blog

By Sam Dolgin-Gardner

Chicago-area Muslim Student Associations
(MSAs) have been attending the trial of Mohammed Salah, a resident of
Bridgeview, Illinois whom the US Government is accusing of fundraising
for Hamas. MSAs from the University of Chicago, DePaul, Northwestern,
and University of Illinois-Chicago are attending the trail to provide
moral support for Salah and his family and draw attention to what they
believe is a deeply flawed government case.

Students point to
the fact that the prosecution relies heavily on evidence gathered in
Israeli prisons—using methods that would be unacceptable in the
American justice system—as one major flaw of the trial. Another
criticism of the case surrounds the admission of closed testimony by
code-named Israeli agents. Finally, students feel the prosecution’s
case conflates the trial with the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
rather than dealing with the individual merits and evidence of this
particular case.

“The government is not trying to separate this
trial from issues of Israel-Palestine as a whole,” said Afshan
Mohiuddin, a 3rd-year undergraduate who is coordinating trial
attendance from the University of Chicago.  “The defense lawyers have
to start from to ground up, and they have to tackle the assumptions
that the American general population has—which is what the jury would
have—about terrorism and about Hamas: that Hamas necessarily equates to
a terrorist organization.”  

Salah, a U.S. citizen of
Palestinian origin who was born in Jordan, ran the Quranic Literacy
Institute, an organization that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars
for causes in the Occupied Territories.  On a 1993 trip to distribute
money there, Israeli authorities apprehended Salah and accused him of
giving that money to Hamas, a Palestinian group that has called for
Israel’s destruction. Although Salah claims he gave money only to
humanitarian causes, the Israelis jailed him for five years before
returning him to the United States, where he was considered a
“Specially Designated Terrorist” by the US Treasury Department.
Although Hamas—currently the democratically elected leadership of the
Palestinian people—was not considered at terrorist organization by the
United States in at the point Salah was arrested in Israel, it is
considered such today.

Many believe that if the US Government
prevails in this case, they’ll use this case as a precedent for further
prosecutions of American supporters of Hamas and other designated
terrorist organizations.  This worries many American Muslims who wish
to send money to their homelands, but are concerned that the U.S. may
label legitimate charities as terrorist organizations.  Compounding
this worry is the prevalence of organizations in the Muslim world that
have both militant and charitable arms, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and
the Muslim Brotherhood.  A well-meaning American Muslim who gives money
to charities with innocuous names might find himself prosecuted for
supporting terrorism, his assets frozen and his job taken away.

While
the reasons for Muslim students to attend the Salah trial are obvious,
Mohiuddin wants encourage non-Muslim students to attend as well, citing
Muslims’ deteriorating civil liberties a reason for all citizens to be
concerned. “The defense lawyer came and spoke to us,” Mohiuddin
explained, “and he said that twenty years down the line, everyone’s
going to look at this trial and be ashamed, just like we’re now ashamed
of the internment camps. That really struck me, because once a group
loses civil liberties, it affects everyone.”