CAIR TIED TO HAMAS IN FEDERAL COURT

DALLAS—Prosecutors have produced scores of documents, audio and videotapes, and intercepted phone calls in their attempt to prove that a Muslim charity based in a suburban Dallas office park was actually a fundraising arm of Middle Eastern terrorists.

Much of the evidence has surfaced before in books, newspaper articles and previous trials. But those who track terror-financing say the document haul from the trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development has also produced new information. They say the documents shed light on a web of related organizations of militant Palestinian supporters in the United States, some of whom saw their goal as destroying Western civilization.

The 1991 bylaws of a group called the Palestine Committee say it was created to be the highest authority on "work for the Palestinian cause on the American front." The committee was led by Mousa Abu Marzook, later deported to Jordan and labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government. The committee oversaw a number of former and current Muslim organizations in the United States.

One was Holy Land, which was shut down in December 2001 and is accused of being a fundraising front for Hamas. Five of its former leaders are on trial in Dallas, charged with sending more than $12 million in illegal aid to Hamas.

Another was the Islamic Association for Palestine, which closed in 2004 after a federal judge found it and then-defunct Holy Land liable in the killing of an American teenager in Israel by Hamas gunmen.

And a third was the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which has emerged as a leading advocacy group for American Muslims.

For the first time, evidence in the case put CAIR's founder, Nihad Awad, at a Philadelphia meeting of alleged Hamas supporters that was secretly watched and recorded by the FBI. The groups had overlapping rosters of leaders. Documents introduced by prosecutors in the Holy Land trial list several of the charity's leaders as officials in the Islamic Association for Palestine...

"It's clear these groups grew out of an effort to carry out a specific strategy in the United States," Farah said. "It's in their own words, it's a political infiltration that worked for 40 years."

Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, denied that his group or its current or former leaders had any ties to Hamas. "That's one of those urban legends about CAIR," he said. "It's fed by the right-wing, pro-Israeli blogosphere."

Ahmed said the Philadelphia gathering attended by CAIR's founder "was an open meeting of Palestinian activists who came together to discuss the Olso peace accords and their struggle to gain a homeland."...
One of the documents is a memo about the goals for the U.S. organization of the U.S. faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members included some of the Holy Land leaders now on trial.

The memo's writer, Mohamed Akram, wrote that members of the Brotherhood "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within."