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 ****umptions 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 ****ets 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.”