Another Thorn in the Crown

Another addition to the list of disgraces here, this morning. Dallas has amassed quite a record as the home of the assassination of President Kennedy, the home of the tv show that lauded greed and ruthlessness, the location of that church related SMU that overrode its church's laws to give a home to the papers of the worst president ever - papers that the public is denied access to - and now the home of the only successful verdict this occupied White House managed in prosecuting Muslim charity. This morning the city has a new thorn in its crown. An editorial in the local paper praises the verdict twelve members of this community reached in a trial that was always questionable.

The Dallas Morning News coverage that I read always gave the prosecution side of the trial that I attended. When I saw the paper's presentation of the events of the days I was there those events did not have the same character that I had witnessed as an observer. It's no wonder that the editorial's view was skewed.

The closing day particularly was memorable. Prosecution once again brought up the use of evidence in a Treasury Department document that had been put in after Hamas had been labelled terrorist by executive order. That evidence was an essential part of the prosecution case, and it established that other organizations than those named by the Treasury were to be treated as terrorist organizations. That notation appeared in a footnote in the instructions sent to Holy Land Foundation, but the version in which it appeared actually came out after the HLF had closed down in 2001.

The organizations that HLF contributed to are zakat committees. The prosecution called, and prosecuted them as, terrorist organizations. Never were they officially designated terrorist by our government. In his closing remarks, however, prosecutor Jacks insisted that he hadn't heard the defense prove its points, and that jurors should depend on their memories rather than evidence.

From my attendance at the trial, I felt that the whole case against Holy Land Foundation turned on the prosecution's insistence on facts that it did not prove, and that if the jury had considered evidence carefully as the previous, hung, jury had that there was no case against Holy Land Foundation.

The editorial finding showed me that editors, like the public, had been sadly misinformed.

Last week's guilty verdicts in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist fundraising trial were a welcome conclusion to a long and hard-fought case. As reporting earlier in this decade by this newspaper's Steve McGonigle showed, the Richardson-based Islamic charity, once the largest of its kind in the nation, secretly funneled money to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas and sought to cover up the connection.

The government's victory over five leaders of the now-defunct HLF means real progress in shutting off the financial lifeline that sustains Mideast terrorists.
(snip)
“We have to look back as a community and reassess our moral compass,” Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and moderate Muslim leader, told us after the verdict.

Precisely. The government got the HLF defendants by clarifying its case. This should be a clarifying moment for others, too.

Odd that a prosecution wrapped up this 'clarified' case by contending the jury should ignore evidence. Prosecutor Jacks insisted that freedom of speech did not apply here, either, as it 'showed a state of mind'.

By his words, the paper that printed the opinion it had reached should have had no right to print that opinion either.

I would rather all the misinformation in the world be given me than that I be told the newspaper and American citizens can't express their state of mind. Mine is very downhearted this morning. I am free to tell you that because the U.S. Department of Justice has not prevailed over the constitution outside of the Federal courtroom where the HLF was tried, at least not so far.