ICE Chief Pandering to Hizballah
Here’s Debbie Schlussel in the New York Post, with still more evidence that way too many people in our government are either profoundly unserious about the threat from Islamic terrorism, or profoundly clueless: Border Cop Bungles.
October 16, 2007 — JULIE Myers, the head of the U.S. Immigration and Cus toms Enforcement agency (ICE), is set to deliver tonight’s keynote address in Dearborn, Mich., to a group that honors lax judges - including ones who interfere with enforcement of our immigration laws. What’s worse, the head of the group - the Michigan American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee - is a suspected former terrorist who repeatedly violated U.S. immigration laws, then used political ties to avoid deportation.
The venue: a place known to local cops and federal agents as “The Hezbollah Social Club.” Yes, Dearborn, Mich.’s Bint Jebail Cultural Center is named after the village in south Lebanon that sheltered the terror group’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, during last year’s Hezbollah-Israel war. Rockets are shot from Bint Jebail into Israel even today.
The Dearborn center has hosted many pro-Hezbollah rallies featuring fiery anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-American speeches. (At one rally I attended last year, Haj Mohammed Turfe, the center’s founding chairman, won raucous applause for saying he looked forward to Armageddon because “only a few thousand Jews will survive.”) Federal agents tell me it has also been the site of gatherings of Hezbollah agents and money launderers.
But it’s the man who’s hosting Myers that has ICE agents aghast. The head of the Michigan ADC is Imad Hamad - who, while living in California, allegedly recruited, organized and fund-raised for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). More, federal officials fought for almost two decades to deport him.
Immigration officials believed they had solid evidence that Hamad had stayed in America long after his visa expired, engaged in marriage fraud to stay here and concealed his PFLP ties on various immigration documents. Surveillance videos showed him engaged in various activities for PFLP. But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) got the Clinton administration to end the fight to deport Hamad, and instead grant him citizenship.
Hamad’s recent behavior has also been interesting. He openly supports Hezbollah, Hamas and other anti-Israel terror groups. And federal official are investigating his close ties to LIFE For Relief and Development, a Muslim charity raided by both the FBI (in America) and U.S. troops (in Iraq). The charity gave millions to a group the FBI identified as Hamas’ Jordanian operation; law-enforcement sources also tell me it’s suspected of funding al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq.