The Unjust Prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation Five

http://theintercept.com/2018/08/05/holy-land-foundation-trial-palestine-israel
Date Written:  2018-08-05
Publisher:  The Intercept
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX22940

Miko Peled, in "Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five," his exhaustive study of the U.S. government's case against five defendants from a friendless minority, demonstrates how American justice has deviated so far from Blackstone that the courts can convict a hundred innocents for one who is guilty.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The FBI, the Treasury Department, and other assorted police forces in Texas and California accosted them with raids on most of their family houses early in the morning on July 26, 2004. The criminal trial against the Holy Land Foundation Five -- or HLF 5, as the five Arab-Americans became known, a reference to the Islamic charity they founded in 1990 -- opened exactly three years later. It culminated in a hung jury. The retrial in Dallas federal court began in September 2008, and included unprecedented testimony from "Avi," the pseudonym assumed by an Israeli intelligence agent whose qualifications the defense was unable to probe. Judge Jorge Solis, although he instructed jurors that they were allowed to weigh the agent's credibility in light of his anonymity, nonetheless brushed aside the defendants’ right under the Sixth Amendment "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." Nothing in the U.S. Constitution until then permitted conviction by anonymous accusations, but the court convicted all five men.

Peled's book is a fascinating account of immigrants making good in their new country, starting families and businesses and creating a charity to help those they left behind. Through Peled, Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulrahman Odeh emerge as decent human beings motivated by the desire to relieve suffering, in line with their religious convictions. They remind the reader of the many Jewish Americans that were persecuted during the McCarthy era for their support of humanitarian causes espoused by organizations that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI declared "communist front organizations."