Eye Witness to the Holy Land Foundation Re-Trial, Week 6

WEEK SIX Report Covering Oct 27-31, 2008
HLF Trial Update & Prayer Points

Saturday, November 1, 2008
The prosecution rests;
the bluster, indignation and contempt begins

One thing that has stood out about the defense cross examination of witnesses in the case against the Holy Land Foundation defendants and that is how little the five defense attorneys had to work with each time they were given the opportunity to challenge witness testimony. When one considers exactly what points the defense attorneys did raise in cross examination there was little substantive challenge of facts.

Instead defense attorneys have done their cross exams with a game face of bluster, indignation and contempt. When Josh Dratel comes to the podium we can be confident we are about to see bluster; Hollander does the indignation; and Moreno’s specialty is the contempt. Theatrics are what you depend on when you have no real defense.

Hopefully the jury has seen enough of this kind of thing to realize that when defense attorneys start making an issue out of things like what the definition of the word “is” is, it is nothing more than a shell game. It is the truth that is being hidden and moved around by sleight of hand techniques to confuse the jury. It is very easy to get drawn into the thinking that these cases are little more than a sporting event where attorneys are the winners and losers. (Remember the O.J. trial?)

Pray that as the defense case is presented, jurors will not be caught up in the theatrics of criminal defense. Pray they will be able to keep focused on real evidence and what is truly reasonable to draw from all they have seen. What is at stake is far greater than a bunch of attorneys who have made it their specialty to defend terrorism in the United States Courts. Pray that the jury does not lose sight of their charge to do justice on the behalf of all of the citizens of the United States.

Over the next week or so, the defense will bring witnesses who like themselves have been content not to dig too deeply into what the Holy Land Foundation was actually funding in the Palestinian territories.

The first such witness was former Congressman (D-TX) and attorney John Bryant, who represented HLF during the 1990’s when a series of Dallas Morning News investigative reports began to unearth ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. One thing from Bryant’s testimony was clear: he took his clients’ word at face value without question. The U.S. government representatives that he tried to approach on behalf of the HLF were not so naïve and rebuffed his efforts to get them to tell him what HLF could do to remove suspicions about their activities.

Last year the defense also called another former government witness, Edward Abington who under the Clinton administration was the US consul general in Jerusalem. After leaving that position Abington became a paid consultant to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. He reportedly received $2.5 million for those services – a fact that leaves little doubt as to where Abington’s sympathies lie.

Apparently it is his former government title that the defense hopes will impress the jury. In my view Abington came off in testimony last year resembling a ‘banty rooster’. He will likely be called to testify again this week and likely that he will stick to his testimony that Hamas is not “Islamist”. Abington will be used to undermine any empathy or trust the jury has for Israel defending itself against terrorism and the Israeli security testimony that has been heard in the trial.

Another potential expert witness for the defense is Dr. Nathan Brown who testified last year primarily seeking to discredit the testimony of the Israel Security Agency counterterrorism attorney “Avi” whose identity was shielded to protect the agent and his family from kidnap and murder plots terrorists have executed as retaliation in the past.

Dr. Brown would have to be far more dazzling than he was last year. The prosecution presented two outstanding terrorism experts with much stronger credentials in the testimony of Dr. Matthew Levitt and Dr. Bruce Hoffman. Dr. Brown is clearly outgunned in his knowledge of terrorism in general and Hamas specifically.

Pray that jurors will have great discernment about those offering viewpoints in this trial. That the truth will ring true and falsehoods be glaring.

Last year the defense only called five witnesses. They maintained that the government did not make a case against their clients. When the prosecution rested on Friday, each of the five defendants’ attorneys filed separate motions to dismiss the case which Judge Solis denied. This year the prosecution brought five witnesses they did not call last year, including former HLF-insider Imam Mohamed Shorbagi. Surely the defense attorneys do not really believe the case against their clients has not been made this year…nevertheless:

Please continue to be in prayer this week for the jurors as they begin to hear all the counter accusations of defense lawyers against the government who will be accused of Islamophobia, witch hunts, invasion of privacy and other conspiracy laced theories designed to take jurors eyes off of the evidence of Hamas terrorism affiliates in our own backyard in Dallas, Texas.

Pray Isaiah 60:18 “Violence (Hamas) will not be heard again in your land…But you will call your walls salvation (Yeshua), and your gates praise (tehillah).”

The defense can say HLF only funded things meant to raise the quality of life for Palestinians but the full array of evidence negates that claim.

One profound example of that are the video clips of kindergarten ceremonies funded by HLF. A 5 or 6 year old forcefully screaming out a hate speech against Jews as part of a presentation for an audience should tell outsiders exactly what kind of brain washing the kindergarten is trying to achieve.

Listening to that jarring expression of hatred from a pre-schooler, I thought about Hitler's rousing hate-filled speeches. I have no idea however, what could possibly have been going through the minds of many spectators whose response to the video clips was smiling and smirking. Pride? God help us. As long as children are born and raised with indoctrination of such intense hatred - encouraged to see suicide mass murder as a lifetime achievement - there will never be peace in the Middle East. This case is about not allowing funding for those kinds of indoctrinations to continue.

Everyone who prays should pray this jury will not succumb to exaggerations of the legal measure they must use to judge this case. It is not how well the defense attorneys can act with bluster, indignation and contempt that matters. They are not the issue and this trial is about far more than the sport of criminal defense.

We must put down a boundary stake in our legal system which cuts off ambiguity in terrorism financing. This is a critical case. Please continue to stand in the gap for justice to prevail.

Articles this week covering the trial by Jason Trahan, Dallas Morning News:

Holy Land prosecutors rest case; defense calls first witness

Holy Land jurors get a sample of Hamas martyr propaganda

Full collection of Trahan’s CRIME blog coverage of the HLF trial: http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/archives/holy-land-foundation/

And the Investigative Project on Terrorism reports
Israeli Official Details Zakat Committee Links to Hamas

Nine/Eleven Finding Answers
All the evidence in the HLF retrial presented in a manner that connects the dots. This is more than you ever wanted to know about the evidence, but even if you only skim over it lightly you will be able to begin to see the weight of the evidence that has been presented against the defendants.

Eye Witness to the Holy Land Foundation Re-Trial, Week 2

HLF Trial Update & Prayer Points

October 4, 2008
WEEK TWO

The "willing suspension of disbelief"
refers to the willingness of a person
to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction,
even if they are fantastic or impossible.
The person, or audience, tacitly agrees to provisionally
suspend their judgment in exchange for a satisfying personal payoff.

This is exactly what the defense attorneys in the Holy Land Foundation are asking the jury to do concerning all the evidence that has been presented over the past two weeks through Hamas and counter terrorism expert Dr. Matthew Levitt, Christian FBI Arabic translator Ataf Shafik, and FBI agent Lara Burns, a lead investigator in the decade long investigation of the Holy Land Foundation.

The payoff defense attorneys are appealing to on the jury panel judging this case is, of course, the public distrust that exists of governmental authorities. The Word of God however instructs us in Romans 13:3-4 differently about government authorities:

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.

Pray for the fulfillment of this verse in this HLF terrorism financing case before the Federal Court in Dallas.

Defending Terrorism

For two weeks jurors have seen bank records, videos, wire tap audios, surveillance photos, in-house HLF documentation and declarations from the defendants themselves, yet the Defense proposes that nothing counts until 1995 when the U.S. government finally officially declared Hamas a terrorist organization. (See the evidence online at the US District Court website.)

The Defense is asking the jury to pretend like the consistent history of these 5 defendants has nothing to do with the charges against them of materially supporting a terrorist organization. The defense also asks the jury to forget about the multiple family connections of the defendants with the highest echelons of Hamas leaders including those family Hamas members funding the startup of HLF and presiding over disputes with other Islamist fundraisers.

The jury saw numerous videos that have been seized in FBI searches at various locations over the years that show, among other things, HLF fundraisers where skits are performed depicting murder of Jewish soldiers and Israeli citizens. Songs are also performed extolling suicide attackers killing Jews, glorifying “martyrdom” of jihadists and giving their blood to wipe the Jews out of Israel. Very often children from 4 or 5 years old to 12 participated in the performance singing the songs, marching in step and waving flags. It was troubling during these displays to realize that these are “home movies” for the families of the defendants.

I watched in horror as the children – some now grown - of several of the defendants were giggling between themselves recognizing themselves as little children performing in the fundraisers. Later as an audio tape was being played of a wire tap telephone call excitedly informing one of the defendants of 2 suicide bus bombings 30 minutes apart in Jerusalem in February 1996, one young teenager was giggling hearing the background noise of the call: a child playfully screaming in the defendant’s home. Like the “home movies” these phone calls are like “home audios” of their childhood. “Train up a child in the way he shall go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” How sad that these are normal activities and conversations in the life of the defendants’ children and families.

Yet the defendants are laughing up their sleeve because they know our system of law favors them being able to slither out of these charges because the jury has had their eyes taken off the ball by Defense attorneys focusing them on insignificant details to obscure the truth. We all can remember how that was accomplished in the O.J. Simpson trial, right? The jury must decide if these men are part of the Hamas terrorist organization in the U.S. Pray they will fulfill that charge in the interest of the American public safety.

As the defense stepped up to cross examine FBI agent Burns yesterday, we began to see the insignificant details ‘gotcha’ game come into play.

v Defense Attorney Linda Moreno (who represents Ghassan Elashi) majored on emphasizing that the dates of many of the damning videos and other government evidence introduced being dated or produced prior to the 1995 U.S. designation of Hamas. As if their life work up to 1995 did not count. She tried to introduce another “Ghassan” to make it seem the government had the wrong guy, and also tried to imply that the HLF acted exactly like the Red Cross.

Pray that jurors will not be willing to suspend disbelief that these men were aggressively committed to Hamas before the U.S. designation when they suddenly dropped all their prior life work of support and aid of Hamas because now Hamas was illegal by U.S. law. Pray for wisdom and clear thinking to prevail among the jury and to realize this is not just a sports event between lawyers, but whether terrorists are allowed free reign in our nation.

v Moreno is also sitting on top of all the defendants in how they are presenting themselves during the trial. I have seen her coaching them on what not to do – like instructing Elashi not to listen to testimony with ‘praying hands’ positioned to his face, or for Shukri Bakr not to sit with arms folded across his chest.

Pray for these efforts to present a false face to falter and for wise counsel in deception to fail. Continue to pray for the spirit of deceptive cover to be disintegrated by the Lord.

v Defense Attorney Nancy Hollander (who represents Shukri abu Bakr) majored on two themes so far. (1) emphasizing how long the FBI has been wiretapping the defendants and trying to bring the jury to relate to the privacy issues over the national security issues. This was the issue that effectively locked the jury last year from being able to concentrate on whether these men are Hamas and working against U.S. interests.

Pray that any who are given to distrust the government more than the Islamist terror organizations in our nation will see the light – that God will give the clarity of the issues and Divine wisdom to judge.

(2) Hollander is also trying to make truly insignificant details seem like a vast government conspiracy against the defendants. Judge Solis did not allow her to dispute these items before the jury and over the weekend she has to show exact examples for the judge to rule on before proceeding. She is also trying to bring the Christian Arab FBI translator into disrepute by saying his translations are not accurate. Pray that Ataf Shafik will not be slimed by false accusation – the differences in word translations Hollander is proposing is miniscule (like the meaning differences between “rebuilding” and “refurbishing”, for example).

After the lunch break on Friday as we waited for the resumption of Hollander’s cross examination of FBI agent Lara Burns, Shukri Bakr came over to talk to a boy sitting in the row in front of me with one of the defendant’s wives. I turned away from them but heard Shukri encouraging the boy about the trial “Next Year in Jerusalem” – they would all go to Jerusalem. In case you don’t know, this is a Jewish New Years’ saying that Jews have greeted each other with for centuries in their exile from Israel. I’m sure Shukri was just trying to provoke me to reaction. He didn’t. Pray that what these men have sown in their life association with Hamas, they will now reap during the processes of this trial.

v Defense Attorney Gregory Westfall (who represents Abdulrahman Odeh) is a Fort Worth attorney who does a down home Texas version of Peter Falk’s Columbo character when he is before the jury.

Pray the jury doesn’t buy into any of the false imagery they are being presented in this case – that God gives them supernatural discernment to judge between lies and truth.

Westfall is painting Odeh as a boy scout, humanitarian but anytime a business is used as a front to disguise the real criminal ‘business’ of the parties, they will carry out normal legal business as a cover for the criminal activity they are trying to hide.

Pray that jurors are not fooled by evidence of legitimate charity done by HLF while disguising terrorist support activities.

Westfall is also beating the drum on how long the government has been wiretapping the defendants, pointing out 9 years on defendant El Mezain and 5 years of Shukri. The implication is that in all those years the government has very little damning evidence captured on tape – however that overlooks that a criminal conspiracy protects itself by trying to never let down its guard. The moments it does are the moments law enforcement make their cases on. Pray that the jury will not be moved by false fronts and cover stories thrown up by the lawyers or the defendants.

On Tuesday last week, I made the mistake of being herded into an elevator full of the defense attorneys and Shukri Bakr. I stood in a back corner with attorney Greg Westfall to one side of me, atty Nancy Hollander in front of me and defendant Shukri Bakr on the other side of me. Westfall struck up a conversation with me – toying with me, of course – introducing himself and when I did not respond in kind, he asked me outright who I was. Still I hesitated from answering then Shukri Bakr said, “Donna. You are Donna?” I answered, Yes. Westfall then asked me if I found the trial interesting and I answered ‘Totally.’ As the elevator doors opened he replied that the fun just never quits coming. They actually believe there are taking the high ground in defending the indefensible: terrorism. It was an uncomfortable elevator ride and I will never make that mistake again.

These attorneys and defendants do not believe our God will answer our prayers about this trial. I have nothing to prove to them or to anyone else. But I am a citizen of the United States who cares greatly whether we are going to allow terrorists to raise funds in the U.S. so the terrorist group Hamas can continue to expand its influence and reign of terror.

Hamas, you have to understand, opposes all peace negotiations with Israel. Their outcome is that not “one hand’s span” of “Muslim” land remain “occupied” by Israel. The Islamist slogan is, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people,” meaning, first the Jews, then the Christians.

Please continue to pray for God’s justice to prevail in this case and for the protection of all involved in it. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent. If fear keeps Americans silent when cases like this are being conducted, then Islamists will overtake us. Lift up your voices to God for His justice to be executed on these men and upon those who are associated with them throughout this D/FW region and within the U.S. Is there not a cause?

Thanking you for your prayers over this trial,
Donna Diorio

On a related note: See the article by Messianic Jewish pastor, Ron Cantor, of King of Kings congregation in Jerusalem, “Sharia Don’t Like It”which discusses a bill that has been introduced by Republican Tom Tancredo, “The Jihad Prevention Act” which would banish Sharia law and its advocates from the United States. Cantor’s article is based on this article also found on his site:

Bill Would Ban Sharia Law and Advocates from U.S.
Monday September 22, 2008
By Robert Longley (about.com)

Sharia law, and its advocates, would be banished from the United States under "The Jihad Prevention Act" just introduced by U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado, 6th).

Sharia law is a form of Islamic justice often criticized for its brutal physical punishments, including flogging and execution by stoning. Sharia punishment is often enforced against women found guilty of "Haram" offenses such as premarital sex and adultery.

Tancredo's bill would bar foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law from entering the United States and make advocacy of Sharia law a deportable offense.

"Any alien who fails to attest, in accordance with procedures specified by the Secretary of Homeland Security, that the alien will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States is inadmissible."

"Advocating the installation of a Sharia law system in the United States shall constitute a ground for revocation of a person's naturalization under this subsection."

The United Kingdom recently declared the decisions of the five Sharia courts operating within the U.K. to be legally enforceable. "Today the British people are learning a hard lesson about the consequences of massive, unrestricted immigration," said Tancredo in a press release.

"When you have an immigration policy that allows for the importation of millions of radical Muslims, you are also importing their radical ideology – an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the foundations of western democracy – such as gender equality, pluralism, and individual liberty," declared Tancredo.