(FrontPage) During the 2007 and 2008 federal trials against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), a Muslim charity that raised millions of dollars for Hamas, CAIR was named by the US Justice Department an “unindicted co-conspirator” for both trials. The label and stigma has followed CAIR, ever since, and has caused the group to have to frequently account for it. Over a decade after, Hassan Shibly, the executive director of CAIR’s Florida chapter, is calling the charges brought against the HLF defendants — charges that led to the convictions of all of them — “false.” But given his own terrorist-supporting and fact-distorting history, Shibly’s pronouncements must be viewed as patently false, themselves.
The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, originally the Occupied Land Fund, was created in 1987, the same year as Hamas. It was established as part of the American Palestine Committee, a terrorist umbrella organization then headed by soon-to-be-global Hamas leader Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which currently is designated a terrorist entity by the United Arab Emirates, would later be added to the committee as its fourth and final member group, following CAIR’s founding in June 1994.
