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Influence: The Muslim Brotherhood in America

Hamas and “Students for Justice in Palestine”

Congress learns that a major anti-Israel movement on American campuses is linked to an organization convicted of funding the terrorist group Hamas.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | April 28, 2016

Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President of Research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, recently testified before Congress.  He spoke about a movement on American campuses called the “Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP).  This organization presents itself as leading a movement to divest from and boycott Israel.  However, it turns out that it does not really exist as a legal organization at all.

The legal organization behind SJP is “American Muslims for Palestine” (AMP).  AMP is organized in a strange way that allows it to mask where its money is coming from.  What is harder to mask is that many of its core employees were previously employed by the Holy Land Foundation, a group convicted of sending more than $12 million to the terrorist group Hamas.

According to the Congressional testimony, a man named Hossein Khatib is both a board member for AMP and previously a Holy Land Foundation regional director.  Schanzer also testified that Jamal Said, a leading speaker at AMP fundraisers, raised money for the Holy Land Foundation at another 501(c)3 charity.  Said was named by the prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

And then there is Salah Sarsour, another AMP board member.  According to Schanzer’s testimony, he has been linked to Hamas in several ways over the years:

A 2001 FBI memo to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) describes how Sarsour’s brother, after being arrested by Israel in 1998, told Israeli officials about Sarsour’s “involvement with Hamas and fundraising activities” …. Jamil Sarsour told Israeli authorities that he and Salah used their Milwaukee furniture store’s bank account to pass money to Adel Awadallah, who was then a leader of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing.

According to Jamil, Salah Sarsour and Awadallah had become friends while sharing a prison cell.  Salah Sarsour spent eight months in jail in Israel for his Hamas activity.

The Jerusalem Post reports that a second investigation of this mystery organization reveals that the SJP’s alleged founder also has significant connections to Hamas.  The founder is a professor at UC Berkeley, one Hatem Bazian.  “Bazian’s organizational pedigree,” the Post‘s report states, “reads like the who’s who of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front organizations in America.”  The Post reports that two of his former employers disbanded after having been found to have raised money for Hamas.

The FBI and the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation was supposed to be a beginning rather than the end of unraveling terror-support networks in the United States.  However, shortly after the election of US President Barack Obama, new political appointees began denying the FBI and Justice Department requests for follow-on prosecutions.  No new criminal investigations of these networks have occurred since.

Backgrounders

Justice Department Finds Brotherhood Network During Terror-Funding Trial

In 2007, Federal prosecutors brought charges of terrorism financing against the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Islamic charity in America, which funneled $12.4 million to Hamas.

“An Explanatory Memorandum” – The Brotherhood’s Plan

In 2007, the Justice Department convicted the largest Islamic charity in North America, The Holy Land Foundation, and its leadership of channeling more than twelve million dollars to known terrorists in the Middle East.

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