From a drab second-story office in Chicago’s southwest suburbs, a small group founded 20 years ago by Palestinian immigrants has served as the U.S. propaganda arm of an Islamic terrorist organization, government documents allege.
While striking the pose of an ethnic-interest group–holding conferences, acting as a spokesman for the Muslim community, even having a top officer invited to greet First Lady Laura Bush in Chicago–the Islamic Association for Palestine has also maintained close connections to Hamas, according to recent government reports obtained by the Tribune.
IAP officials deny working for Hamas, and the organization has not been charged with wrongdoing.
But new law enforcement reports suggest that the group has come under increasing federal scrutiny. The government’s allegations, bolstered by a Tribune review of corporate records, conference transcripts and other documents, reveal links to Hamas, a militant Palestinian group that has claimed responsibility for killing scores of Israelis, including 35 people this month. The government designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995 and recently shut down one U.S.-based group for allegedly providing funds to it.
A report by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, issued in August in connection with a deportation hearing involving a former IAP employee, states that a top-ranking Hamas leader contributed about $490,000 to IAP’s budget. IAP has also produced training and recruitment videos for Hamas and has published Hamas communiques and distributed its charter, the INS said.
“These facts strongly suggest that the IAP and the American Middle Eastern League for Palestine [a sister group] are part of Hamas’ propaganda apparatus,” according to the INS.
At IAP’s annual conference in Rosemont a year ago, for example, IAP President Rafeeq Jaber read from the will of a man who “drove his car into an Israeli military patrol, killing the lead officer instantly,” according to a transcript from the conference, translated from Arabic and provided by Washington, D.C.-based terrorism expert Steven Emerson. “The martyr is God’s darling,” Jaber concluded.
A female speaker, who addressed the topic of “Women’s role serving Islam in [the] USA” called on audience members to “collect as many donations as possible in order to support jihad [holy war] in Palestine, not only the food, not only the medications, but also the weapons to kill the Zionists,” the transcripts showed.
`We are under attack’
In an interview last week, Jaber strongly disputed the allegations raised in the government documents and said his Palos Hills organization “has nothing to do with Hamas.”
“I don’t know what they [the government] are looking at,” he added, sitting behind a desk piled high with papers in a cramped office where several American flags are prominently displayed. “They can look and look and there’s nothing they can find.”
Jaber blamed the government’s scrutiny of his group and its deportations of two IAP employees in recent months on “the Zionist influence in this country. They [Zionists] want to cut us down. . . . We are under attack by the Zionists.”
As for his reading of the suicide bomber’s will last year, he insisted that he was not hailing such actions. “This is the state of despair that Palestinians are in and Americans don’t want to see it,” said Jaber, who was born in a West Bank village and came to the U.S. 27 years ago.
Indeed, Hamas’ popularity has always been tethered to the level of Palestinian despair over the bloody clash with Israel for control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That explains why its support has grown among Palestinians since the recent uprising began over 14 months ago. Hamas is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, and the word also means zeal in Arabic.
Allegations that IAP’s links to Hamas went beyond mere ideological support first surfaced in the mid-1990s. The group has drawn attention once again because of the Bush administration’s decision earlier this month to freeze the assets of an organization related to IAP–the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, one of the nation’s biggest Islamic charities–as part of its expanding financial war against terrorism.
The White House charged that Holy Land, which is based in Richardson, Texas, with offices in Bridgeview and elsewhere in the U.S., served as a front for Hamas by distributing most of its money to the families of Hamas activists, including the widows and orphans of suicide bombers. Holy Land officials have denied any links to Hamas and have vowed to fight the White House action.
The move against Holy Land, which collected $13 million last year, has sparked outrage among Muslims across the nation. Within days of the action, the IAP organized a rally of Chicago-area Muslim groups at the charity’s shuttered office in Bridgeview.
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“The decision was not a surprise to me,” Jaber told a crowd of about 200, his voice rising in anger as he spoke, “because we know the enemy of the Holy Land Foundation, the enemy of the Palestinian people, the Muslim people, which is Israel and its supporters in the United States. They are not going to sleep as long as anybody helps the Palestinian people.”
On Friday, the Bush administration froze the assets of two other Islamic charities, the Global Relief Foundation and the Benevolence International Foundation, alleging ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. The groups, which are both based in the southwest suburbs, have denied the charge.
Scrutiny before Sept. 11
Even before its action against Holy Land, the government had stepped up its scrutiny of IAP. Five days before the Sept. 11 attacks, Infocom Corp., a Richardson-based internet provider with links to Hamas, was raided by FBI agents, and clients Holy Land and IAP received subpoenas for records, according to news reports.
Unlike the three U.S. groups whose assets were frozen this month, IAP isn’t a charity. Besides sponsoring conferences and issuing press releases, the group publishes Al-Zaitonah (The Olive), an Arabic-language newspaper, from its Texas office, which is technically a separate corporation.
In a report filed last month with the Illinois attorney general’s office, IAP said it has raised only $1.4 million in the past eight years.
IAP officials contend that the group doesn’t send any money overseas. But an informant told the FBI in 1996 that IAP donates about $3 million a year to Hamas through Holy Land, according to a recent FBI report that lays out the government’s case for shutting down Holy Land.
From the start, IAP reflected a split in the Chicago area’s Palestinian-Muslim community. The organization was founded in 1981 by the then-president of the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview amidst a bitter fight for control of the mosque’s board that led to a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court.
The winning group, including the founders of IAP, favored a fundamentalist version of Islam that required strict religious observance and directed women to wear headscarves, according to several mosque members. Some of the dissidents worried that the new leadership was connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement dedicated to replacing secular rulers with an Islamic society.
Hamas was formed in the late 1980s as a militant Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not long after, government documents, corporate records and Arabic-language articles show clear connections between Hamas, Holy Land and IAP.
Along with Holy Land, “IAP is one of two wings of Hamas in the U.S. that has provided a corporate structure that has allowed [Hamas] to operate,” said Emerson.
In the late 1980s, Mousa Abu Marzook, a political leader of Hamas, was the chairman of IAP’s advisory committee, according to an article in IAP’s Arabic-language magazine, Ila Filastin. Marzook, who was later deported by the U.S., also contributed about $490,000 to IAP, the INS report alleges. The INS declined to comment on the document.
In a 1989 statement in Ila Filastin, IAP praised the “blessed intifada under the leadership” of Hamas and requested that donations “to support your people’s intifada in Palestine” be sent to the Holy Land Foundation, which was then called the Occupied Land Fund and based in California.
Holy Land’s founder, Ghassan Elashi, also opened an IAP office in California in the late 1980s. Elashi’s brother has been an officer of IAP’s Texas operation.
In 1993, IAP officials attended a key meeting in Philadelphia with Hamas and Holy Land leaders, according to the FBI report. At the meeting, the organization allegedly mapped out a strategy to use the U.S. as a fundraising base for Hamas.
In the Muslim-American community, support for IAP has mirrored the embrace shown Hamas thousands of miles away, leaders say.
“When the peace process was going along, the disagreement was very high between me and them [IAP],” said Ghassan Barakat, editor of al Bustan, one of several Arabic-language newspapers in the Chicago area. “But with the Israeli attack on the Palestinians, the tone of disagreement goes down because everyone is suffering.”
Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the Washington-based Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, the major human rights group for the nation’s Arabs, said that IAP’s “strong-minded religiously oriented” views are not representative of a majority of American Arabs.
But, he added, that doesn’t mean they should be silenced. “Curtailing what they say means that this is not a free country,” he said.