RUTHFULLY YOURS

Still tainted by terrorism ties

10/25/10 Our attention was caught by a JTA story that suggested all of us CAIR-loathers may not have CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) to kick around anymore because of a court decision.  But after reading the article, and the Politico article upon which the JTA apparently relied, we decided to do something radical and read the actual opinion.

RELAX everyone, we still have CAIR to kick around.  And ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) and NAIT (North American Islamic Trust).  You see, the courts did NOT decide that CAIR or its fellow-terrorist-travelers are not actually terrorists or not actually terrorist enablers.

What the courts did was rule that the government should not have made public a document it attached to a brief in May, 2007, which the government then referred to as a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case.  The case determined that the so called Islamic charity actually existed almost exclusively to support Hamas, the Arab Palestinian terrorist entity.

In fact, thank you so much to CAIR and to ISNA and to NAIT.  In the course of trying to get the courts to clear their “good” names, those organizations gave the courts and the government lawyers nearly half a dozen opportunities to point out that the government presented evidence during the trial of the organizations’ connections to Hamas.  In other words – the fact that there was a violation of the organizations’ Fifth Amendment rights because the organizations were publicly named as having close connections to terrorist entities in a document – and the organizations had no opportunity to defend themselves in that document – really didn’t amount to a hill of beans because evidence was introduced at trial of those same connections. In fact, the government witness, testifying under oath, referred to CAIR as a Hamas front group.

The really fun reading is in the government’s brief in opposition to CAIR’s effort to clear its name.  Smackdown!  The trial court never even bothered to rule on CAIR’s motion, presumably because the name-calling became justified by evidence introduced at the trial.  Bottom line?  The court REFUSED to remove the whiners from the official list of bad guys.  The appellate court merely said that the lower court should publish its opinion, but that opinion only says the list attached to the government’s pre-trial brief should not have been published, and, again, NOT that the whiners were entitled to a court pronouncement that they were not connected to terrorists.

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