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href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/revived-lawsuit-puts-palestine-advocacy-crosshairs/21026">https://electronicintifada.net/content/revived-lawsuit-puts-palestine-advocacy-crosshairs/21026</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Revived lawsuit puts Palestine advocacy in
crosshairs</h1>
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver">Charlotte
Silver</a></span> <span class="field field-publisher"></span><span
class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2017-07-10T20:54:00+00:00">10 July 2017</span></span>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/holy-land-foundation">Holy
Land Foundation</a>, and criminally prosecute its
leaders.</p>
<p>Now the Boims are suing <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/american-muslims-palestine">American
Muslims for Palestine</a>, a national advocacy
group, and the affiliated Americans for Justice in
Palestine Educational Foundation, arguing they are
reincarnations of the defunct charities.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>The case</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel/IDF-kills-Nablus-Hamas-commander-4674">killed</a>
by the Israeli military, which claimed he was reviving
Hamas’ infrastructure in Nablus.</p>
<p>Hinawi’s conviction was not enough for the Boim
family at the time.</p>
<p>In 1997, the Boims met Nathan Lewin, a lawyer who
serves on the board of advisors of the Zionist
Organization of America’s <a
href="http://zoa.org/center-for-law-and-justice/">Center
for Law and Justice</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/anti-terrorism-act">Anti-Terrorism
Act</a>. 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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>Lewin and the Boims identified three US charities
that they argued provided material support to Hamas.</p>
<h2>Government gets on board</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Attorney John D. Shipman argues in a <a
href="http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4303&context=nclr">2008
article</a> for <em>North Carolina Law Review</em>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/10/us/after-long-slow-climb-respectability-muslim-charity-experiences-rapid-fall.html">accused</a>
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.</p>
<p>In 2002, the US government threw its weight behind
the Boims’ lawsuit. In a <a
href="https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/assets/Boim%20v%20Quranic%20Lit%20Institute%20-%20Brief%20for%20the%20US%20as%20Amicus%20Curiae%20Supporting%20Affirmance_0.pdf">friend
of the court brief</a>, 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.”</p>
<p>“<em>Boim</em> was like a stalking horse to develop
evidence to give to the federal government so they
could bring criminal charges,” attorney <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/michael-deutsch">Michael
Deutsch</a> told The Electronic Intifada.</p>
<p>Deutsch began <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/remembering-muhammad-salah/16451">representing</a>
defendant <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-salah">Muhammad
Salah</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/mousa-abu-marzouk">Mousa
Abu Marzouk</a>. The government’s case drew heavily
on the Boims’ lawsuit. The indictment against Salah
and Abu Marzouk <a
href="https://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/80.pdf">cited</a>
the Boims’ case. While the indictment against the Holy
Land Foundation was sealed, the Boims filed supporting
briefs in the case.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Overwhelming offensive</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>But the next year an expanded appellate panel
reversed that decision.</p>
<h2>Reviving the lawsuit</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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 <em>North
Carolina Law Review</em>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Palestine, however, was not the only issue being
litigated under the various anti-terrorism laws passed
in the 1990s.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/turkey">Turkey</a>
– on how to reject violence and pursue its goals
through lawful means.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the Boims argue that AMP has the
“identical” agenda as its alleged predecessors.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/us-activists-homes-targeted-pro-israel-intimidation-campaign">including</a>
Jewish Voice for Peace, to organize educational events
and actions in support of Palestinian rights and the
boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“It’s a continuing attack on Muslim Palestinians.”</p>
<p>Deutsch, who is not representing AMP but is familiar
with the case, said that “the whole impetus behind the
<em>Boim</em> case was to destroy charitable groups
that were helping those suffering under Israeli
occupation.</p>
<p>“This is just a continuation of this. They’re going
after this group that is successful and active.”</p>
<p>The Boims’ lawyer, Stephen Landes, <a
href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-israel-hamas-attack-chicago-lawsuit-met-20170512-story.html">said</a>
allowing AMP to operate “makes a mockery” of federal
anti-terrorism laws.</p>
<p>American Muslims for Palestine declined to give a
comment for this article.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Charlotte Silver is Associate Editor for The
Electronic Intifada.</em></p>
<br>
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