Why Are Muslim Charities Still Being Branded as Terrorist Bankrollers?

NEW YORK, Jul 8 (IPS) - While President Barack Obama conceded in his speech in Cairo last month that U.S. rules on charitable giving "have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation," civil rights advocates are pressing the president to turn his words into action.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council has joined other nonprofit organizations in urging Obama to follow up on his commitment to work with Muslim Americans to revise charitable giving rules.

In a letter to the president, the organizations said, "We are seeking a meeting with you and the appropriate representatives of your administration to provide background information on how current national security rules create problems for all U.S. charities and to provide recommendations for change."

It outlined a set of principles for new rules governing charitable giving and operations, and said government policy "must address systemic problems."

The government, it said, should "provide clear standards for permissible charitable and development activity that are consistent with long-standing norms for humanitarian operations," such as the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief.

It must provide a fair opportunity for charities accused of supporting terrorism to defend themselves; protect charitable assets from indefinite freezing and allow these resources to further the charitable mission donors intended to support; and withdraw the Treasury Department's "Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines: Voluntary Best Practices for U.S.-based Charities", the letter said.

For Muslims, charitable giving is a religiously-mandated obligation known as "zakat."

The "war on terror" has dealt a harsh blow to Muslim charities and interfered with their donors' religious freedom, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The report says statutes that it describes as overly broad and enforced in a discriminatory manner, coupled with a lack of due process, have starved Islamic charities of money and impeded Muslims' ability to fulfill their religious requirement to make charitable donations.

Entitled "Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity," the report is based on interviews with more than 100 Muslim community leaders as well as experts on antiterrorism laws and regulations. Though it gives no estimate of the decline in donations to Muslim groups, it says a total of nine Islamic charities have closed as a result of government action against them since the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.

That action ranges, it says, from declaring a group to be under investigation to designating it a terrorist organization and freezing its assets.

Georgetown Law Centre's David Cole, a widely respected constitutional scholar, sees a correlation between the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s and the government's current policies.

He told IPS, "With our return to a 'preventive paradigm' of preemptively weeding out threats to national security, guilt by association has been resurrected from the McCarthy era."

"While it was illegal in the 1950s to be a member of the Communist Party, it is now a crime to support an individual or organization on a terror watch list, although the government can designate and freeze assets without a showing of actual ties to terrorism or illegal acts," he said.

Last November, five members of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted in federal court in Dallas of funneling money to the Palestinian militant group Hamas and sentenced to prison. The defendants said they only gave much-needed aid to a volatile region.