Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 8:54:40 am
At the New York Post, Steven Emerson takes a look back at the Holy Land Foundation trial/mistrial, and the implications for groups like CAIR and ISNA: Evil Exposed.
October 29, 2007 — THE trial of four key figures with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development ended last week with a hung jury. Holy Land’s defenders and allies are trumpeting the mistrial as a huge victory. Yet the defendants remain in legal jeopardy, with a new trial almost assured - and the prosecution has, at a minimum, closed a lucrative funding channel for the Palestinian terror group Hamas.
Prosecutors in the Northern District of Texas deserve praise for bringing this case in the first place. The trial record conclusively demonstrated that Holy Land and several of its unindicted co-conspirators - including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - grew out of Hamas. Moreover, it showed that they spent the better part of 15 years deceiving government agencies and the media, hiding their true goals under a mask of work for charity and civil rights.