The Treasury Department yesterday designated one of the nation's largest Muslim charities as a terrorist organization because it has received funding from a top al Qaeda financier and its leader worked for a group created by Osama bin Laden in the 1980s.
The government's action means that anyone who has financial dealings with the Illinois-based Global Relief Foundation without Treasury Department permission can be charged as a felon. It is the latest U.S. government crackdown on leading Islamic organizations in a global effort to choke off funding for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
The foundation "has connections to [and] has provided support for . . . the al Qaeda network and other known terrorist groups," Treasury said in a statement. It cited, among other allegations, the fact that high-ranking al Qaeda financier Mohammed Zouaydi, who was arrested in April in Spain, had given more than $200,000 to Global Relief.
Lawyers for Global Relief and its co-founder, Rabih Haddad, denounced the government's action as anti-Muslim and McCarthyist. They focused on one piece of evidence Treasury cited to assert Global Relief is tied to al Qaeda -- that Haddad was a member of a bin Laden organization in the 1980s that preceded al Qaeda and that helped recruit guerrillas fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"The United States also supported that organization [Makhtab al-Khidamat] then," said the foundation's Maryland-based attorney, Roger Simmons. "None of this was illegal at the time, and it's Orwellian now to say it is. This is revisionist history."
Haddad, a popular cleric in Ann Arbor, Mich., has been in jail on charges of overstaying his visa since Dec. 14, the same day federal agents raided Global Relief's headquarters in Bridgeview, Ill., and shut it down.
Haddad had worked for years for bin Laden's Makhtab al-Khidamat, which supported the tens of thousands of Arabs who rushed to Afghanistan to join the anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980s. The group was all but swallowed up by al Qaeda after he launched the new organization in 1988. In 1992 Haddad helped establish Global Relief to provide humanitarian aid to needy Muslims around the world. In 2001 it had revenue of $5.2 million.
In a statement released yesterday, Treasury pointed out that Global Relief for years promoted tapes and writings of Makhtab al-Khidamat's other co-founder, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian scholar killed in a car bombing in 1989. "His words are jewels," one foundation publication said. "He produced a new theory for saving the [Islamic] nation from disgrace."
Global Relief "has published several Arabic newsletters and pamphlets that advocate armed action through jihad against groups perceived to be un-Islamic," Treasury added. Officials cited a foundation publication in 1995 that described Muslim guerrilla struggles around the world and solicited donations "for equipping the raiders, for the purchase of ammunition and food."
"The organization was born in trying times" after the Afghan war and during the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia, said Haddad's Virginia-based lawyer, Ashraf Nubani. "But that's not where the group is now. It grew, and focused totally on humanitarian relief."
Haddad added that the government, by quoting from foundation publications advocating that Muslims donate funds for jihad or struggle, are attacking Islam itself. Some of the quotations were from the Koran, he said. "You may not like it, but [financially supporting jihad] is part of the religion," he said. Furthermore, he added, Azzam is "a hero" not only to Haddad but millions of Muslims.
The government also said the director of Global Relief's Belgian affiliate was in close touch in the late 1990s with Wadih Hage, bin Laden's personal secretary, who was convicted on conspiracy charges in the al Qaeda bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa. Global Relief's attorneys say the contact was fleeting.
"America is going after everyone even tangentially related" to al Qaeda, Nubani said. "They fight the whole religion, the whole civilization."
