Parents of Youth Killed in Israel File Suit Against U.S. Muslim Groups

By Lucille Barnes

Stanley and Joyce Boim, parents of 17-year-old Israeli-American David Boim, who was shot to death as he waited for a bus with a crowd of Israeli students in Jerusalem in 1996, have filed a $600,000 lawsuit in Chicago against several U.S. Islamic charities, non-profit groups, and individuals they contend have raised money in the United States for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group which functions as the principal domestic political opposition to President Yasser Arafat, operates clinics, orphanages, day care centers and other charitable institutions in Gaza and the West Bank, and also has a militant wing calling itself the Izzedin Al-Qassem Brigades, which has claimed responsibility for attacks against Israeli civilians and military personnel in Jerusalem and the occupied territories. The Israeli government has implicated two Palestinian youths in the shooting of David Boim, one of whom is serving a 10-year prison sentence for the crime and the other of whom was killed in a 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem. The Boim lawsuit names Mohammed Salah, a Palestine-born U.S. citizen living in Bridgeview, IL, who spent five years in Israeli prisons; the Quranic Literacy Institute in Illinois; Mousa Abu Marzook, a Palestine-born U.S. resident who accepted deportation from the U.S. to the Middle East after several months of detention on “secret evidence” by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a charitable group based in Texas; the Islamic Association for Palestine, a non-profit U.S. group dedicated to disseminating information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the United Association for Studies and Research, a Virginia-based think tank and publishing organization. The suit establishes no connection between any of the respondents and alleged Hamas terrorist activities, or with either of the youths accused of the shooting of Boim. Commenting, director Ahmed Youssef of the United Association for Studies and Research told The New York Times, “the charges are nonsense, absolute nonsense.” In earlier comments officials of the Holy Land Foundation, which in recent years has conducted emergency relief operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Turkey after its 1999 earthquakes, and twice in nearby Oklahoma, in addition to its work with Palestinian refugees in several countries, have denied any connection to terrorism. Nathan Lewin and Thomas Carr, lawyers for the Boims,said they hoped to make a case for holding anyone who sends money “to a group like Hamas” legally accountable for all of its activities. “That’s what we believe Congress intended in enacting the Anti-terrorism Act [which permits the used of secret evidence against defendants] of 1990 and 1992,” attorney Carr told Judith Miller of TheNew York Times.

Another victim of “secret evidence,” Anwar Haddam, who had been elected to the Algerian parliament before the 1991 coup in that country and then sought political asylum in the United States, finally was granted U.S. political asylum in early May after spending three and a half years in U.S. prisons without any legal charges being lodged against him. The favorable decision followed a grant of asylum to his wife, Nassima. Only days later, on May 15, the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that the grant to Mr. Haddam “was not correct” and the INS was “vacating” the initial approval. Said American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) president Hala Maksoud, “The government’s case is called into serious question by its use of secret evidence and is brought into further disrepute by its inexplicable action in granting and then revoking political asylum for him”

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the World Unification Church and publisher of The Washington Times, the U.S. national capital’s conservative daily newspaper, has purchased United Press International from the six Saudi Arabian families who bought the financially ailing national news service from a Mexican publisher several years ago. “UPI is saved from bankruptcy and can look to the future optimistically,” said Arnaud de Borchgrave, a former Belgian diplomat who also has been Washington Times editor-in-chief and who became UPI president and chief executive in December 1998. He will retain those titles as part of the merged organization, he said. On UPI’s staff is Lebanese-American journalist Helen Thomas, “dean” of the White House press corps through many successive administrations who asks the first question at every presidential press conference and closes the conferences with “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, whose division in the Gulf war carried out the famous “left hook,” driving deeply through the Iraqi desert to cut communications between Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait and their Iraqi bases, is locked in a public dispute with journalist Seymour Hersh over a battle with retreating Iraqi forces in which McCaffrey’s forces destroyed some 700 Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks. Hersh quoted Retired Lt. Gen. James H. Johnson as saying, “there was no need to be shooting at anybody” on March 2, 1991 when the encounter took place. “They couldn’t surrender fast enough…They were a defeated army going home and he attacked them.” McCaffrey, now director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, responded, “This is nonsense, this is revisionist history.” McCaffrey said two of his company commanders reported they were under fire and “we obviously had to support our soldiers.” Among many retired U.S. officers supporting the Hersh charges was Retired Lt. Gen. John J. Yeosock. He told HershMcCaffrey was “looking for a battle” and “what Barry ended up doing was fighting sand dunes and moving rapidly.” Hersh’s article will be published in the May 22 New Yorker.

Greek-American former Capitol Hill staffer George Tenet has not been Israel’s favorite CIA chief since he threatened to resign in 1998 if President Bill Clinton released U.S. spy-for-Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard as payola to then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for signing the Wye Plantation agreement to withdraw Israeli forces from some West Bank land. But when Tenet was asked to speak at a New York dinner commemorating Abraham Foxman’s 13th year as national director of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League and 35th year with the organization, he called Foxman “my teacher,” saying “you have interpreted Judaism for Tenet, not only interpreted the tenets of Judaism.” It was a nice play on words, but under Foxman’s tutelage ADL has been caught spying on American citizens and also in possession of illegally obtained police files on private citizens which, instead of being destroyed in accordance with a court order, were stolen by a rogue policeman and sold to the ADL. Perhaps America’s chief spook would like to revise those remarks about who taught what to whom.

The anything but publicity-shy American Jewish Congress made a futile attempt to keep out of the weekly Jewish press accounts of its $1,000-a-plate Hillel Award dinner dance in honor of CEO Geoffrey C. Bible of tobacco giant Philip Morris International. Meanwhile the American Jewish Committee, a rival member of the Israel lobby, honored Philip Morris USA President and CEO Michael E. Szymanczk. It makes arguments about whether the Israel lobby or the tobacco lobby is the most powerful special interest in America irrelevant if the former is getting its funding from the latter.

Lucille Barnes covers Washington, DC for U.S. and Middle East publications.