Report: Donations to Hillary Clinton's campaign from Muslims under investigation for jihad financing

Obviously, the Clinton camp has some explaining to do. But the larger story is that the suspects in question have donated to other campaigns, and usual, there is a Saudi connection.

"Hillary takes cash from terror suspects," from WorldNetDaily:

Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has taken thousands of dollars in cash donations from Islamists under federal investigation for terror-financing, money laundering and tax fraud, WND has learned.

The Democrat senator over the past seven months has received $1,000 from M. Yaqub Mirza and another $500 from M. Omar Ashraf, federal campaign records show. Federal agents raided the Virginia homes and offices of the Muslim donors after 9/11 for ties to terrorism.

Others tied to the still-active probe also have contributed money to Clinton, including one Muslim man who after 9/11 complained the U.S. government should focus on changing its Mideast policies instead of killing Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists.

Mirza, who also has given to other candidates, including Republicans, is said to act on behalf of Saudi millionaire Yassin al-Qadi, who the U.S. Treasury Department in October 2001 blacklisted as an al-Qaida financier.

Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has taken thousands of dollars in cash donations from Islamists under federal investigation for terror-financing, money laundering and tax fraud, WND has learned.

The Democrat senator over the past seven months has received $1,000 from M. Yaqub Mirza and another $500 from M. Omar Ashraf, federal campaign records show. Federal agents raided the Virginia homes and offices of the Muslim donors after 9/11 for ties to terrorism.

Others tied to the still-active probe also have contributed money to Clinton, including one Muslim man who after 9/11 complained the U.S. government should focus on changing its Mideast policies instead of killing Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists.

Mirza, who also has given to other candidates, including Republicans, is said to act on behalf of Saudi millionaire Yassin al-Qadi, who the U.S. Treasury Department in October 2001 blacklisted as an al-Qaida financier.

More recently, Wachovia Bank closed the accounts of a shadowy Muslim charity supported by Mirza after an entity controlled by the Pakistani immigrant donated $150,000 to the charitable front, known as FAITH. The bank in 2005 cited suspicious activity in its accounts related to possible money laundering.

Mirza and Ashraf, who have not been charged with a crime in the ongoing probe, control with several other Islamists some 40 Muslim businesses, charities and think tanks known collectively by law enforcement as the Saudi-backed "Safa group." Their offices are located primarily at 555 Grove St. in Herndon, Va., a suburb of Washington. The Muslim World League, a Saudi-based charity linked to al-Qaida, originally set up its U.S. branch at that address with the help of Mirza.

Mirza in March contributed $1,000 to Clinton, listing his occupation as an officer of the SAAR Foundation. The Saudi-backed entity is listed on the federal affidavit for a search warrant in the original counterterror raid.

Mirza also gave $2,300 to former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore before the Republican left the race for president in July. However, Clinton is the only active presidential candidate who has received funds from Safa suspects in this election cycle.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/018685.php

November 5, 2007

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Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror: The desert kingdom supplies the cash and the killers

As we have been saying here for four years now.

By Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter in the Times (thanks to Sr. Soph):

[...] Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks. “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” said Stuart Levey, the US Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing.

Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of the world’s nastiest trouble spots.

An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising and militant.

Half the foreign fighters held by the US at Camp Cropper near Baghdad are Saudis. They are kept in yellow jumpsuits in a separate, windowless compound after they attempted to impose sharia on the other detainees and preached an extreme form of Wahhabist Islam.

In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of the great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of which have already been bombed. And while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are tolerated.

Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees terrorist trials, was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, encouraging young men to fight in Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become risky now,” he cautioned. “It requires avoiding those evil satellites and those drone aircraft, which own every corner of the skies over Iraq. If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so.”

[...]

In the past the Saudis openly supported Islamic militants. Osama Bin Laden was originally treated as a favourite son of the regime and feted as a hero for fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Huge charitable organisations such as the International Islamic Relief Organisation and the al-Haramain Foundation – accused in American court documents of having links to extremist groups – flourished, sometimes with patronage from senior Saudi royals.

The 1991 Gulf war was a wake-up call for the Saudis. Bin Laden began making vitriolic attacks on the Saudi royal family for cooperating with the US and demanded the expulsion of foreign troops from Arabia. His citizenship was revoked in 1994. The 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, which killed 19 US servicemen and one Saudi, was a warning that he could strike within the kingdom.

As long as foreigners were the principal targets, the Saudis turned a blind eye to terror. Even the September 11 attacks of 2001, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, could not shake their complacency. Despite promises to crack down on radical imams, Saudi mosques continued to preach hatred of America.

The mood began to change in 2003 and 2004, when Al-Qaeda mounted a series of terrorist attacks within the kingdom that threatened to become an insurgency. “They finally acknowledged at the highest levels that they had a problem and it was coming for them,” said Rachel Bronson, the author of Thicker than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia.

Assassination attempts against security officials caused some of the royals to fear for their own safety. In May 2004 Islamic terrorists struck two oil industry installations and a foreigners’ housing compound in Khobar, taking 50 hostages and killing 22 of them.

The Saudi authorities began to cooperate more with the FBI, clamp down on extremist charities, monitor mosques and keep a watchful eye on fighters returning from Iraq.

Only last month Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, the kingdom’s leading cleric, criticised gullible Saudis for becoming “convenient knights for whoever wants to exploit their zeal, even to the point of turning them into walking bombs”.

And last week in London, King Abdullah warned young British Muslims not to become involved with extremists.

Yet the Saudis’ ambivalence towards terrorism has not gone away. Money for foreign fighters and terror groups still pours out of the kingdom, but it now tends to be carried in cash by couriers rather than sent through the wires, where it can be stopped and identified more easily.

A National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad, a nongovernmental organisation that was intended to regulate private aid abroad to guard against terrorist financing, has still not been created three years after it was trumpeted by the Saudi embassy in Washington.

Hundreds of Islamic militants have been arrested but many have been released after undergoing reeducation programmes led by Muslim clerics.

According to the daily Alwa-tan [sic], the interior ministry has given 115m riyals (£14.7m) to detainees and their families to help them to repay debts, to assist families with health care and housing, to pay for weddings and to buy a car on their release. The most needy prisoners’ families receive 2,000-3,000 riyals (£286 to £384) a month.

Ali Sa’d Al-Mussa, a lecturer at King Khaled University in Abha, protested: “I’m afraid that holding [extremist] views leads to earning a prize or, worse, a steady income.”

Former detainees from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are also benefiting. To celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid, 55 prisoners were temporarily released last month and given the equivalent of £1,300 each to spend with their families.

School textbooks still teach the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antiSemitic forgery, and preach hatred towards Christians, Jews and other religions, including Shi’ite Muslims, who are considered heretics.

Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs, said: “The Saudi education system has over 5m children using these books. If only one in 1,000 take these teachings to heart and seek to act on them violently, there will be 5,000 terrorists.”

In frustration, Arlen Specter, the Republican senator for Pennsylvania, introduced the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act 10 days ago, calling for strong encouragement of the Saudi government to “end its support for institutions that fund, train, incite, encourage or in any other way aid and abet terrorism”.

The act, however, is expected to die when it reaches the Senate foreign relations committee: the Bush administration is counting on Saudi Arabia to help stabilise Iraq, curtail Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions and give a push to the Israeli and Palestinian peace process at a conference due to be held this month in Annapolis, Maryland.

“Do we really want to take on the Saudis at the moment?” asks Bronson. “We’ve got enough problems as it is.”

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CAIR rewriting American history?

Pamela has an interesting post about CAIR's calling attention to Muslim World War II veterans, and the Muslim American Veterans Association, which was founded in...1997, a scant 52 years after the end of the Big One.

Pamela notes that high-profile Muslims, such as the Mufti of Jerusalem, were on the other side during World War II, and Bill Warner writes to her that in his research on the Normandy invasion, he has found no Muslims who participated -- contrary to CAIR's claims.

Does anyone know more about this Muslim American Veterans Association? Were its World War II vets actually Muslims during the war, or did they convert afterward?

Why should anyone raise questions about a Muslim American Veterans Association? Isn't it just the kind of thing we want to see -- evidence that Muslims are loyal American citizens who are proud to fight to defend their country? Indeed. But what was happening fifty-two years after the cessation of hostilities that suddenly gave these vets the idea that such an association was needed? And if these vets were not Muslims during the war itself, is this an attempt to -- as Pamela says -- rewrite history to put an Islamic presence where there wasn't one?

And even if CAIR's story is 100% true, and there were Muslim soldiers participating in the Normandy invasion, does this really do anything to answer questions about the attachment of Muslims in America, and CAIR itself, to political Islam? Since CAIR has never clarified its position about ultimately replacing the U.S. Constitution with Islamic Sharia, and Ibrahim Hooper is on record saying he'd like to see an Islamic government in the U.S., these are legitimate questions. But don't hold your breath waiting for answers from the helpful folks at CAIR.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/018679.php

November 4, 2007