John Cline of the Holy Land legal team described how the government first shut down the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), the largest Islamic charity in the U.S., in 2001, and then in 2004 charged five of their officers with aiding Hamas, a Palestine Islamic group. These five included the president of the HLF, Shukri Abu Baker, chairman of the board Ghassan Elashi, and Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulraham Odeh.

Despite years of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping, the government had no convincing evidence that the HLF was funding Hamas. Instead the government argued that the HLF aid to local Zakat (Islamic Charity) Committees in Palestine improved the lives of the people and thus helped Hamas. But these same committees also received aid from the U.S. government, the United Nations and the Red Crescent (Islamic Red Cross) and were not on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. Despite the use of an anonymous witness who worked for Israeli intelligence and testimony about Hamas, the jury did not convict any of the defendants and there was a mistrial.

The government came back and charged them again. In the second trial the prosecutors, including the notorious Barry Jonas, had a witness testify that “everybody knew” that the Holy Land Foundation was Hamas – which is hearsay and generally not admissible in trials. Another witness from the U.S. Treasury Department said that the official U.S. terrorist list doesn’t matter. A third witness testified that the HLF charity “could lead to another 911.” Last but not least, an anonymous witness testified who claimed to be a Israeli military officer. This witness further claimed to have documents from the Israeli attack on the Palestinian Authority headquarters, saying that the HLF was the fundraising arm of Hamas. With this, the government was able to win a conviction on material aid to terrorism and sentence the defendants to 15 to 65 years in jail.

While an appeals court found that the four testimonies in the second trial should not have been allowed, it upheld the conviction. A later appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was turned down, ending the legal fight. The Holy Land Foundation 5 are now being held in a Communication Management Unit or CMU, where inmates are not allowed contact with each other and very limited contact with the outside world. About 70% of the CMU inmates are Muslim, reflecting the government’s campaign of harassment and repression against American Muslims.

The next speaker was Ling Wu Lee, director of the Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education. Ms. Lee told the audience how in the days after Pearl Harbor, the government rounded up thousands of Japanese immigrant men who were religious, business and cultural leaders in the community and sent them to prison camps. With the established leadership of the community in prison, President Roosevelt issued executive order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942 that led to the roundup and incarceration into concentration camps of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the west coast.

Fred Korematsu was a young Nisei (second generation American of Japanese descent) who tried to evade the roundup but was caught and convicted. Korematsu appealed his conviction with the help of the Northern California ACLU (the national ACLU leadership refused to help) but in the end the U.S. Supreme Court, on a six to three vote, upheld the concentration camps.

40 years later, a team of lawyers from the San Francisco Asian Law Caucus, along with professor Peter Irons, proved that government prosecutors had lied and withheld evidence that Japanese Americans were not supporting Japan. This led to Fred Korematsu and other concentration camp resistors – Gordon Hirabayashi and Min Yasui – having their convictions overturned.*

Fred Korematsu, before he passed away in 2005, and the Korematsu Institute today, opposed the treatment of American Muslims after 911.

Other speakers on the panel included Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of the Bay Area Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) who called for “compassion, inspiration and indignation,” from those there that night. Dan Carpenter of the National Lawyers Guild, and on the legal team for the Irvine 11 (eleven college students who were prosecuted for protesting a speech by the Israeli ambassador), called for people to organize together to make change.

In the question and answer session that followed, John Cline stressed that while the U.S. legal path seemed to be closed for the Holy Land Foundation 5, there is a need to speak out and affect political change in the country.

*[editor’s note: While their convictions were overturned, this was done on procedural grounds, and there was not a judgment that the World War II concentration camps were unconstitutional. Thus, legally, there is not a ban on the U.S. setting up concentration camps again.]

#SantaClaraCA #AsianNationalities #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #HolyLandFive #FredKorematsu #HolyLand5

The film showed the round-up of Japanese Americans after the Japanese empire attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Korematsu tried to evade the round-up, was caught and arrested, and set to a concentration camp. He fought his arrest all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1944 upheld the government’s round-up by a six to three margin. Then in the 1980s, a team of young Asian American lawyers fought with Korematsu to overturn his conviction on the basis that the government had suppressed evidence that there was no threat from Japanese Americans. A federal court vacated (cancelled) his conviction, but the Supreme Court did not rehear the case, and did not rule the camps unconstitutional.

The film was followed by a panel of speakers from the Japanese American and American Muslim communities. Tom Izu, director of the California History Center of De Anza College in Cupertino, California, spoke about his own experience of being called a traitor by another faculty member after organizing a program on the WWII concentration camps after September 11, 2001. He was followed by Yasir Afifi, a young college student who found a GPS tracking device attached to his car and is currently suing the government over this. The last speaker was Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the Bay Area Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who said that it was important for people to fight discrimination and government harassment.

The panel was moderated by Masao Suzuki, a member of the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee and the South Bay Committee Against Political Repression, who spoke of his own experience of being visited by the FBI as part of the FBI raids and federal grand jury subpoenas on 23 Midwest anti-war and international solidarity activists. The program was chaired by Will Kaku of the Japanese American Museum of San José, which organized the event. He quoted the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in urging solidarity between the Japanese American community and American Muslims.

#SanJoséCA #JapaneseAmericanInternment #Islamophobia #MasaoSuzuki #AntiWar23 #WorldWarII #FredKorematsu