[News] Revived lawsuit puts Palestine advocacy in crosshairs
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jul 11 10:46:16 EDT 2017
https://electronicintifada.net/content/revived-lawsuit-puts-palestine-advocacy-crosshairs/21026
Revived lawsuit puts Palestine advocacy in crosshairs
Charlotte Silver
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver> 10 July 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The case of a youth killed more than two decades ago – whose death
prompted a tide of anti-terrorism litigation in the US – has returned to
court.
In 1996, 17-year-old David Boim was standing at a bus stop in the
Israeli settlement Beit El, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank,
when he was shot dead in a drive-by attack.
Eleven years earlier, David’s parents, Stanley and Joyce Boim, had moved
to Jerusalem from New York. The whole family maintained dual
American-Israeli citizenship.
In 2000, the Boims became the first US citizens to use federal
anti-terrorism laws to accuse Islamic charities in the US of being
fronts for a designated terrorist group (in this case, Hamas) in order
to hold the organizations liable for the murder of their son.
Their civil lawsuit, which resulted in a $156 million award in damages
in 2004, also helped the government bankrupt several of the country’s
Islamic charities, including the largest such organization at the time,
the Holy Land Foundation
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/holy-land-foundation>, and
criminally prosecute its leaders.
Now the Boims are suing American Muslims for Palestine
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/american-muslims-palestine>, a
national advocacy group, and the affiliated Americans for Justice in
Palestine Educational Foundation, arguing they are reincarnations of the
defunct charities.
The Boims’ first lawsuit stretched over eight years and was full of
holes that have yet to be filled. Their new lawsuit, filed last month in
Chicago, suggests their goal is not to hinder terrorism, but to
criminalize Palestine advocacy groups.
The case
Three days after David Boim was killed at the Israeli settlement,
24-year-old Amjad Hinawi turned himself in to the Palestinian Authority.
Hinawi admitted that he was in the car with Khalil Sharif, also 24, when
Sharif opened fire on Boim and the others standing at the bus stop, but
maintained that he did not know Sharif’s plans.
Just a year after Boim’s slaying, Sharif, a member of Hamas who had
evaded the Palestinian Authority’s attempts to find him, carried out a
suicide attack in Jerusalem.
In February 1998, Hinawi was convicted by a Palestinian military court
for being an accomplice in the slaying of Boim and sentenced to 10 years
in prison with hard labor. Hinawi did not complete the prison time,
however, because he absconded while on furlough shortly after he was
sentenced. In 2005, he was killed
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel/IDF-kills-Nablus-Hamas-commander-4674> by
the Israeli military, which claimed he was reviving Hamas’
infrastructure in Nablus.
Hinawi’s conviction was not enough for the Boim family at the time.
In 1997, the Boims met Nathan Lewin, a lawyer who serves on the board of
advisors of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Law and
Justice <http://zoa.org/center-for-law-and-justice/>. Lewin, who has
also represented AIPAC and former president Richard Nixon, took on their
case without charge and began aggressively lobbying for the US to obtain
the extradition of Hinawi to face trial in the US and possibly the death
penalty.
In public statements to the press and Congress, Lewin revealed that the
FBI and the Justice Department pursued an investigation into Hinawi
throughout 1999, with FBI agents traveling to Israel and the occupied
Gaza Strip to meet with Palestinian and Israeli officials.
They concluded, however, that there was not enough admissible evidence
to try Hinawi in a US court. One US official told Lewin that they
couldn’t be certain that Hinawi’s confession hadn’t been coerced.
It was at this point, as Lewin tells the story, that he discovered a
recourse for the Boim family in the form of the unused Anti-Terrorism
Act <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/anti-terrorism-act>. The
legislation, passed by Congress in 1992, allows US citizens who are
victims of acts the US government defines as terrorism to sue for civil
damages in US courts.
“Obviously, there was no purpose in suing Mr. Hinawi, who had no funds,”
Lewin told a Senate judiciary committee hearing on fighting the
financing of terrorism in 2002.
Lewin and the Boims identified three US charities that they argued
provided material support to Hamas.
Government gets on board
In their lawsuit filed in May 2000, the Boims claimed that the Holy Land
Foundation, the Islamic Association for Palestine, activist Muhammad
Salah and several other organizations and individuals had acted as a
“network of front organizations” for a State Department-designated
terror organization, Hamas, which they claimed was responsible for their
son’s slaying.
Attorney John D. Shipman argues in a 2008 article
<http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4303&context=nclr>
for /North Carolina Law Review/ that the Boims’ lawsuit was “the first
to articulate a theory of terrorist liability based solely upon the
defendants’ knowledge that their funds were being used to conduct acts
of international terrorism.”
That liability could be imposed “at any point along the causal chain of
terrorism,” according to the theory, no matter how far removed a group’s
activities were from the acts of terrorism.
By the next year, the US government was working in tandem with the Boim
lawsuit. In early December 2001, nearly three months after the attacks
on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the US government accused
<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/10/us/after-long-slow-climb-respectability-muslim-charity-experiences-rapid-fall.html>
the Holy Land Foundation of being a front for Hamas and seized its
assets. The move put the largest Islamic charity in the US out of
business and imperiled its ability to hire lawyers.
In 2002, the US government threw its weight behind the Boims’ lawsuit.
In a friend of the court brief
<https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/assets/Boim%20v%20Quranic%20Lit%20Institute%20-%20Brief%20for%20the%20US%20as%20Amicus%20Curiae%20Supporting%20Affirmance_0.pdf>,
the US government urged the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to allow
the case to go to trial, arguing the Anti-Terrorism Act could be “an
effective weapon in the battle against international terrorism.”
“/Boim/ was like a stalking horse to develop evidence to give to the
federal government so they could bring criminal charges,” attorney
Michael Deutsch <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/michael-deutsch>
told The Electronic Intifada.
Deutsch began representing
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/remembering-muhammad-salah/16451>
defendant Muhammad Salah
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-salah> in 2004, when the
US government indicted him for running “a US-based terrorist recruiting
and financing cell associated with the foreign terrorist organization
Hamas.”
During the summer of 2004, the federal government filed two separate
lawsuits against defendants in the Boim lawsuit, the Holy Land
Foundation and Muhammad Salah and Mousa Abu Marzouk
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/mousa-abu-marzouk>. The
government’s case drew heavily on the Boims’ lawsuit. The indictment
against Salah and Abu Marzouk cited
<https://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/80.pdf> the
Boims’ case. While the indictment against the Holy Land Foundation was
sealed, the Boims filed supporting briefs in the case.
In December 2004, a jury awarded the Boims $52 million in damages that
was automatically trebled to $156 million according to federal
anti-terrorism laws.
Overwhelming offensive
The overlapping civil and federal cases against these organizations
formed an overwhelming offensive, but the claim that the organizations
were providing “material support” to Hamas was based on thin evidence,
one piece of which was fabricated by the Israeli government.
In a letter to the same 2002 Senate judiciary committee hearing on
fighting the financing of terrorism, John W. Boyd, the lawyer for the
Holy Land Foundation at the time, rebutted the claims against his client.
According to Boyd, one of the most substantial pieces of evidence was
fabricated by the Israeli government. Israel provided a supposed summary
of a statement from the Holy Land Foundation’s manager in the West Bank,
which attributed to him a confession that some of the foundation’s funds
went to Hamas. According to Boyd, a factual transcript of the interview
shows that the manager categorically denied that the Holy Land
Foundation ever supported Hamas. Boyd stated that the government was
aware of the error.
Another piece of evidence that purports to prove the foundation
supported Hamas entities was the funding of a hospital in Gaza
affiliated with Hamas. But this hospital received funding from USAID, a
US government agency, at the same time the Holy Land Foundation was
donating to it.
The Holy Land Foundation also gave money to Palestinian children who
lost their fathers and were counted as orphans. Four hundred children
received $45 per month from the Holy Land Foundation. These children’s
fathers were killed for a variety of reasons: according to Boyd, only
four fathers died in connection with alleged terrorism. Nine were killed
by Hamas or other Palestinian organizations as suspected collaborators.
Still, this program was cited as evidence that the Holy Land Foundation
supported Hamas.
In 2007, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals voided the 2004 verdict
that held the Holy Land Foundation and others liable, stating that the
Boims had failed to prove that financial contributions to Hamas had
played a direct role in the slaying of their son.
“Belief, assumption and speculation are no substitutes for evidence in a
court of law … We must resist the temptation to gloss over error, admit
spurious evidence and assume facts not adequately proved simply to side
with the face of innocence and against the face of terrorism,” Judge
Ilana Diamond Rovner wrote.
But the next year an expanded appellate panel reversed that decision.
Reviving the lawsuit
In the eight years between the start and end of the Boims’ case, the US
“War on Terror” turned the courts into a front line in the fight against
terrorism by supposedly attacking its revenue streams in the US.
“The practical effect of the Boim decision was to open American
courtrooms to an entirely new class of litigants by explicitly
recognizing a cause of action under the [Anti-Terrorism Act] for ‘aiding
and abetting’ terrorism, even in cases where the defendant had no
specific knowledge of the actual terrorist activity,” attorney Shipman
explained in the /North Carolina Law Review/.
In the decade after the Boim case, several lawsuits were filed. Many
were related to Palestine, targeting the Arab Bank, the Palestinian
Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization for alleged acts of
terrorism committed by people or groups loosely affiliated with them.
Palestine, however, was not the only issue being litigated under the
various anti-terrorism laws passed in the 1990s.
The decade of litigation culminated in 2010, when the Obama
administration took the Humanitarian Law Project, an organization
dedicated to peacefully resolving conflicts, to the Supreme Court.
Then-Attorney General Eric Holder argued it was illegal for a group to
advise a designated terrorist organization – in this case the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/turkey> – on how to reject violence
and pursue its goals through lawful means.
According to law scholar David Cole, “The [Supreme] Court ruled – for
the first time in its history – that speech advocating only lawful,
nonviolent activity can be subject to criminal penalty, even where the
speakers’ intent is to discourage resort to violence.”
On 12 May of this year, the Boims went back to court in Chicago.
Claiming they received a small fraction of the damages they were
awarded, the parents are now naming three individuals and American
Muslims for Palestine (AMP) as responsible for paying the rest of the
money they are owed. An exact amount has not been specified.
The new lawsuit claims that Rafeeq Jaber, Abdelbasset Hamayel and Osama
Abu Irshaid established AMP, and a nonprofit funding arm, Americans for
Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation (AJP), to replace the three
organizations found liable for supporting Hamas in 2004.
“AMP and AJP are alter egos and successors of HLF [the Holy Land Fund],
AMS [American Muslim Society] and IAP [Islamic Association for
Palestine], and are therefore liable for the unpaid portion of the Boim
Judgment,” the complaint argues.
The lawsuit does not purport to have any evidence that AMP or the other
named defendants are supporting Hamas. Indeed, AMP says it does not
conduct any activities abroad.
Nevertheless, the Boims argue that AMP has the “identical” agenda as its
alleged predecessors.
“AMP claims on its website that it is ‘all about educating people about
Palestine,’ thus continuing the purported purposes of AMS, IAP and HLF,”
the complaint states.
Jaber, Hamayel and Abu Irshaid are named because they all had some role
in the previously indicted organizations and now work with AMP. None of
them was indicted or named in the previous lawsuit.
AMP was founded in 2006 in Chicago with the “sole purpose” to “educate
the American public and media about issues related to Palestine and its
rich cultural and historical heritage.” It collaborates with groups
around the country, including
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/us-activists-homes-targeted-pro-israel-intimidation-campaign>
Jewish Voice for Peace, to organize educational events and actions in
support of Palestinian rights and the boycott, divestment and sanctions
movement.
“They’re trying to say that this is the same group with a different
name, but it’s a different group, different philosophy, goals and
people,” Deutsch told The Electronic Intifada.
“It’s a continuing attack on Muslim Palestinians.”
Deutsch, who is not representing AMP but is familiar with the case, said
that “the whole impetus behind the /Boim/ case was to destroy charitable
groups that were helping those suffering under Israeli occupation.
“This is just a continuation of this. They’re going after this group
that is successful and active.”
The Boims’ lawyer, Stephen Landes, said
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-israel-hamas-attack-chicago-lawsuit-met-20170512-story.html>
allowing AMP to operate “makes a mockery” of federal anti-terrorism laws.
American Muslims for Palestine declined to give a comment for this article.
The Boim case is being revived just as the Trump administration says it
will prioritize fighting what it calls terrorism in the US and abroad.
How the court handles the resurrection of this precedent-setting lawsuit
could usher in a new wave of phony terrorism cases targeting Palestinian
activism.
/Charlotte Silver is Associate Editor for The Electronic Intifada./
--
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