Zakat is supposed to find its way to jihadists
Andrew McCarthy
We exposed zakat funding jihad here. Andrew McCarthy is all over Obama’s zakat pronouncement to the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo too. Read it all for examples of FBI pandering to Muslims – we skipped right to the zakat reference.
Material Support on the Ropes?
Will a key anti-terror tool fall victim to Obama’s Muslim outreach?
I wonder. There was so much jaw-slacking stuff in Obama’s Cairo stemwinder that this fleeting bombshell dropped unnoticed:
Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.
Zakat is the obligation of giving alms. It occupies a central place in Islam (one of the religion’s five “pillars”), just as it does in religious traditions more familiar to the West — you know, the charitable giving that Obama wants to saddle with less favorable tax treatment.
Do we really have “rules on charitable giving” that, as the president claims, make it especially difficult for Muslims — as opposed to others — to give? No. What we have are federal laws against material support for terrorism. These were enacted by Congress in 1996. They have been the bedrock of the DOJ’s anti-terrorism enforcement ever since.
The purpose of these laws is obvious, as has been the stepped-up effort to use them since 9/11. If we are going to prevent terrorist strikes from happening, rather than content ourselves with prosecuting any surviving terrorists after our fellow citizens have been murdered and maimed, we have to identify cells and choke off their resources before attacks can be planned and executed. Thus,
a donor who gives to an organization, including an ostensible charity, that he knows to have been formally designated as a terrorist entity under U.S. law, or that he knows facilitates terrorist activity, is liable.
That shouldn’t be a problem, should it? The law does not target Muslim charities or organizations, and, indeed, several non-Islamic entities have been prosecuted.
Yet the inconvenient fact is that numerous Islamic charities have proved to be fronts for terrorist activity, at least in part. These include the Holy Land Foundation (whose top operatives were recently convicted for underwriting Hamas in a prosecution that
exposed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator) and the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, one of the world’s largest Muslim charities, headquartered in Saudi Arabia (which hosted the president for private talks last week). So material-support statutes have become a sore subject for Muslims because the vast majority of terrorism — including virtually all anti-American terrorism — is carried out by Muslims.
In our politically correct, increasingly “progressive” times, of course, there can be equal protection of the laws only if those laws produce equal outcomes for disparate grievance groups. Thus, if our material-support laws are causing a problem for Muslims in particular, it couldn’t possibly be that
this is due to a peculiar nexus between Islam and terrorism. It must be that our laws themselves are flawed. Evidently, regardless of their vital role in keeping us safe from domestic terror attacks for the last eight years, those laws must now be kneaded into something acceptable to the Islamic activists that DOJ is so determined to “partner” with.
There’s a problem, though. It’s not just that we know, based on experience, that zakat often tends to find its way to jihadists.
The inconvenient fact is that it is supposed to find its way to jihadists. As explained at the Center for Security Policy’s new website, Shariah Finance Watch,
under the Islamic legal code, recipients of zakat alms-giving include “those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army roster [i.e., ‘volunteers for jihad without remuneration’].” Such jihadists must be “given enough to suffice them for the operation, even if affluent” —
including “weapons, mounts, clothing, and expenses,” as well as support for the families they have left behind.
Last I checked,
we’re still operating under U.S. law, not sharia. U.S. law already provides a legal process by which an organization that contends that it has been erroneously designated as a terror facilitator can challenge that designation. Moreover, the material-support statutes already carve out humanitarian exceptions that permit donations of medical care and religious items. And no one can be convicted of providing material support absent proof that he knew he was giving to a terrorist organization or knew his contributions were abetting terrorist activities.
What more, exactly, are Obama and Holder planning to do to eliminate this particular “false choice” between our security and “our” values?
http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/...ists-mccarthy/