An interesting report on the trial in Chicago of Abdelhaleem Ashqar and Muhammad Salah, charged with fundraising for Hamas in the United States: Student was terrorist, prosecutor says. (Hat tip: IRIS Blog.)

CHICAGO - A graduate student living in Mississippi was an important Hamas terrorist leader directing thousands of dollars to families of members who were jailed or killed, a prosecutor said Tuesday in closing arguments of the trial of two accused militants.

“He’s Hamas, and he’s assisting the murderous terrorist activities of Hamas,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph M. Ferguson told jurors, pointing at Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was a graduate student at the University of Mississippi in the early 1990s. It was the second day of Ferguson’s closing argument.

Ashqar, 48, later an assistant professor of business at Washington’s Howard University, is accused along with former Chicago grocer Muhammad Salah, 53, of being a high-ranking member of the Hamas terrorist network. …

Federal agents found that Ashqar spoke on his telephone 568 times in several years with Mousa Abu Marzook, an alleged top Hamas leader who also is charged in the case and is a fugitive believed to be living in Syria.

Here’s an excellent demonstration that monitoring phone communications with terrorists in foreign countries is a vital tool in the fight against militant Islam. But mainstream media and the American left wing have done everything possible to delegitimize and damage this tool.

And another interesting note to this story: the Hamas terrorist with whom Ashqar communicated, Mousa Abu Marzook, is also connected to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Ghassan Elashi, the founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, has a long history of funding terrorism. First, he was convicted in July 2004, with his four brothers, of having illegally shipped computers from their Dallas-area business, InfoCom Corporation, to two designated state-sponsors of terrorism, Libya and Syria. Second, he and two brothers were convicted in April 2005 of knowingly doing business with Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas leader, whom the U.S. State Department had in 1995 declared a “specially designated terrorist.” Elashi was convicted of all twenty-one counts with which he was charged, including conspiracy, money laundering, and dealing in the property of a designated terrorist. Third, he was charged in July 2004 with providing more than $12.4 million to Hamas while he was running the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, America’s largest Islamic charity. When the U.S. government shuttered Holy Land Foundation in late 2001, CAIR characterized this move as “unjust” and “disturbing.”