{"id":2659,"date":"2007-11-05T15:18:20","date_gmt":"2007-11-05T20:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2659"},"modified":"2007-11-05T15:18:20","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T20:18:20","slug":"a-tale-of-three-show-trials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2659","title":{"rendered":"A tale of three show-trials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"lead\"> The very public indictment, prosecution and trial of leading American Muslim organisations and persons reveal a larger agenda at work, writes <strong>Abdus Sattar Ghazali<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/weekly.ahram.org.eg\/2007\/869\/op12.htm#1\">*<\/a><\/p>\n<hr noshade=\"noshade\" \/> <!-- STORY --> This week&#8217;s failure to win any convictions against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) &#8212; once the largest Muslim charity in the US &#8212; was the third show-trial of Muslims in post-9\/ 11 America. In February this year, a federal jury in Chicago acquitted Mohamed Salah and his co- defendant Abdel-Halim Ashqar of supporting terrorism financing. Salah was charged with &#8220;terrorism&#8221; based upon a confession extracted by torture in an Israeli jail. In December 2005, former college professor Sami Al-Arian was acquitted on eight counts of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. After a six- month trial, jurors deadlocked on nine other counts.<\/p>\n<p>What is common in the three major trials? The three cases have been touted by the Bush administration as a major breakthrough in disrupting &#8220;terror financing cells&#8221;. The Holy Land case was considered so significant that President George Bush personally announced the seizure of its assets in December 2001. He made this announcement at a press conference in the Rose Garden four days after a request from then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The president said that money raised by the group, &#8220;is used by Hamas to support schools and indoctrinate children to grow up into suicide bombers&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[<a href=\"http:\/\/weekly.ahram.org.eg\/2007\/869\/op12.htm\">Read the report<\/a>]\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The very public indictment, prosecution and trial of leading American Muslim organisations and persons reveal a larger agenda at work, writes Abdus Sattar Ghazali* This week&#8217;s failure to win any convictions against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=2659\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-GT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}