James Baker, his secretary of state; and Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense. If that wasn't enough, there was the staggering amount of Saudi investment in America--as much as $600 billion in U.S. banks and stock markets.
That kind of clout may help explain why the House of Saud could be so dismissive of American concerns on terrorism. Official inquiries about bin Laden went unanswered by Riyadh. When Hezbollah terrorists killed 19 U.S. troops with a massive truck bomb at Khobar Towers in Dhahran in 1996, Saudi officials stonewalled, then shut the FBI out of the investigation. So sensitive were relations that the CIA instructed officials at its Riyadh station not to collect intelligence on Islamic extremists--even after the bombing--for fear of upsetting their host, former officers tell U.S. News.
Payoffs. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 changed all that. Within weeks, the NSC formed its task force on terrorist finances, drawing in members from the Treasury Department and the CIA's Illicit Transactions Group. (The ITG was later absorbed into the agency's Counterterrorism Center.) In the movies, U.S. intelligence often seems capable of extraordinary feats. In the real world, alas, Washington's reach is all too limited. Officials on the task force were quickly sobered by the handful of people they found with true expertise on the Middle East. Those knowledgeable about terrorist financing numbered even fewer. So limited was the CIA's knowledge that it began using al Qaeda's real name only that year--10 years after bin Laden founded the organization. Even less was known about al Qaeda's fellow jihadists around the globe. Its top ally in Southeast Asia, Jemmah Islamiya, was not targeted until after 9/11, according to an Australian intelligence report.
Other challenges loomed. The Islamic world has always been a difficult target for Western intelligence services, and terrorist cells are among the toughest to penetrate. Following criminal money is also a tortuous task. Drawing a bead on al Qaeda combined all three challenges. The NSC task force tried to formulate what staffers called "a theory of the case." Their first questions were simple: What did it cost to be bin Laden? How much did it take to fund al Qaeda?
Terrorist acts, even the so-called spectaculars like 9/11, are relatively cheap to carry out. But the more the task force studied al Qaeda, the bigger its budget appeared. With its training camps and operations, and payments to the Taliban and to other terror groups, the amount was surely in the millions, task-force members surmised. After finding that bin Laden's inherited wealth was largely gone and his Sudanese businesses failing, the question was, where did the money come from? The answer, they eventually concluded, was Saudi charities and private donors.
The charities, by 1999, were integrated even further into the jihadist movement. In India, police detained Sayed Abu Nasir, a longtime IIRO staffer, for plotting to bomb U.S. consulates. Nasir confessed that the organization was secretly supporting dozens of jihadist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Equally striking was the al Haramain Foundation, one of Saudi Arabia's largest, which dispensed $50 million a year through some 50 offices worldwide. U.S. officials would eventually conclude that its branches in at least 10 countries were providing arms or cash to terrorists, including those in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Somalia. In Southeast Asia, al Haramain was acting as a key source of funds for al Qaeda; in Chechnya, Russian officials suspected it of moving $1 million to the rebels and arranging the purchase of 500 "heavy weapons" from the Taliban.
There was more. In the Middle East, the CIA learned, Saudi donations were funding as much as half of Hamas's budget and paying off the families of suicide bombers. In Pakistan, so much Saudi money poured in that a mid-level Pakistani jihadist could make seven times the country's average wage. Jihad had become a global industry, bankrolled by the Saudis. Daniel Benjamin, the NSC's counterterrorism director, knew that Palestinian terror groups had used local charities, but that was nothing like what the Saudis had wrought. "The structure was not astonishing," Benjamin says. "The ambition and scale were."
This time something would be done. The NSC staff approached Vice President Al Gore, who told the Saudis that Washington wanted a meeting with their top security and banking officials. In June 1999, the NSC's William Wechsler, Treasury's Richard Newcomb, and others on the task force flew to Riyadh. They were met by a half-dozen senior Saudi officials, all dressed in flowing white robes and checkered kaffiyehs. "We laid everything out--what we knew, what we thought," said one official. "We told them we'd just had two of our embassies blown up and that we needed to deal with them in a different way."
Deep freeze. Two things soon became clear. The first was that the Saudis had virtually no financial regulatory system and zero oversight of their charities. The second was that Saudi police and bank regulators had never worked together before and didn't particularly want to start. Those were problems, but the Americans made it clear they meant business. If the Saudis didn't crack down, Newcomb explained, Treasury officials had the ability to freeze assets of groups and individuals who supported terrorists. That struck a nerve. The mention of wealthy Saudis prompted lots of nervous chatter among the Saudis. But on some points, the Saudis seemed genuinely puzzled. Some stressed that jihad struggles in certain regions, such as Israel and Chechnya, were legitimate. Still, the Saudis agreed they may have a problem. Changes, they said, would be made.
But none were. A second visit by a U.S. delegation, in January 2000, elicited much the same reaction. Worse, the team was getting the same treatment back home. Frustrated with Riyadh, Newcomb's Office of Foreign Assets Control at Treasury began submitting the names of Saudi charities and businessmen for sanctions. But imposing sanctions required approval from an interagency committee, and that never came. CIA and FBI officials were lukewarm to the idea, worried that sanctions would chill what little cooperation they had with their Saudi counterparts. But it was the State Department that objected most strenuously. "The State Department," recalls one official, "always thought we had much bigger fish to fry."
Not everyone in Foggy Bottom agreed. In the fall of 1999, Michael Sheehan, State's tough-minded coordinator for counterterrorism, had seen intelligence on the Islamic charities and was appalled. As part of a still-classified report, he wrote a cable instructing U.S. ambassadors to insist that host governments crack down on the groups. But some at State argued that the charities were doing important work and fought to kill Sheehan's initiative. The cable was deep-sixed.
Underlying the reluctance to confront the Saudis was a more fundamental failure--Washington's inability to recognize the strategic danger posed by the growing jihad movement, of which al Qaeda is but the head. The U.S. government, in effect, largely missed the gravest ideological threat to national security since the end of the Cold War. "There were people who got it at the analyst level, at the supervisory level, but all of us were outnumbered," says Pat Lang, the former Pentagon analyst. "You just couldn't get people to take seriously the world of Islam and the threat it represented."
Consider the work of the National Intelligence Council, which is tied closely to the CIA and reports directly to its director. In 1999, the NIC brought together experts from across America to identify global trends--key drivers, they called them--that would affect the world over the next 15 years. A senior intelligence official, the anonymous author of Through Our Enemies' Eyes, which chronicles the rise of al Qaeda, described to U.S. News how he perused the NIC draft report and was shocked to see that Islamic fundamentalism was not listed among the key drivers. The analyst sent a note to the NIC chief, stressing that there were nearly a dozen Islamic insurgencies around the world, knitted together by Saudi money, al Qaeda, and thousands of Afghan veterans. The response: "I got a Christmas card back with a note hoping my family was well," the man recalls. The NIC's final report, Global Trends 2015, barely mentioned radicalism in the Islamic world. The NIC's vice chairman, Ellen Laipson, later wrote that their report "shied away" from the issue because it "might be considered insensitive and unintentionally generate ill will."
The lack of vision extended to the incoming Bush adminstration, say counterterrorism officials. Early in the Bush term, they say, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill moved to kill a proposed terrorist asset-tracking center that the NSC task force had pushed.
The 19 hijackers, of course, obliterated any lingering concerns about sensitivity and Saudi ill will. Over the next year, police raided the offices of Saudi-backed charities in a half-dozen countries. The Treasury Department ordered the assets of many of them frozen, including those of al Haramain branches in Bosnia and Somalia. At the Saudi High Commission in Bosnia, which coordinated local aid among Saudi charities, police found before-and-after photos of the World Trade Center, files on pesticides and crop dusters, and information on how to counterfeit State Department badges. At Manila's international airport, authorities stopped Agus Dwikarna, an al Haramain representative based in Indonesia. In his suitcase were C4 explosives.
Outside Washington, federal agents raided offices of the IIRO and Muslim World League, along with over a hundred other Islamic groups, nearly all based--at least on paper--in two buildings in the Virginia suburbs. Many share directors, office space, and cash flow. For two years, investigators have followed the money to offshore trusts and obscure charities which, according to court records, they believe are tied to Hamas, al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. To date, no groups have been indicted. "You can't trace a cent to any terrorist," says attorney Nancy Luque, whose clients include several of the firms.
The big Saudi charities, for their part, also deny wrongdoing. The Muslim World League, al Haramain, and the IIRO all declined to answer questions from U.S. News, but IIRO Secretary General Adnan Basha told the Arab press that "there is not a single shred of evidence" tying the group to terrorists. Says al Haramain director Sheik Aqil al-Aqil: "We set up this institution to preach Islam peacefully. It's very strange that we are described as terrorist."
But as more evidence has become public, Saudi officials have finally admitted that something is indeed seriously wrong. In June of this year, they promised reforms. Charities would be audited, officials in Riyadh vowed, their overseas activities curtailed. The ubiquitous zakat boxes have been banned. Saudi officials liken the situation to U.S. funding of the Irish Republican Army. During the 1970s and '80s, IRA activists raised millions of dollars from Irish-Americans, despite British pleas that the funds were backing IRA terrorism. "The Saudis are not diligent donors," says Chas. Freeman, a former ambassador to Riyadh whose Middle East Policy Council receives Saudi funds. "They've never asked us what we're doing with their money." The Saudis' record, Freeman says, is not one of complicity but of "negligence and incompetence."
Getting serious. Not everyone, obviously, agrees. A $1 trillion lawsuit names Saudi princes, businessmen, and charities for funding the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks. Brought by more than 900 victims' family members, the suit is winding its way through the U.S. courts. The withholding of 27 pages in Congress's 9/11 report last June--detailing Saudi funding and ties to al Qaeda--has only fed suspicions. Counterterrorism officials also remain wary that the Saudis will make good on their pledges to reform. Only after triple suicide bombings struck Riyadh on May 12 did the regime get serious about cracking down, they say. Since then, the Saudis have arrested more than 200, broken up a dozen al Qaeda cells, and begun sharing intelligence as never before. "The Saudis didn't really get it," says Wechsler, the former NSC coordinator. "They didn't get it after the '98 embassy bombings, after the Cole bombing, after 9/11, after Bali. They got it after May 12."
That remains to be seen. This year Saudi officials announced the closing of all of al Haramain's offices overseas. That came as news to its director, al-Aqil, who in July told Reuters that he was still running branches in Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Bangladesh. Al-Aqil, say Saudi officials, is now under investigation for fraud. In Pakistan, meanwhile, President Pervez Musharraf has twice asked Riyadh to curtail the millions of Saudi dollars that pour into local Islamic political parties, jihad groups, and religious schools. Again, the Saudis have promised change, but Pakistani officials are skeptical. They point to the visit to Mecca last month by the chief of the Jamiat-e-Ullema Islam, one of Pakistan's top Islamic parties. The JUI shares power in Pakistan's Northwest Territory, where it provides sanctuary for Taliban members staging attacks in Afghanistan. Why was JUI's boss in Mecca? For fundraising, JUI sources told U.S. News.
The bigger test for the Saudis will be reform of their society. The hijacking of their charities by the jihad movement occurred because of support by the Saudi fundamentalist religious establishment. That won't be easy to change. Since May 12, officials in Riyadh say, they have purged some 2,000 radical clerics from their mosques and ordered the jihadist rhetoric turned way down. But bringing Wahhabism into the 21st century won't be easy. "We need time," says Abdullah Alotaibi, a political scientist at King Saud University in Riyadh. "You can't change 70 years of history overnight."
Money Mecca
Offices of these three leading Saudi charities played key roles in moving millions of dollars to jihadists, terrorists, or insurgents in some 20 countries.
A - MUSLIM WORLD LEAGUE
Headquarters: Mecca
Est. annual budget: $45 million
Branch offices: 36
Terror ties: Early '90s, Manila branch sends cash to Islamic guerrillas in Philippines; 2001-02, MWL's Rabita
Trust affiliate designated as terrorist group by U.S. for al Qaeda ties; 2002, federal agents raid U.S. offices
of MWL in terrorist financing case.
B - AL HARAMAIN FOUNDATION
Headquarters: Riyadh
Est. annual budget: $53 million
Branch offices: 50
Terror ties: 1996, CIA links group to Egyptian extremists and Bosnian jihadists; 1999, Moscow claims group
transferred money and arms to Chechen rebels; 2002, staffer nabbed at Manila airport with explosives; 2003, U.S.
says branches in 10 countries provide arms or cash to terrorists.
C - INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC RELIEF ORGANIZATION
Headquarters: Jeddah
Est. annual budget: $46 million
Branch offices: 80
Terror ties: Early '90s, Manila branch funnels cash to Abu Sayyaf and Moro Islamic Liberation Front; 1996, CIA
reports funding of jihadists in Balkans and Afghanistan, and ties to Algerian and Egyptian extremists, al Qaeda, and
Hamas; 1998, FBI traces suspected Hamas money in Chicago to IIRO; 1999, staffer suspected in bomb plot admits IIRO
funds Afghan terror training camps.
NO GOOD MUSLIM CHARITIES CAN BE IDENTIFIED!
ISLAMIC UNIVERSAL PROMO
10 NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE,
LONDON WC2N 5BX, THE UNITED KINGDOM.
FROM: THE DESK OF THE DIRECTOR PROMOTIONS,
ISLAMIC PROMOTIONS/PRIZE AWARD DEPARTMENT,
REF: GUPL/67-AO91652005
WINNING NOTIFICATION
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu
We are pleased to inform you of the announcement today,14th of june 2005,of winners of the ISLAMIC UNIVERSAL PROMO held on 31th of may 2005. ISLAMIC UNIVERSAL PROMO is sponsored by ISLAMIC RELIEF ORGANISATION. The Organisation is dedicated to alleviating the poverty and the suffering of the world poorest people."Whoever saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind" Qur'an 5:32.
Islamic Relief is registered with the UK government’s Charity Commission – Registered Charity no. 328158.
Your email address was attached to ticket number 13-2316-5086-477; with serial number A025-09 drew the lucky numbers 37-13-34-85-56-87, and consequently won in category A. You have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of £4,000,000.00(GBP) in cash credited to file REF NO.GUPL/67-AO91652005.
This is from total prize money of £9,000.000.00(GBP) shared
among the three international winners in the category A. All participants were
selected through a computer ballot system drawn from Islamic 100,000
companies/individuals from Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, America, Asia,
Europe , North America and Africa as part of our International Promotions
Program, which is conducted annually.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Your fund is now deposited with a Security company insured in
your name. Due to the mix up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep
this award strictly from public notice until your claim has been processed and
your money remitted to your account. This is part of our security protocol to
avoid double claiming or unscrupulous acts by participants of this program.
We hope with a part of you prize, you will participate in our end of year high
stakes £10 Million Islamic international lotto. To begin your claim, please
respond back to your claims agent;
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Email:
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Phone: +447031849985
He will brief you on steps to be taken for due processing and remittance of your
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than two weeks after this date or funds will be returned as unclaimed.
NOTE: In order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications, please remember to
quote your reference number in every one of your correspondences.
Ticket number 13-2316-5086-477
Serial number A025-09
Lucky numbers 37-13-34-85-56-87
File REF NO. GUPL/67-AO91652005
Congratulations again from all our staff and thank you for being part of our
promotions program.
Sincerely,
Wassalam wr. wb
Ms. Farhat Usman
THE DIRECTOR PROMOTIONS,
ISLAMIC UNIVERSAL PROMO
farhatusman@praiseallah.com
N.B. Any breach of confidentiality on the part of the Winners will result to
disqualification.
No Muslim Charities Could be Found to Help with the Hurricane Katrina Cleanup
Muslims looking for
safe charities
Donors fear
they might unknowingly aid terrorists.
The Orange County Register
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Masoud Nassimi has given money for victims of Hurricane Katrina and sponsored a child in his native Afghanistan.
He has donated to charities for water projects in Pakistani villages and to help refugees in Bosnia.
Donating is second nature to the Westminster man, who never gave too much thought to his charity, doling it out as required by his Muslim faith.
That is, until he gave to a Muslim organization - to buy ambulances in the Middle East - that was later shut down by the U.S. government, which accused it of funneling money to terrorist groups.
"All the time we receive brochures. It never crossed my mind the question of how the money will be used and who's managing it," said Nassimi, 43, a Caltrans engineer.
Nassimi has not stopped giving. During this Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when charity is stressed even further, he has given to victims of the Pakistan earthquake.
But he now looks for transparency, seeking charities that clearly define their goals, spell out how they spend money, are free of suspicion and make their financial documents available to the public.
He would like to see a list of trustworthy charities and nonprofits to give to without fretting about whether the money could end up supporting terrorism.
While fears of giving have substantially subsided since the U.S. government froze the assets of several prominent charities accused of ties to terrorism after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Muslim charities and community leaders say they recognize the dilemma.
And while some Muslim charities have already become more transparent in the way they do business, more change is coming.
Next month, several U.S. Muslim organizations will meet in Washington, D.C., to hammer out operating guidelines for a fledgling group to serve as a sort of umbrella authority.
The National Council of American Muslim Non-Profits could end up scrutinizing member charities, setting financial standards and issuing a de facto seal of approval, thus raising their credibility level.
Karen Keyworth, who's on a task force to form the council, said the nation's estimated 50 Muslim charities will likely want to join.
"If they meet these standards, they'll be able to improve their overall quality and then, of course, donor confidence will be affected by that," she said.
Keyworth, co-founder of Virginia-based Islamic Schools League of America, was part of the planning process this year with some other Muslim organizations and input from the U.S. Treasury Department.
She said Muslim organizations are starting to mature.
"There's a natural change in all these institutions moving toward a more organized (system) capable of carrying out the standards of financial responsibility," she said. "9/11 came along and gave that a very big push."
The U.S. Department of Treasury has encouraged formation of the council to "implement best practices and help safeguard both donors and charities from the taint of terrorism and also restore donor confidence in the community," Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said.
Locally, the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, where Nassimi is a volunteer, is urging people to give to four relief agencies for Pakistan quake victims and giving an unusual assurance: The groups will send an independent team to the affected area, which will report back to the community on Nov. 13.
"In Southern California what we are trying to accomplish is a total transparency between the recipient and donor," said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the organization of more than 70 mosques and Muslim organizations.
Last year, federal officials charged seven leaders of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development with illegally sending millions of dollars to the Palestinian group Hamas. One of the group's top fundraisers was arrested at his Buena Park home for an alleged immigration violation and remains in custody.
Some in the Muslim community argue that Islamic charities have been unfairly singled out for increased scrutiny by the government post-9/11.
But Treasury spokeswoman Millerwise said the government must act when it gets information on charities with terrorist links.
The U.S. government has frozen the assets of 41 Muslim charities worldwide, accusing them of ties with terrorist organizations.
While many Muslim charities have thrived despite post 9/11 scrutiny, some say they are spending more time, energy and money on audits and attorney fees than they ever did before.
"We have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that money that we are raising is going to uses that are kosher," said Jihad Smaili, who's an attorney and a board member of the Toledo, Ohio-based KindHearts.
The organization started in 2002 and is devoted to providing disaster relief and development aid worldwide.
His group raised almost $5 million last year, but Smaili said, "It's unfortunate that a charity such as ours has to spend a lot of time and money on its existence."
Muslim world urged to fund Hamas
The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called on the Muslim world to help the Palestinian people and their Hamas-led government.
Both he and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched strong attacks on the West as a three-day forum on Palestinian solidarity began in Tehran.
The US Treasury has this week further tightened Palestinian cash flows.
But Palestinian PM Ismail Haniya said on Friday the cuts in funds would not weaken the people's resolve.
Late on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow had agreed to provide "urgent financial aid" to the Palestinian Authority.
The US and European Union cut off aid to the authority after Hamas took power on 30 March, because the militant group refuses to renounce violence and recognise Israel.
'Rotten tree'
Ayatollah Khamenei, opening the Tehran conference, said all Muslims had a duty to help the Palestinian people and should not remain indifferent to tyranny.
He launched a scathing attack on the West, saying its liberal democracy was like a poison.
He said global imperialism led by the US president openly threatened the Muslim world by talking about launching a crusade against it
President Ahmadinejad widened the attack to include Israel, which he said was "a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm".
The president provoked an international outcry last October when he cast doubts on the Holocaust and said Israel should be "wiped off the map".
On Friday he said there were no doubts about the holocaust suffered by the Palestinian people in the past 60 years and that the Palestinians should not pay the price for what the West said were crimes against Jews.
"Believe that Palestine will be freed soon," he said.
The conference came as the US Treasury banned its nationals from doing business with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
It said the militant Islamist group had a vested interest in the transactions of the authority.
The US is making exceptions for government entities under the direct control of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah movement is a rival of Hamas.
'Oil and olives'
Mr Haniya said on Friday the suspension of Western aid to the Palestinians would never defeat the Hamas-led administration.
He said the West would not succeed in isolating the government because it had the full support of Palestinians.
"We will eat cooking oil and olives," he said.
Mr Haniya was addressing Friday prayers in Gaza before the start of a series of rallies aimed at demonstrating support for the Hamas-led administration.
In response to the financial crisis, the Russian foreign ministry said Moscow would grant the Palestinian Authority urgent financial aid.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the pledge to Mr Abbas in a telephone call, a ministry statement said.
Russia says Hamas should recognise Israel and enter negotiations but it believes denying aid is a mistake.
The militant group's political leader in exile, Khaled Meshaal, is attending the Tehran conference to gain funding pledges.
Iran has said it will fund the Hamas-led government but so far no figures have been publicly pledged and no concrete deals have yet been announced at the conference.
Doha meeting to ask Muslims to help Hamas govt
Monday, 8 May, 2006
Staff Reporter
ISLAMIC scholars are to meet in Doha later this week to draw up a fatwa (religious edict), obliging the Muslim faithful to help the Palestinian government headed by Hamas.
Influential cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi said the May 10-11 meeting would help both the Palestinian people and their government, hit hard by US and EU funding cuts because of the Islamist group’s refusal to recognise Israel.
Ulemas (scholars) as well as other Muslim and Palestinian leaders will "draw up a fatwa on the duty of the Ummah (Muslims) and of governments" towards the Palestinians and the Hamas cabinet, Qaradawi told a press conference yesterday.
The fatwa will refer to financial aid to the Palestinians as well as offering them moral support.
He slammed what he called "the duality of the West, which rejects Palestinian democracy after encouraging such a democracy just because it doesn’t suit them."
"This is political hypocrisy and we reject it," he said.
Exiled Hamas supremo Khalid Mishal, Islamic Jihad chief Ramadan al-Shalah and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command leader Ahmed Jibril would attend the Doha meeting, Qaradawi said.
However, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, which Hamas trounced in January’s vote, would not be attending, he said, citing "difficulties with Fatah representatives ... who mostly refuse to co-operate".
Qaradawi, head of the International Federation of Muslim Scholars, said the conference aimed at rallying support for the Palestinian people in the backdrop of the difficult conditions they lived today.
It would bring together Muslim scholars from all over the Islamic world to make known their stance on the "siege" clamped on the Palestinian people.
Qaradawi said he would urge the varying Palestinian factions to stand united in one trench with the Palestinian government to tackle the siege as "such action is a religious, moral and national duty".
He said he would also call on all Arab-Muslim governments and organisations not to give in to foreign pressure and to initiate support and assistance to the Palestinians.
Qaradawi warned that "any failure of Hamas as a result of the siege is a failure of the entire Muslim world".
"The conference will issue a final communique and a fatwa to explain the duty of the Arab and Muslim nations and the Palestinian factions on supporting the Palestinians and their government under the leadership of Hamas, because this is what the Shariah and reality dictate."
The conference will also set up a committee to follow up the recommendations issued by the conference.
"The silence of some of the Muslim governments toward the EU and US pressures on Hamas is treason," he said.
Qaradawi rejected the idea of disbanding the Arab League, saying that the Arab and Muslim governments are not exempted from their obligations towards Palestine which he described as the "home of the Prophets".
He hailed Qatar’s donations to the Palestinian people and appreciated the efforts of the charities in helping them.
"I have given a speech via cell phone to the Egyptian Engineers Syndicate. I was told that an Egyptian donated LE1.25mn (Egyptian pounds) to the Hamas government but the banks refused to transfer the money," he said.
Asked about the Islamic scholars conference, Qaradawi said the initiative was his own as well as from the scholars union.
"It was a collective initiative that found a positive response from Qatar," he said.
Regarding the concessions that Hamas should make to come to terms with the other Palestinian factions, he said he could not ask Hamas to do so "while Israel is encroaching upon the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people".
"Hamas has offered a 50-year long truce but Israel rejected it," he said.
Regarding the legitimacy of the channels that would deliver the financial aid raised by the people and governments, Qaradawi ruled that all such channels are legitimate. – Gulf Times/Agencies
Arms plea by Hamas
Published: 11th May 2006
DOHA: Hamas yesterday urged supporters around the world to send it arms, fighters and money to back its fight against Israel.
"We ask all the people in surrounding Arab countries, the Muslim world and everyone who wants to support us to send weapons, money and men," its political leader Khaled Meshaal said in a speech at a pro-Palestinian event in Qatar.
"You should not shy away from of this. This is resistance, not terrorism," said Meshaal whose group leads the Palestinian government.
Prominent Muslim cleric Sheikh Youssef Al Qaradawi told the event Muslims should boycott banks refusing to transfer funds to the Palestinians after Washington said it could penalise banks that help provide money to the Hamas-led government.
Mosque donations make Muslims uneasy
Oct. 19, 2006
HEBA ALY
Toronto Star
STAFF REPORTER
Close to a decade ago, in a Beverley St. mosque, hands were shaken and a deal made — a deal that continues to raise questions in the mind of Munir Pervaiz.
The Pakistani-Canadian banker was hosting a wealthy Saudi man and took him to visit the neighbourhood mosque. The mosque needed money. The businessman had funds to spare. A transfer was made.
"At that time, it was just a goodwill gesture toward a mosque that needed some money to grow," Pervaiz says.
Pervaiz, who worked in Saudi Arabia for 15 years, has revised his views on that; he now says such financial transfers are never innocent.
"When these monies are given," he says, "it is a propagation of a certain ideology."
Last June's arrest of 17 GTA residents on terrorism-related charges has revived debate over financial aid to Canadian mosques from overseas, inside and outside Muslim circles.
Some argue it constitutes dangerous outside influence and plants a seed of radicalism here.
Those who have accepted overseas money say it represents only a small part of their overall funding and has no influence on how they do things.
Among Canada's Muslims, it's a sensitive subject some prefer not to discuss.
Receipts on a bulletin board at Scarborough's Jame Abu Bakr Siddique mosque record funds raised the week before. Donations at Friday prayer: $1,921. Revenue from the shop: $330. Management committee member Saleh Hafejee pointed to them earlier this year as proof of the mosque's attitude of financial accountability.
When asked about foreign funding, Hafejee first said there had been none since about 1998, when the Scarborough Muslim Association, which runs the mosque, accepted $100,000 from a wealthy Saudi individual.
But the mosque's president, Yakub Hatia, later confirmed what the Star found on a website for the Saudi Arabia-based Islamic Development Bank: that it had accepted a $270,000 grant to the association this past January to build an Islamic school. He noted that for a $6 million project, those funds were a drop in the bucket.
That North American mosques have been accepting Saudi money for years "is not a secret," says Calgary-based Syed Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism. "This is a very common practice in the Muslim community." Soharwardy founded the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada in 2000 after noticing the effect of Saudi funding on Canadian mosques.
"Wherever the mosques get funding from Saudi Arabia," he says, "the imam and the management committee become so centrally focused that they don't believe that anybody else in the Muslim community can be right." That tends to deepen their isolation.
"I disagree with anybody who says that mosques in Canada are breeding grounds for terrorism or extremism. I don't believe that," Soharwardy says. "But what I'm sure of is that narrow-mindedness and intolerance towards the difference of opinion will lead towards extremism and ultimately terrorism."
In 2004, a task force on terrorist financing sponsored by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations said Saudi money helped establish 210 Islamic centres and 1,359 mosques worldwide. Citing a Saudi government news release, it said donations included $5 million (U.S.) from King Fahd, the late leader of Saudi Arabia, for an Islamic centre in Toronto, along with operating funds of $1.5 million annually (The name of the recipient has not been revealed.) There's nothing unique or illegal about such international gifts.
"Under Canadian law, there is absolutely nothing wrong with people receiving contributions from outside — universities do, hospitals do, certainly religious institutions do," says Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Carleton University. "The question you have to ask is ... the existence of leverage and purpose."
Critics of Saudi funding suggest that the money comes with the expectation that recipients toe the Wahhabist line. The dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is a puritanical movement that frowns upon reforms to what it sees as the "pure" Islam of historic times. Since 9/11, it has been increasingly linked to Islamist terrorism.
"Saudi Arabia has spent what could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars around the world financing extremism," the U.S. task force claimed — in the form of direct funding, training of imams, texts and materials.
What worries Pervaiz is not the money itself, but the materials that end up distributed in the bookstores and classrooms of Saudi-funded institutions: "Islamic revivalism and Islamic jihad."
In the library at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, issues of National Geographic and Maclean's sit alongside Islamic reference books by Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi, founder of Pakistan's biggest Islamic fundamentalist movement, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Sayyid Qutb, who is associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
They are exactly the kind of books that concern Pervaiz. But they seem to cause no discomfort to the foundation's president, Mohammad Alam.
Dressed in short sleeves and trousers — not the traditional Islamic garb many of the foundation's teachers wear — he tours the library largely unaware of what's inside. "I do not read any of those books," he admits. "I have very little knowledge of Islam. I know five daily prayers. I know when is Ramadan. I know when is the Eid."
The foundation's imam, Husain Patel, says it's only natural for libraries to carry a wide variety of reference books.
"If you go to any university library, you'll find books by all types of authors. That's what a library is supposed to be."
Nobody, he says, has ever raised concerns over hate in their pages.
The Scarborough mosque accepted about $150,000 from one of the most active Saudi-based donors — the Islamic Development Bank — to help construct its school in 1994, says Alam. But it sees things differently today.
"We believe (the local) Muslim community is rich enough. We don't have to go out and ask for the funding from any other nations or any government."
He says there were "no strings attached" to the one-time grant, but argues that organizations routinely funded by Saudi Arabia are a different story: "If somebody's going to fund you, they expect something in return."
The Islamic Development Bank's stated aim is economic development and social progress in Muslim communities, and an official told the Toronto Star that in Canada its involvement is limited to accredited schools endorsed by local authorities.
Hatia, of the Scarborough Muslim Association, says the only condition the bank placed on its grant to the mosque's new school this year was that it be registered with the Ontario Ministry of Education and that it send progress reports back to the bank.
On the other hand, the bank refused the Pickering Muslim Association's request for funds to expand its mosque, because there was no school involved.
According to its website, the bank has given more than $1.6 million over the past five years to Islamic schools across the country, including the Mississauga school run by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The bank also offers scholarships through local partners, one being the ISNA, which receives $28,000 a year to provide grants to four Muslim university students.
The society's secretary general, Mohammad Ashraf, argues that's not "Saudi money." The Islamic Development Bank is, he says, a "World Bank of the Muslim world," and has nothing to do with Saudi government. Any suggestion that extremist ideology is perpetuated through such a loan is unfounded and damaging, he has insisted.
Tarek Fatah is among those who disagree. "Nothing in Saudi Arabia happens without the authorization of the state," says the former communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, which has pushed for a ban on international funding of Canadian religious institutions.
Most of the bank's capital comes from Saudi Arabia, he insists. "It's different layers of deception."
Drawing connections between such gifts and extremism is dangerous, says Kathy Bullock, offering a personal opinion while on leave from her job as outreach director with ISNA Canada. What this debate comes down to, she says, is fear-mongering.
Those who preach hate are not attached to any particular branch of Islam, she says. "They're like a brand in and unto themselves. They're their own school of thought, if you like. An individual from any of those communities could be attracted to those ideas."
The head of Iranian delegation attending the international conference on Zakat (annual obligatory alms under Islamic law) urged Muslim states here Tuesday to help establish a global Zakat organization.
Addressing the opening session of the one-day conference in Kuala Lumpur's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araqchi said promotion of the culture of Zakat in Islamic countries was a must.
Zakat is the third of the Five Pillars of Islam and refers to giving a fixed portion of one's wealth for the needy and poor.
It enjoins every adult, mentally stable, free and financially able Muslim, male and female, to pay a certain amount of money to support specific categories of people.
The idea of establishing an international zakat organization was mooted by Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as a way of helping poor Islamic countries address their socio-economic problems.
The ongoing conference is deemed the first step towards establishing such an organization.
Over 200 participants from 15 Muslim countries are participating in the conference, where they will share their views and ideas on the subject.
Besides Iran, other participants in the conference are Brunei, Qatar, Pakistan, Indonesia, Syria, Egypt and Bahrain.
Araqchi in his speech said Iran's Imam Khomeini Relief Committee has a long and rich history of promoting the culture of helping the poor and removing poverty from the face of society.
He said that the committee would be willing to share its experiences with other Muslim states in promoting the new culture of fighting poverty in all Muslim states.
THE MILITANT ISLAM CONNECTION IN BOSTON
The Boston Globe
JEFF JACOBY
The Boston mosque's Saudi connection
January 10, 2007
SPEAKING AT the State Department in 1999, Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi sheik
and leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, sounded an alarm about
Muslim houses of worship in the United States.
"The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques . . . is the
extremists' ideology," he said. "Because they are very active, they took over
the mosques; . . . they took over more than 80 percent of the mosques that have
been established in the US." He warned ominously that "a danger might suddenly
come that you are not looking for . . . we don't know where it is going to hit."
When Kabbani was condemned by other Muslim organizations, he stood his ground.
His assessment of the leadership of US mosques, he said, was based on having
visited scores of them, and in a subsequent interview he explained the
extremists' pattern of infiltration.
Muslim immigrants to the United States "came with a good heart . . . and they
wanted a place to pray," Kabbani told the Middle East Quarterly. "They collected
money and they built mosques in their community. Slowly, certain Middle Eastern
groups seized these mosques, promoting political and ideological agendas rooted
in their home countries' problems. . . . Slowly, such groups took over many
mosques either directly or by unseen pressure on the moderate board members, and
now an antagonistic mentality controls them. The extremists -- not ordinary
believers -- changed the use of American mosques into centers of intolerant
political dogma."
At the time, Kabbani's charges may have seemed little more than inside Muslim
baseball. After Sept. 11, it became clear that mosques dominated by radical
clerics were a potentially lethal threat. Many such mosques are funded by Saudi
Arabia, which spends heavily to propagate Wahhabism, a fanatic and aggressive
strain of Islam. The Saudi government, reported the 9/11 Commission, "uses zakat"
-- Islamic charity -- "and government funds to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout
the world, including in mosques and schools. . . . Some Wahhabi-funded
organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent
jihad against non-Muslims." Its findings were reinforced by Freedom House, which
in 2005 documented the penetration of US mosques by Saudi-supplied Wahhabi hate
literature.
It is against this background that the $24 million mosque and cultural center
being built by the Islamic Society of Boston has generated such controversy.
Questions have been raised about the Islamic Society's past and present leaders,
some of whom have supported Islamist terrorism or indulged in virulently
anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric. There are concerns about the sweetheart
deal in which the land for the mosque was acquired from the City of Boston for a
fraction of its value. Especially disturbing has been the Islamic Society's
response to its diverse critics: a lawsuit accusing them of anti-Muslim
conspiracy and libel.
That libel, the lawsuit charges, included claims that the "ISB receives funds
from Wahhabis and/or Muslim Brotherhood and/or other Saudi/Middle Eastern
sources" and that "the ISB Project was supported financially by donors from
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states 'with known connections to radical Islamists.'
" Given the Saudi role in disseminating jihadist fanaticism, it might indeed be
defamatory to falsely accuse the ISB of financial ties to Saudi Arabia.
But such ties are quite real.
According to financial documents supplied to The Boston Globe, major funding for
the mosque is being provided by the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia. In December 2005, two payments of approximately $250,000 each were wired
from Jeddah to the Citizens Bank account of the mosque's general contractor in
Boston. Messages confirming the payments were faxed from Jeddah to the Islamic
Society of Boston on Dec. 19; these refer to the payments as "USA-52" and
"USA-53." Other documents suggest that subsequent payments have been made as
well.
The Islamic Development Bank is a subsidiary of the Organization of the Islamic
Conference, and each of the conference's 56 member nations are shareholders. But
the largest shares are owned by Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iran, which together
control 48 percent of the bank's stock. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iran are also
three of the world's foremost sponsors or incubators of terrorism. It is perhaps
not surprising that the Islamic Development Bank, through its Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa
funds, has become a leading funder of Palestinian suicide bombing, paying large
financial subsidies to the families of terrorists.
The Islamic Society of Boston didn't return my calls, but its website notes that
all donors are cross-checked against the government's terrorist watch list, and
that funding is accepted only "with no strings attached." It notes too that it
"rejects any interpretation of Islam that is considered fundamentalist,
oppressive, radical, anti-Western, or anti-Semitic."
But questions remain. More questions will come. Suing the good people who ask
them won't make the questions go away. Answering them candidly, on the other
hand, just might.
As Muslim Group Goes on Trial, Other Charities Watch Warily
Prosecutors charge that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Richardson, Tex., which was closed in 2001 was a supporter of Hamas.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
July 17, 2007
DALLAS — The strained argument between the United States government and nonprofit groups over how to deal with charities suspected of supporting terrorism is expected to play out in federal court here with the trial of the largest Muslim charity in this country, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
The government, in the lengthy indictment and other court documents, accuses the foundation of being an integral part of Hamas, which much of the West condemns as a terrorist organization. The prosecution maintains that the main officers of the Holy Land foundation started the organization to generate charitable donations from the United States that ultimately helped Hamas thrive.
The defense argues that the government, lacking proof, has simply conjured up a vast conspiracy by claiming that the foundation channeled money through public charity committees in the occupied territories that it knew Hamas controlled. The federal government, the defense says, has never designated these committees as terrorist organizations.
The defense is expected to liken a donation to the Holy Land foundation to one to a Roman Catholic charity in Northern Ireland that ends up helping poor Irish Republican Army sympathizers.
The case is being closely watched by a large number of charitable organizations, as well as Muslim-Americans, because its outcome might well help determine the line separating legitimate giving from the financing of banned organizations.
Critics of government policy say the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department has gone too far in using often secret evidence to condemn charities. The process unfairly destroys them, the critics say, though not one American charity itself has been convicted of supporting terrorism since the practice started in 2001. Some individual officers have gone to jail.
These critics say that in its zeal to prosecute, the government has lost sight of the fact that the charities were delivering millions of dollars to the poor and to victims of disasters.
They also say that undermining charities on the basis of little or no public evidence tarnishes the United States’ reputation among Muslims globally, effectively helping the very groups the policy is supposed to subvert.
“The Treasury Department has this ‘complete taint’ theory,” said Kay Guinane of OMB Watch, a Washington group that advocates government transparency. If anyone in a charity is suspected of aiding a terrorist organization, Ms. Guinane said, the entire charity is deemed guilty.
Other countries, like Britain, have managed to allow charities under suspicion to continue to deliver aid to the poor, she said, whereas the Treasury Department “disagrees with any approach that says you can separate the real charitable work from the alleged terrorist activity.”
Chip Poncy, the strategic policy director for the terrorism finance office at the Treasury Department, outlined the department’s basic approach in Congressional testimony in May. “If any aspect of a charity’s organization is engaged in terrorist support, then the charitable organization is a problem,” Mr. Poncy said.
But he also noted that all 44 charities the government has designated as supporting terrorism were engaged in some legitimate charity work. They include six either closed or under investigation in the United States.
The Treasury Department refuses to reveal how many millions of dollars donated for the poor or for disaster relief sit frozen in the accounts of shuttered charities. But OMB Watch estimates the sum at $14 million, and lawyers for the Holy Land foundation say it includes its assets and charitable donations of about $5 million.
For American Muslims, whose religion stipulates that they give 2.5 percent of their annual income to charity, the shuttering of so many of their organizations without a hearing smacks of discrimination.
The Holy Land foundation case has had a high profile since President Bush announced in 2001 that the charity was being closed.
In 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft heralded the 42-count indictment against the charity and seven of its senior officials as the fruit of the USA Patriot Act, saying, “There is no distinction between those who carry out terrorist attacks and those who knowingly finance terrorist attacks.”
The case is extremely complicated and has been delayed three times since first scheduled in October 2004. There have been extended legal battles over the terrorism designation itself, secret evidence, a decade of wiretaps and testimony from unidentified Israeli sources, and two efforts to seize the foundation’s assets as damages for deaths in Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories or in Israel.
The prosecution’s list of unindicted co-conspirators runs to more than 10 pages with some 300 names, including some of the largest Muslim American organizations.
The Holy Land foundation “was an integral part of the Hamas social structure,” the government’s trial brief says. The group, based in Richardson, Tex., received more than $57 million in donations, gifts and grants while it was operating from 1992 to 2001, the indictment states.
The prosecution says the money was channeled through charity committees known as zakat committees. Zakat is the Arabic word for “charity” or “tithe,” and the committees, habitually organized by mosques, exist in virtually every Palestinian town.
Official federal foreign aid programs have indirectly channeled money to the occupied territories via the zakat committees, the defense counters. Officials with the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department refused to comment, citing current litigation, as did the prosecutors.
“They are trying to establish that using widely accepted methods of getting humanitarian aid to the Palestinians is criminal,” said John Boyd, a defense lawyer. “If that is what you think, then put them on the list and say we can’t give them money. Not a single one of those zakat committees has ever been on those lists.”
Three reporters, including one from The New York Times, may be called by the prosecution to testify about their articles on the Holy Land foundation.
Muslim charity founder gets jail for lying
to FBI
By Lee Hammel TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
July 18, 2008
WORCESTER— The founder of a Muslim charity was sentenced yesterday in U.S.
District Court to a year in prison and fined $10,000 for lying to an FBI agent
when he denied traveling to Afghanistan in 1994-1995.
In sentencing Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, former president of Care International
Inc., a defunct Boston charity, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV doubled the maximum
amount of prison time and the fine called for under the federal advisory
sentencing guidelines. Mr. Muntasser, 43, is a former Worcester resident and
Worcester Polytechnic Institute graduate living in Braintree. He must report for
his prison sentence within four weeks.
The U.S. attorney’s office called for a five-year prison term, saying the case
is being watched around the world to see how the United States will treat
someone the Justice Department said abused the tax system to send money to
organizations that have since been branded by the government as terrorists. But
Mr. Muntasser’s lawyers pointed out that guidelines called for a sentence of
between zero and 6 months and that the U.S. Probation Department recommended a
sentence within that range on a simple false statement case.
Mr. Muntasser was detained Jan. 11, the day a federal jury convicted him in
Boston on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and scheming to
conceal material facts as well as lying to a federal agent. But expectations
that Mr. Muntasser might be freed on a sentence of time served were raised after
Judge Saylor reversed the jury verdict on the two most serious charges and freed
Mr. Muntasser June 13 on conditions to await sentencing yesterday.
Judge Saylor also reversed all of the convictions against Samir Al-Monla of
Brookline, another Care former president, but left all except one of the
convictions intact against a third defendant in the case, Muhamed Mubayyid of
Shrewsbury, a former treasurer of Care International. Mr. Mubayyid is scheduled
to be sentenced today.
All of them had been charged with conspiring to get or keep tax-exempt status
from the Internal Revenue Service by concealing Care’s support for Islamic Holy
War and those who fight it and that it was an outgrowth or successor to Al-Kifah
Refugee Center, which had been tied in news accounts to the 1993 bombing of the
World Trade Center in New York.
Judge Saylor called this conviction “a serious offense, not a garden variety”
false statement. He said the FBI might have gained some useful information about
the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom Mr. Muntasser met with in
Afghanistan, as well as whether the government of Pakistan helped him gain
passage through the dangerous frontier bordering Afghanistan.
Defense lawyer Kathleen M. Sullivan argued that FBI Agent Christopher Peet was
not likely to have learned much of value in the April 2003 interview with Mr.
Muntasser from a trip eight years earlier.
Ms. Sullivan argued that Mr. Hekmatyar had been invited to the White House as an
anti-Soviet hero, but Judge Saylor said that by 1994 Mr. Hekmatyar was shelling
Kabul and by the time of the interview in 2003 he had been branded a terrorist
by the U.S. government.
While Judge Saylor did not penalize Mr. Muntasser for “relevant conduct” from
the acquitted charges, he took into account that Mr. Muntasser had made
materially false statements in the 1993 application to the IRS for tax-exempt
status, although he was not prosecuted for that because of the statute of
limitations.
Judge Saylor said Mr. Muntasser showed many charitable and other worthy
attributes. The judge said he was having trouble reconciling that with the views
showing support of suicide bombings and other violence in the newsletter, Al
Hussam, published by Care.
Islam had been brought into the trial numerous times, Judge Saylor noted, but
there are millions of Muslims who do not support violence.
After Assistant U.S. Attorney B. Stephanie Siegmann objected, Judge Saylor
reversed his acceptance of a plea by Ms. Sullivan to sentence Mr. Muntasser, a
Libyan citizen, to 364 days instead of 365 days. Although that would apparently
have an effect on whether the government could continue to detain Mr. Muntasser
at the end of the sentence if it decided to deport him, Judge Saylor said he was
uncertain of the consequences of reducing the sentence by a day.
IT’S OK TO GIVE TO BAD MUSLIM CHARITIES PER MO-HAM-MAD
Volume 2, Book 24, Number 502:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) said, "A man said that he would give something in charity. He went out with his object of charity and unknowingly gave it to a thief. Next morning the people said that he had given his object of charity to a thief. (On hearing that) he said, "O Allah! All the praises are for you. I will give alms again." And so he again went out with his alms and (unknowingly) gave it to an adulteress. Next morning the people said that he had given his alms to an adulteress last night. The man said, "O Allah! All the praises are for you. (I gave my alms) to an adulteress. I will give alms again." So he went out with his alms again and (unknowingly) gave it to a rich person. (The people) next morning said that he had given his alms to a wealthy person. He said, "O Allah! All the praises are for you. (I had given alms) to a thief, to an adulteress and to a wealthy man." Then someone came and said to him, "The alms which you gave to the thief, might make him abstain from stealing, and that given to the adulteress might make her abstain from illegal sexual intercourse (adultery), and that given to the wealthy man might make him take a lesson from it and spend his wealth which Allah has given him, in Allah's cause."