The Truth About Hamas--and Its Followers

Over the past two years, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Canadian affiliate, CAIR-Canada, have filed a series of lawsuits against journalists and others who have traced the connection between CAIR and the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas. Among the targets of these lawsuits have been the Web site Anti-Cair-net.org, the Canadian terrorism expert David Harris, and this newspaper and myself.

On April 12, CAIR-Canada settled its lawsuit against Harris. The lawsuit ended without retraction or apology by Harris. The suit against Anti-Cair-net was settled a few days earlier. Although the terms of Anti-Cair's settlement are confidential, Anti-Cair's Web site has likewise issued no retraction or apology. The words that triggered the lawsuit remain posted on the Anti-Cair site: Anti-Cair stands by its charge that CAIR is a "terrorist-supporting front organization . . .founded by Hamas supporters" that aims "to make radical Islam the dominant religion in the United States."

The lawsuit against the National Post and myself was settled with an editor's note that likewise offered no apology or retraction.

The settlement of the Harris lawsuit should be of special interest to Canadians. David Harris is one of Canada's leading experts on terrorism: a former chief of strategic planning for CSIS and now president of the Insignis consulting firm. His views are regularly heard on television and radio. Now he has recovered his full freedom to speak and to alert Canadians to the dangers in their midst. This should establish once and for all that media organizations can broadcast his carefully chosen words without legal risk.

These lawsuits represented a very considerable gamble for CAIR and its Canadian branch. So long as they lasted, it's true, they inhibited media organizations' ability to speak about CAIR. But once they terminated, as they were bound to do, the full facts of the case would become matters of public record.

By coincidence, just as the Anti-Cair and Harris lawsuits were being shut down, Yale University Press released the most detailed study of the Hamas terror group ever offered to readers without a security clearance. The book is Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad; the author is Matthew Levitt, the chief intelligence officer of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and one of the world's leading experts on Hamas.

Levitt's book was excerpted on these pages a few weeks ago. The Post excerpts described Hamas's indoctrination of young people, Hamas' electoral strategy in the Palestinian Authority and the close co-ordination between Hamas' social-welfare projects, its terrorism and its overall ideological mission of building a global Islamic caliphate.

But Levitt also has a good deal to say about Hamas' operations in North America. "[U.S.] Federal investigators have uncovered a surprisingly large number of front organizations supporting Hamas in the United States," he observes, and proceeds to explain an intricate network of fundraising and ideological advocacy dating back to the 1980s. One Hamas front organization, the Holy Land Foundation, raised $57-million between its founding in 1992 and its final shuttering by the U.S. government in December 2001. Another Hamas front group, the Islamic Association for Palestine, engaged in advocacy and propaganda work.

The leadership of the Holy Land Foundation and the Islamic Association for Palestine in turn interlocked with the leadership of CAIR. CAIR's co-founder, Omar Ahmed, had previously co-founded the Islamic Association for Palestine. CAIR's executive director, Nihad Awad, is a self-described "supporter of the Hamas movement." Lower-level CAIR officials have been arrested and indicted on terrorism-related charges in the United States; one accepted deportation rather than face trial.

Nobody associated with CAIR-Canada has been charged with any criminal misconduct. Internal CAIR-Canada documents uncovered during CAIR's litigation against the National Post suggested, however, that 70% of CAIR-Canada's revenues were forwarded to CAIR in the United States.

Canada's new federal government has acted decisively against international terrorism. The Harper government has announced that aid to the Palestinian Authority will be suspended so long as it is governed by Hamas. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has added the Tamil Tigers to the list of prohibited terrorist organizations--a move Mr. Day has described as "long overdue." And the days when Prime Minister Paul Martin sought advice from CAIR-Canada have mercifully been left behind.

Now, with these libel cases closed, Canadians can freely join a larger conversation, not just about terrorism, but about the larger problem of ideological extremism from which terrorism emerges. Canadians owe David Harris thanks for winning that freedom. Now Canadians owe him something even more urgent: their attention to his words and warnings.