The government’s largest and most visible effort to prosecute Hamas financiers started yesterday in Dallas, as five former officials of the Holy Land Foundation Islamic “charity” go on trial: Hamas Goes ‘on Trial’ in Texas in Case Over Muslim Charity.

“This is Hamas on trial,” a longtime researcher into the American links of Middle Eastern terrorist groups, Steven Emerson, said yesterday. “I don’t think you can get a more significant material support case.”

The foundation, its chairman of the board, Ghassan Elashi, its secretary and CEO, Shukri Abu Baker, one of its top fund-raisers, Mufid Abdulqader, its director of endowments, Mohammed El-Mezain, and its New Jersey representative, Abdulraham Odeh, are charged with conspiring to aid a terrorist group, engaging in financial transactions with an embargoed group, money laundering, and other violations. Holy Land was shut down and had its assets frozen in 2001, but the criminal indictment was not returned until 2004.

In the Muslim community, many view the prosecution as driven by pro-Israel political forces and by a form of paranoia they call “Islamophobia.”

“The prosecution is trying to criminalize humanitarian aid,” the vice president of the Dallas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Khalil Meek, said. “The Holy Land Foundation and its associates are not charged with any violence. They actually did feed, clothe, shelter, and provide medical support to humanitarian efforts all over the world.”

Prosecutors contend that $12.4 million raised by the foundation between 1995 and 2001 went to charitable committees in Gaza and the West Bank set up to receive tithing, or zakat, from Muslims. The prosecution alleges that the zakat committees were controlled by Hamas and sometimes singled out the families of Hamas “martyrs” for assistance.

“The government’s case is pretty strong in terms of … deliberately providing annuities to the families of suicide bombers,” Mr. Emerson said.

Mr. Meek said the defendants are expected to argue that aiding orphans, no matter who their parents were, cannot amount to support for terrorism. “When you say, ‘They are accused of feeding the wrong children,’ that doesn’t resonate,” he said.

This is the trial in which CAIR has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator. And meanwhile, in the Dallas Morning News, Khalil Meek, vice president of CAIR, and Susan Abulhawa, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, continue to deny that Hamas is a terrorist group: Point of Contact.

Is Hamas a terrorist organization?

Mr. Meek: I would support that conclusion because it was my government who did it [designated Hamas as a terrorist organization]. So I would say, yes, not by my knowledge but by their knowledge.

Ms. Abulhawa: Hamas, whether you agree with their tactics or not, is a resistance organization and, frankly, the terrorism inflicted on the Palestinian people from air, sea and land, and economic strangulation and so forth, home demolitions, the list goes on ad nauseam it doesn’t compare. It [Hamas violence] is not even a fraction of the [Israeli-inflicted] level of destruction. I don’t speak for CAIR. I speak for myself. Hamas has a lot of divisions and a lot of wings. As a Palestinian who really has observed on the ground the level of charitable work that they do the nonmilitary divisions it is really hard for me to say that that’s a terrorist organization.

Is the talk of al-Qaeda sleeper cells just fear-mongering? How should the government respond?

Mr. Meek: If the government wants to go after sleeper cells, let ‘em. Good job. Let’s support that effort. Let’s encourage them to find every sleeper cell, every terrorist on the planet. … But let’s not have a rhetoric out there of fear, fear, fear. From what I hear, I wouldn’t get near a Muslim. If I weren’t a Muslim, I’d run like hell. I’d be afraid. But I am Muslim, and I’m like, there’s something weird about this. This ain’t right.