ACLU Fight for Muslim Right to Fund Terrorism

by Stop the ACLU Recently the ACLU released a report on Muslim charities, many of which were proven terrorist funding fronts. In the report the ACLU falsely creates victims where none exist and once again exaggerate their favorite target of vilification, the U.S. government. According to the ACLU the evil American empire are stomping on the rights of Muslims to donate money to charities acting as front groups funding terrorist activities.

It suggests (contrary to a substantial body of evidence) – that the U.S. government was wrong to have acted against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation and other charities accused of raising money for terrorist organizations. The report also perpetuates the myth that the United States government may be planning to prosecute persons for unwittingly contributing to charities that were fronts for terrorism.

The ACLU asserts that post-September 11 policies targeting these charities have a “disproportionate” effect on Muslims and “are undermining American Muslims’ protected constitutional liberties and violating their fundamental human rights to freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom from discrimination.”

It recommends a series of policy changes which include repealing Executive Order 13224, issued shortly after September 11, which creates mechanisms for designating persons and organizations as “specially designated global terrorists” (SDGTs). The ACLU also calls on the FBI to employ the” least intrusive means” necessary to accomplish its investigative objectives and urges the federal government to ban law enforcement practices that “disproportionately” target people “based on ethnicity, national origin or religion.”

There is outstanding evidence that fears of Islamic charities donating their money to fund terrorist activities are legitimate. In many cases, such as the Holy Land Foundation, convictions happened. Of course the ACLU would make them partial. There is absolutely no evidence anyone wanting to donate money to legitimate charities, or people that donated unknowingly to front groups have had any civil liberties violated. The government has only went after the charity/front groups themselves, and never after donors.

The ACLU recommendations mean “more money for Hamas,” said Dennis Lormel, who created the FBI’s terror financing section. Terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah use the charities to build hospitals and provide food to the poor to win the trust of local Muslims. They then use “this credibility to enlist children as suicide bombers,” Lormel said.

But if the ACLU had its way, the U.S. government would lose critical tools for preventing U.S. charities from sending money to terrorist organizations. Using the “least intrusive means” would make it much more difficult (if not impossible) to shut down terrorist- financing charities like HLF, Lormel told IPT News, because they could deny the government the ability to use methods like wiretaps which were critical to building a case against the group for providing funds to Hamas.

Ending the SDGT designations would take away a valuable deterrent to abuse. “We know from experience that people stop donating to these charities once they are designated as supporters of terrorism,” added Lormel, a 28-year FBI veteran who oversaw its stepped-up efforts to shut off the flow of funds to terrorist organizations after September 11.

The ACLU complaints about the “disproportionate” impact of these investigations on Muslims overlook the reality that most of “the terrorist violence we’ve seen the past eight years comes from the Muslim world,” says Jonathan Schanzer, who worked as a Treasury Department counterterrorism analyst in the George W. Bush Administration.

The bottom line is if the ACLU get their way on this it is good for America’s enemies and bad for America. This is almost always the case when the ACLU get their way.