Old habits die hard.
Via Gatestone:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, founded in 1994 by operatives from Hamas, this month continued its tradition of embracing individuals with ties to terrorist organizations, such as Mousa Abu Marzouk and Yusuf al Qaradawi, by featuring, as the speaker for the annual banquet of its Florida chapter, Kifah Mustapha, an imam from Chicago, whom the U.S. government has named a party to Hamas financing.
In November 2008, a federal jury found the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) and five of its leaders guilty of “providing material support and resources to a terrorist organization.” That organization was Hamas, and the money raised for it by HLF was in the millions. HLF was shut down by the FBI in December 2001.
Besides the five persons found guilty in the HLF trial, the U.S. Justice Department listed a number of other individuals who had been considered involved in the conspiracy but whom the government chose not to indict (“unindicted co-conspirators”), among whom was Kifah Mustapha.
At the time of the trial, Mustapha was an imam at the Mosque Foundation, a Chicago-area Mosque, itself a hub for Palestinian terror-related activity. A Hamas operative and one of the founders of CAIR, Rafiq Jaber, has acted as president and spokesman of the Mosque Foundation. The mosque has held fundraisers for different terrorist conduits, including the HLF and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s [PIJ] co-founder, Sami al-Arian, indicted in 2003 for “contributing services” for the benefit of a “specially designated terrorist” organization, PIJ. Mustapha is still an imam at the Mosque, as well as being the Mosque’s associate director.