PrintMore fallout from Hamas connection to prayer service participant
Yesterday's American Thinker piece by Winfield Myers on Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who will be participating in the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral on Wednesday has generated quite a bit of fallout. AP and Politico picked up on the story from American Thinker, but without acknowledging our prior reporting. Winfield Myers' article was echoed in reports from Politico (published ~16 hours later) and the Associated Press (published ~17 hours later). Neither story mentioned Myers, Campus Watch (where he works and for which he did the research), or American Thinker.
A small thing, perhaps, but telling. A quick look at Google News would have told both publications of the existence of a prior story on Mattson.
Ed Lasky reports that the story has been picked up and being given some good play by Fox News.
Josh Gerstein, who covered the long and complex Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas for the now-defunct New York Sun, published his piece in Politico yesterday afternoon that riffed off of Myers article, showing how the ISNA has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood Palestinian Committee and several defendants in the HLF case.
Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is scheduled to join Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis offering prayers for the new president and his family during a service at the National Cathedral in Washington, organizers announced Friday.
Mattson’s group calls itself “the largest Muslim umbrella organization” in North America. However, in May 2007, federal prosecutors included ISNA on a list of nearly 300 co-conspirators filed in a criminal case charging that the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, funneled more than $12 million to Hamas.
The U.S. government designated Hamas as a terrorist group in 1995.
A trial in Dallas in 2007 for the foundation and five of its leaders ended with acquittals and mistrials. However, Holy Land and the five officials were convicted of all 108 charges in a second trial last year.
What kind of evidence is there that Mattson's group is connected to Hamas? Here's the prosecutor in the HLF trial James Jacks responding to a motion by ISNA to strike their name from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the HLF case:
During last year's trial, numerous exhibits were entered into evidence establishing both ISNA's and NAIT's intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestine Committee, and the defendants in this case," Mr. Jacks wrote . "They were intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to HAMAS. ... That ISNA and NAIT appeared in these documents and share a common history with these defendants is a reflection of the evidence, not any attempt to 'disparage' or 'vilify.'"
Since the Holy Land Foundation convictions, contacts between the government and Mattson's group have been virtually cut off. It now appears that Obama wishes to ignore the evidence that the ISNA and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - also named as a conspirator in the trial - have terrorist connections.
A helluva price to pay for political correctness.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
