American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) legislation was crafted to protect the constitutional rights of Americans against the incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines in state courts, where foreign laws increasingly have made their presence felt.

ALAC legislation has become a lightning rod for Islamist organizations and Muslim Brotherhood groups, such as HAMAS-linked CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) simply because they know in their hearts that Shariah is so antithetical to fundamental US constitutional rights.

Kansas has now joined Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona in passing ALAC legislation through its state legislature.

Note that the vote in Kansas was not even close. The bill passed the House 120-0 and the Senate 33-3.

Nevertheless that has not stopped Reuters from publishing an unbalanced report on the bill’s passage.

Note that in the Reuters report below they give more column inches to the main critic of the bill, State Senator Tim Owens (more on this character in a moment) than the bill’s courageous sponsor, Rep. Peggy Mast.

Not only that, but Reuters also tracked down CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper for his 2 cents on the passage of the bill in Kansas. Keep in mind that CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism financing prosecution in US history. As for Ibrahim Hooper, he is perhaps most famous for this quote:

“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the
government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”

Notice that Reuters didn’t bother to include any Kansas state senate backers of the bill, who staged an eloquent campaign in the floor debate. Nor did they bother to contact any organization supporting ALAC.
This is hardly a surprise and it’s also where the tie to Shariah Compliant Finance comes in.

Reuters’ parent is Thomson Reuters, a company we have written about before here on SFW.

Thomson Reuters bills itself as an information resource for the financial world, but in the case of Shariah-Compliant Finance, they aren’t just an information resource. They have a major financial stake in the industry, having developed sophisticated platforms for Shariah-Compliant Finance:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/category/thomson-reuters/
Note that in typical sleazy journalistic fashion, Reuters conveniently forgets to disclose that it has a stake in promoting Shariah in any of its articles.

Take our word for it: you can’t trust anything Reuters writes about Shariah.

This brings us to State Senator Tim Owens, the man who led a crusade against ALAC in Kansas and very nearly killed the bill against the clear will of the people.

According to our sources, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Owens refused to bring the bill to a vote effectively blocking the bill.

He did this because he knew the bill would pass.

But he didn’t want to go on record as opposing a bill to protect the constitutional rights of Kansas residents.

Unfortunately for Owens, he is not well respected in the chamber and his colleagues got together and maneuvered the bill past him.

ALAC later ended up in a conference committee on which Owens sat. Owens actually signed on to the conference committee report in favor of the bill.

This is where things get interesting.

Once the bill made it to the senate floor, Owens flip-flopped. He declared he signed the conference committee report by mistake! He then led the opposition to ALAC in the floor debate.

Owens introduced a motion that would have effectively killed the bill. That motion went down in flames.

But the story doesn’t end there!

When the ALAC bill came up for a final vote, Owens took a pass rather than vote! This was the equivalent of voting “present.”

After the vote in favor was tallied, and ALAC had passed overwhelmingly, Senator Tim Owens asked if he could change his vote to no!

We decided to do some snooping around about Owens. We couldn’t find anyone with anything positive to say about the guy in the Kansas legislature.

We did find out that, despite the fact that he is a Republican, he is a “big ACLU guy.”

That comes as no surprise. The ACLU has conducted a disinformation campaign in opposition to ALAC and it turns out Owens was merely parroting the ACLU line:

http://publicpolicyalliance.org/?p=458

Owens couldn’t debate the merits of the words on paper, so he simply borrowed intellectual capital from his far-left allies in a bitter attempt to discredit good legislation.

We also found out that Owens describes himself as a “Bloomberg Republican.”

This is certainly curious, given the fact that Mayor Michael Bloomberg left the Republican Party in 2007, after having switched to the GOP in 2001 to get elected in the first place.

We’ve never heard anyone describe themselves as a Bloomberg Republican. But it seems to fit Tim Owens to a T.

Flip-flopping must be a way of life to some politicians, like Bloomberg and Tim Owens.

Which brings us to a further tie to Shariah Finance: SFW readers may recall that Bloomberg’s financial information empire also has a huge stake in Shariah Compliant Finance:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/category/companies/bloomberg/

Read all about Reuters’ take on the Kansas stand against Shariah here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-sharia-kansasbre84b0aw-20120512,0,4389772.story

We’ve no doubt that Iran, the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism, has been substantially effected by sanctions and we would concede that Al Qaeda has no doubt been impacted in some way.

But we would point out that Al Qaeda is but one enemy in the global Islamic insurgency and recent reports have indicated that the Taliban’s funding sources remain largely intact, for instance.

Most worrying to us is the fact that we know that the US Treasury’s longstanding position of promoting Shariah Finance and the complete denial that there may be something to be concerned about with regard to zakat.

In fact, readers may recall that in his famous speech to the Muslim world in Cairo a few years ago, President Obama pledged to ease scrutiny of zakat. This came despite the details in the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report in which it was revealed that Al Qaeda received substantial funding through the zakat system.

For this reason, we have to remain skeptical that Al Qaeda’s funding sources have dried up due to US sanctions policy…

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/10/u-s-treasury-sanctions-take-aim-at-al-qaeda-rogue-regimes/?section=money_news_international&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_news_international+%28International+News%29

Note especially the explanation with regard to ransom payments and Shariah in the Money Jihad posting. Note also that the amount of money paid by Spain and France were not inconsequential. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars, which can go a long way toward financing Jihadi operations, as we have seen over and over again. (The September 11th attacks are believed to have cost Al Qaeda no more than about $500,000.)

Worst of all, these ransom payments are very likely to encourage more kidnappings and hostage takings, not just in the Islamic Maghreb, but around the world…

http://moneyjihad.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/spain-gives-e8-9-million-for-jihad/

Some of these advisors, such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Mufti Taqi Usmani, have known ties to Jihadist terror groups.

But even in the cases where there are no such known ties, there is still plenty to be concerned about. For instance, there are very few of these scholars who serve on these advisory boards and they end up serving on numerous boards, creating at the very least the potential for conflicts of interest and possibly even a racketeering operation.

Money Jihad blog has more…

http://moneyjihad.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/exposing-the-overpaid-incestuous-sharia-boards/

La Française AM has launched the first Sharia compliant OPCI – collective real estate vehicles with simplified investment rules with leverage – into the French market as part of the financing of an office building jointly owned by a Kuwaiti bank.

The leveraging of the deal was partly done by way of a Murabaha, a Sharia compliant loan structured to avoid interest payments.

La Française AM has been working with the Kuwaiti bank since 2010 to focus on Sharia compliant property projects in France. The bank wants to remain anonymous, La Française AM said, but it has selected France as a key part of its global investment allocation.

Can anyone say ‘COMPLETE LACK OF TRANSPARENCY???’

http://www.investmenteurope.net/investment-europe/news/2172554/la-fran-aise-launches-sharia-compliant-opci-france

In addition, the UN says that terrorists are making greater use of the internet to facilitate terrorism financing.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/04/terrorist-kidnappings-for-ransom-increase/

One of the eight acceptable destinations for zakat under Shariah is to “those fighting in the way of allah,” defined as those engaged in Islamic military operations who are not on any Army roster.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-mct-muslim-woman-gets-huge-award-in-workplace-20120505,0,6271844.story

Abu Sayyaf  kidnappers have set a four-week deadline to be paid or they will behead Australian Warren Rodwell. It should be noted, though, that the original ransom demand of A$2 million has been reduced to A$460,000.

http://stayingsafeabroad.blogspot.com/2012/05/philippines-abu-sayyaf-reduces-sets.html

A SENATOR has requested an official inquiry into whether Australian taxpayers are unknowingly funding a Palestinian terrorist organisation.

In a letter sent to Foreign Minister Bob Carr last week, Victorian Liberal Senator Michael Ronaldson cited evidence collected by Israeli civil rights organisation Shurat HaDin, which alleges that the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), based in Gaza, is a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The PFLP has a history of hijackings and suicide bombings, and was listed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government in 2001.

The Australian government’s foreign-aid arm, AusAID, funds the UAWC through World Vision Australia.

http://www.jewishnews.net.au/senator-demands-inquiry-into-terror-funding/25989

We first reported on HSBC’s deplorable money laundering policies almost a year ago when it was announced they would be fined $1 billion for lax compliance:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2011/05/24/hsbc-to-be-fined-1-billion-for-lax-money-laundering-compliance/

Couple HSBC’s deplorable money laundering vigilance with the fact that they are one of the world’s most active participants and promoters of Shariah Finance and you end up with a worrisome combination indeed.

Just take a look at our entries with regard to HSBC over the years:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/category/hsbc/

There is scarcely a financial institution more deeply involved with Shariah Finance than HSBC. Readers should recall that for years the chief of HSBC’s central shariah committee was the vicious jihadist, Mufti Taqi Usmani:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2009/02/27/hsbcs-shariah-man/

With clear ideological ties to the Taliban, no Western financial institution had any business employing Usmani.

HSBC got the message eventually on Taqi Usmani, but in a move that demonstrated profound cynicism and arrogance, HSBC replaced him with his own son, Dr Muhammad Imran Ashraf Usmani.

The younger Usmani is considered antiseptic enough for Western financial institutions and has no known Jihadist writings that have been translated into English, unlike his hateful, Jihadist father.

Readers should be aware, however, that the younger Usmani’s education background indicate the same disturbing traits as his father. In fact, he was educated at the same Taliban-related madrassa in Pakistan.

These are the people with whom this large international financial conglomerate with a horrible record on money laundering choose to do business.

It would be nice if regulators would look much deeper into HSBC’s activities in Shariah Finance:

• Who are its Shariah advisors? What are their backgrounds and affiliations?

• How has HSBC facilitated the promotion of Shariah globally, as is the stated goal of Shariah finance?

• How much has HSBC paid out in zakat? Where has this zakat money gone?

Given that regulators at the US Treasury have shown very little curiosity when it comes to these issues and have, in fact, promoted Shariah Finance themselves, perhaps the best we can hope for is that people in the West will recognize HSBC for what it is and make their personal financial decisions accordingly.

Here is a link to Forbes’ latest article on HSBC:

Drugs, Terrorism And Medicare Fraud: HSBC’s Messy Money Laundering
Investigations

Suddenly the biggest scandal in banking might not be about mortgages or bailouts. Instead, money laundering is allegedly rampant at banking giant HSBC.

Reuters has a very juicy exclusive on the British bank’s alleged illegal dealings that involve drugs, terrorism and medicare fraud.

Almost a decade ago federal banking regulators  investigated HSBC, the 5th largest bank in the world, for sloppy work in its anti-money laundering group. The regulators asked the bank to clean up its act but it seems little cleaning was done. Instead, the problems may have gotten worse according to documents obtained by Reuters.

HSBC is apparently facing several investigations about its internal compliance abilities.

Reuters notes that “the Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Manhattan district attorney, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations are scrutinizing client activities such as cross-border movements of bulk cash, and transactions linked to Iran and other parties under U.S. economic sanctions.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/05/03/drugs-terrorism-and-medicare-fraud-hsbcs-messy-money-laundering-investigations/

And here is a link to the work done by Reuters on the subject:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/03/us-hsbcusa-probes-idUSBRE8420FX20120503

The arrests were part of an international probe into alleged terror fundraising and money-laundering.

In a statement, Scotland Yard said the arrests were part of an investigation into a network suspected of illegally exporting the stimulant khat to the US and Canada.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17907635

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17939465

Daniel Glaser, assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing, will travel to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Glaser will talk with government and private sector officials about the threat of terrorist financing, the need to strengthen anti-money laundering regimes and efforts to implement sanctions against Syria and Iran.

http://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2012/05/02/treasurys-terrorism-finance-official-to-travel-to-middle-east/

It seems that a US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement intelligence officer has been embroiled in serious financial impropriety.

But wait, that isn’t even HALF the story. It gets much worse.

This intelligence officer is a former colonel in the Jordanian Air Force named Ahmed Abdallat. Abdallat started working for the US federal government way back in 1995 and has had access to all sorts of sensitive and classified documents and programs during his tenure. He has also been posted around the world, especially in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. Most recently, Abdallat has been assigned to an intelligence post right on the US-Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, an area that has been given increasing scrutiny due to persistent reports of Hezbollah activity.

Abdallat is caught up in a fraud and money laundering scandal involving a Department of Homeland Security ICE official named James Woosley, who scammed the taxpayer systematically over a three-year period.

Law enforcement officials stealing is bad enough, but in our view, Abdallat’s involvement is the potentially much bigger story here. You see, we know that Woosely was using his ill-gotten gain to buy a new boat and a second home.

Not Abdallat.

Abdallat wired $570,000 to bank accounts in the Middle East. Maybe Abdallat was just sending his money overseas for himself. But maybe he was sending money overseas for an entirely different purpose…One thing we do know: Abdallat didn’t make anywhere near enough money off of his US government salary to explain over a half million dollars in wire transfers.

To make matters worse, when the FBI raided Abdallat’s home, they found two Jordanian passports, which he wasn’t supposed to have and they found evidence of several Middle Eastern bank accounts that Abdallat denied having…

There certainly seems to be more to this than just a bureaucrat who got greedy…All the focus of the media on this investigation seems to be on Woosley. We think more scrutiny should focus on Ahmed Abdallat.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/01/top-ice-figure-expected-to-plead-guilty-to-brazen-500g-scam/

That’s why it is so important that sukuk, also known as Islamic bonds, lack liquidity, especially as compared to conventional bonds.

Investors holding sukuk that get into trouble–and a lot of sukuk have gotten into trouble over the past 4 years–will find that there is almost no secondary market for the instruments that the hold.

Who says?

Malaysian Securities Commission deputy chief executive Datuk Dr Nik Ramlah Mahmood…

http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/4/27/business/11183328&sec=business

http://finance.bernama.com/news.php?id=662099

http://www.thesundaily.my/news/361540

DIFC Investments “has little room for delays in its efforts to secure a bank loan and government support to refinance the sukuk,” the rating agency said in a statement. The B+ long-term and B short-term ratings were placed on creditwatch with negative outlook.

This is a potentially very serious situation since DIFC is controlled by the government of Dubai. Dubai can scarcely afford another Sukuk default after the rash of Sukuk defaults that rocked the Emirate in 2009, led by Nakheel. As we reported previously, UAE’s Dana Gas is trying to restructure its Sukuk as well.

Is this the start of a new round of defaults from the so-called “ethical” world of Shariah Finance???

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-26/difc-investments-may-be-cut-at-s-p-on-sukuk-refinance-risk-1-.html

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2012/01/31/another-sukuk-in-trouble/

Well, sure enough, Dana Gas has hired Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, to restructure its sukuk set to mature in October…

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-24/dana-gas-said-to-hire-blackstone-to-restructure-1-billion

This is an indicator of Shariah Finance as dawah, or missionary work…something Malaysia’s finance minister has flatly stated in the past.

http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/4/28/business/11174298&sec=business

Previously, in September and November of 2009, Ahmadinejad was critical of capitalism:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2009/09/25/ahmadinejad-criticizes-capitalism/

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2009/11/12/iranian-president-mahmoud-ahmadinejad-blasts-free-market-capitalism-at-oic-economic-conference/

Ahmadinejad’s repeated attacks on capitalism are more significant than you might think. First of all, in his November 2009 tirade before the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), he called for replacing capitalism with a system based on Islam (Shariah-compliant finance).

Those who think of Shariah-compliant finance as just another form of capitalism should take note of the distinction that Ahmadinejad makes between Shariah finance and capitalism. Shariah finance is NOT part of capitalism. It is a centralized system of economics designed to REPLACE capitalism. And it has done just that in Iran. Iran has more Shariah-compliant assets under management than any other nation in the world and the largest Shariah-compliant financial institutions in the world are Iranian.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/238504.html

The report indicated that some $1.3 trillion is invested in 650 Shariah-Compliant funds worldwide, including  230 in Saudi Arabia, 172 in Malaysia, 59 in the Cayman Islands, 46 in Bahrain, 29 in Luxembourg, 16 in Dubai and 11 in Singapore. (Notice that there is no mention of Iran here, which has more Shariah-compliant assets than any other nation and by far the most large Shariah-compliant financial institutions.)

Among the US attendees was Kavilash Chawla, MD, Nur Global Strategies, Chicago. Two Shariah scholars attended: Mufti Muhammad Najeeb Khan, Shariah Advisor, Habib Metropolitan Bank Limited, Pakistan; Qazi Abdul Samad, Shariah Advisor, The Bank of Khyber, Pakistan.

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=152049

The Obama administration says that it has talked with members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in order to promote small business.

Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats said that the State Department is trying to promote collaboration between small and medium-sized businesses in the United States and businesses overseas.

I’ve had conversations in Egypt, with business people members of the Muslim Brotherhood; the same is true in Tunisia, and other parts of the world.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-administration-says-it-talked-muslim-brotherhood-promote-small-business

Proponents of Shariah Finance act as if this concern is completely unfounded and that there are no problems with zakat or Islamic charities.

But that is clearly untrue. We frequently come across reports of fraud, waste and abuse in the system of zakat. Below, we’ve linked just such an article out of Pakistan today.

If zakat can be misappropriated in this way, why is it so hard to believe that zakat can end up in the hands of Jihadist terrorists when, after all, Shariah mandates it?

http://dawn.com/2012/04/25/corruption-in-zakat-distribution-irks-lawmakers/

One of the stated purposes behind such an institution is to develop products to allow Shariah Finance to gain more ground in world stock markets. Right now, Shariah Finance is weighted substantially toward the debt markets with Islamic bonds (sukuk) becoming a greater factor every day in financial dawah operations. By waving petrodollars in the faces of those wishing to find creditors in the Islamic world, the financial jihadists can use sukuk as a Trojan horse to compel Westerners to accommodate Shariah compliance.

Should the financial jihadists develop similar instruments for the equity markets, their reach and influence–and ability to spread Shariah into the non-Muslim world will be exponentially greater.

This is the one obvious impact of such a Mega Islamic Bank. There will no doubt be others. This development bears watching.

http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BTIMES/articles/20120424011119/Article/

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=501216&version=1&template_id=48&parent_id=28

Sukuk are used as a means of imposing Shariah compliance on nations and entities wishing to participate in global debt markets. Russia, Thailand, the Philippines and other non-Muslim nations are all planning to issue sukuk as a result.

The sukuk (Islamic bonds) market in the Gulf and other countries is expected to exceed $100 billion this year to smash the record $85 billion achieved in 2011…

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=20120423122479

This continued financing provides one explanation as to how the Taliban have continued to wage Jihad in Afghanistan still today.

Now more details are coming out about the Taliban’s financing.

Up until September of 2010, the US believed that most of the Taliban’s funding came from drug trafficking, but that may not actually be the case.

It appears that the Taliban continue to enjoy broad support from donors abroad. The CIA estimates that the Taliban received $106 million in such funding in 2009–and that is only the money that the CIA was actually able to trace. By comparison, the US estimates that the Taliban’s revenue from the drug trade is just $70 million per year.

According to Russian news agencies, Richard Barrett, who leads efforts by the UN Security Council to oversee sanctions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, explains the difficulty in tracking donations with the fact that sponsors of terrorism became experts in disguising transfers and traces of entanglement. “It is very, very difficult to identify these people,” said Barrett. “You can monitor the cash flows and find that the money came from the Gulf, but to establish the exact source of it is a lot harder.”

Salafist countries in the region have been aiding the Taliban since they seized power in Kabul in the 1990s, when Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, along with Pakistan, were the only nations to officially recognize the Taliban regime.

It is likely that most of the funding from these nations comes in the form of zakat from Islamic charities. Tracking Taliban funding is very difficult. The vast majority of financial transactions are carried out through the age-old, informal Islamic settlement system known as hawala. In the hawala system, the money goes through private brokers and money changers who do not make records of their customers, making tracing sources very difficult.

Efforts to get countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan to cooperate in keeping Islamic charities from funding Jihad and to track and regulate hawala have largely met with the “runaround.”

The ruling regime also discouraged the growth of Shariah finance in Egypt as they knew that it had been the artificial creation of Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi, one of the ideological godfathers of Islamism and it was a darling of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

When it appeared not long ago that the Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood would seize power in Egypt, Shariah finance seemed poised to ascend there. But now this is not so clear. The military regime has barred the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood candidates from the presidential elections and the military regime appears to be mostly opposed to the onset of Shariah Finance in Egypt.

How long they can legitimately hold the line remains to be seen.

The link below is to an article that Reuters has written on the subject. You will no doubt note the clearly pro-Shariah tone in the “news” article. That should come as no surprise. Reuters’ parent company is a major player in the Shariah-Compliant Finance marketplace…

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/22/us-islamic-finance-egypt-idUSBRE83L04N20120422

Complete with telephone hotlines and email addresses, the appeal was posted on a Taliban website asking Muslims worldwide to help the rebels in what they say is a “Jihad”, or a holy war, against non-Muslim “invaders”.

…

“In the light of Islamic sharia, all Muslims everywhere are duty-bound to join the Jihad with money and soul,” the militant group said.

The Taliban “are still waging legitimate Jihad single-handedly with mere help from common sincere Islam-loving masses and is in dire need of financial assistance from the Muslim brothers worldwide for its military and non-military expenditures,” it added.

http://india.nydailynews.com/newsarticle/4f90605cb7445cc132000006/afghanistan-s-taliban-appeal-for-donations-to-finance-jihad

The good news is that the link below takes you to a good report that explains Sukuk, aka Islamic bonds.

The bad news?

The report was produced in Japan and it is clear that the Japanese have no problem complying with Shariah to get access to petrodollars…which is the whole purpose of Sukuk and Islamic finance in the first place–to enforce Shariah-compliance on non-Muslim players in the financial markets.

This quote from the report says it all:

“By issuing Sukuk compliant with Islamic law, favorable attention to the issuers in the Islamic world is expected. Thus, the issuers are expected to gain favorable positions in marketing in the Islamic world.”

http://www.fsa.go.jp/en/news/2012/20120416-1/01.pdf

NOTE: The link will open a PDF file.

Westerners have concerns about zakat–especially as to how zakat interacts with Islamic charities and Shariah-compliant finance–because Shariah states that a portion of the zakat can go to those waging violent Jihad for Allah.

The controversy in Indonesia isn’t about zakat for Jihad, but there is a heated debate going on because a government agency is trying to gain control of zakat and the myriad non-governmental and local zakat entities that already exist are fighting the proposal. The government plan is said to be needed for purposes of “transparency” and because the current system does not tap into the potential for zakat collection in Indonesia.

We’re not sure we trust either side in this debate, but there is no doubt a great need for transparency when it comes to zakat. There have been numerous scandals around the world involving the misappropriation of zakat.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/04/20/law-alms-causes-controversy.html

VTB is planning on conducting debt sales in China but, of greatest interest for our purposes, they are also looking at selling Islamic bonds, or sukuk, in Indonesia.

What makes this doubly significant is that the Russian government controls VTB.

“…in April last year that the bank wanted to become the first Russian borrower to sell Shariah-compliant debt, and was aiming to raise about $200 million in 2011 selling sukuk, debt that complies with Islam’s ban on interest.

The lender wants to establish “an infrastructure for issuing sukuk” as Russia also has a large Muslim population…”

The camel’s nose is getting under the tent inside Russia…Note that less than ten years ago the debt markets were doing just fine without Shariah-compliant bonds. Now Muslims are demanding that anyone interested in floating bonds make them Shariah-compliant. This is the march of Islam, just as Mawdudi envisioned it when he dreamt up Shariah Finance. It’s not just about Shariah-compliance; petro-rich Muslims had no hesitation to  buy secure Western bonds for decades until very recently. This is Islamic economic imperialism pure and simple, designed to promote Shariah.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-20/vtb-considers-debt-sales-in-china-indonesia-in-move-from-dollar.html

CAIR, of course, is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization and was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in US history.

http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2012/04/action-alert-best-buy-tvs-computers-hamas

Sukuk have fast become the instrument of choice in the world of Shariah-compliant finance, having come a long way since 2009 when Mufti Taqi Usmani, one of the world’s foremost Shariah scholars, declared them “unislamic.”

http://www.meforum.org/3216/islamic-bonds

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/category/islamic-charities/

The bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission documented the activities of Islamic charities in support of Al Qaeda in the report they issued after an exhaustive investigation into the September 11th attacks. The Bush Justice and Treasury Departments pursued terror funding aggressively and shut down some major Islamic charities here in the USA for funding Jihadist terrorism.

This enforcement activity has slowed to a trickle under Obama who, soon after coming into office, pledged to Muslims around the world that he would ease scrutiny of zakat by US regulators and law enforcement:

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2009/07/20/president-obama-on-zakat/

Perhaps encouraged by the Obama administration’s recalcitrance with regard to the funding of Jihadist terrorists through zakat payments via Islamic charities, a new cottage industry has sprung up pushing back on behalf of Islamic charities to end scrutiny of their activities.

Organizations such as the Charity and Security Network (a misnomer if there ever was one) and KARAMAH, Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, are leading this charge:

http://www.charityandsecurity.org/about

http://www.karamah.org/

On April 11th, they combined to hold an online webinar on the subject:  ”Muslim Civil Society in the US: Overcoming Islamophobia through Charity, Advocacy and Education”

This webinar continued the bogus narrative that Muslims are victims of serial Islamophobia and that their charities have been unfairly targeted. Here is the description from the site promoting the webinar:

From raids on innocent Muslim charities, to pervasive surveillance on Americans based only on their religion or ethnicity, it is impossible to ignore the impact of Islamophobia in the U.S. The Charity & Security Network, in partnership with the Institute for Social and Policy Understanding and KARAMAH, will host a panel of experts to discuss the challenges faced by American Muslims and how the Muslim civil society sector has employed charity, advocacy and education to encourage diversity, equality and understanding.

The experts will draw from their own experiences as well as the examples presented in The Charity & Security Network report, U.S Muslim Charities and the War on Terror: A Decade in Review. The report summarizes action taken by the U.S. government to shut down American Muslim charities since 2006, and gives updates on the status of litigation and other efforts by charities. It also details the unwarranted government investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities and charities and how the American Muslim civil society sector has addressed government scrutiny and Islamophobia.

Among the speakers on this webinar were:

• Engy Abdelkader, legal fellow for ISPU and Vice President of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights
• Dr. Azizah Y. al-Hibri, Esq., Founder and Chair of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights
• Mohammed Alomari, Chief Operating Officer for Life for Relief and Development
• Moderator: Shireen Zaman, Executive Director for ISPU

As a public service to the rest of society, SFW has obtained for publication a transcript of this lengthy webinar as a reference source to the arguments that our adversaries are making in an attempt to end scrutiny of Islamic charities and the system of zakat. This transcript is very lengthy, but it is a view inside the world of those working to end scrutiny of Islamic charities:

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CHARITY AND SECURITY NETWORK WEBINAR

[BEGIN FILE]

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Okay, well, we’re at about 12:30 now, so we’ll go ahead and get started. As I said before, my name is Shireen Zaman. I’m the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. I wanted to welcome all of you and thank you for joining us today. We’re very excited to help host this discussion with our partners, the Charity and Security Network and KARAMAH. We’re going to go ahead and start with Nathaniel Turner from Charity and Security Network, who’s going to give us just a brief overview of a report that they published at the end of last year. If you – anyone who is not presenting can please mute your phone line, you’ll hit star six to do that and you’ll see that there is a chat box on the left hand side of your computer screen. If you have any questions as we go along through the presentation or the initial panel discussion, please just send your question to presenters and I’ll be sure to moderate the discussion as we open it up for Q and A and pose as many of those questions as we can. So with Nathaniel, who will be presenting some of the key findings of their report and then we’ll open it up to our panelists and I’ll introduce them after the initial presentation. So Nathaniel, why don’t you go ahead and start and, again, for everyone who is not presenting, please be sure to hit star six. And if you – if you have any questions, please type them into the chat box. Thank you. Go ahead, Nathaniel.

NATHANIEL TURNER:

Hi, thank you, Shireen. I hope everyone can hear me. And I would just like to say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening for our international callers. So before we begin with our fantastic panel experts, I’d like to just briefly summarize the findings of the report that was the impetus for this event. In 2006, OMB Watch released a report called Muslim Charities and the War on Terror. Which chronicled the charities that had been shut down by the Bush Administration for purportedly funding terrorist groups. In December of last year, our organization decided to update that report and we released US Muslim Charities and the War on Terror: A Decade in Review. This [BELL SOUND] surrounding many of those cases, and it also covered some of the other issues of surveillance and scrutiny that had become apparent since we released the first report. What we found was that while there were certainly numerous instances of unfair targeting of Muslim Americans, their charities and their organizations, there was also a strong response [BELL SOUND] education [OVERLAPPING VOICES] new civil society and advocacy groups [UNCLEAR] commitment, charitable causes, despite all of the [UNCLEAR] posed [UNCLEAR] government. The problem. Well, a total of nine charities were shut down under the Bush Administration. Seven of which had Muslim affiliations.

Under current law, the government is able to designate and freeze the assets of any individual or organization that it believes to be a supporter of terrorism. It is important to note that despite the number of groups on this list that have been shut down, only one was actually [BELL SOUND] material support of terrorism and that was the Holy Land Foundation. And they were never even actually represented in a court of law during their trial. Even when the government is not shutting down an organization, it can still harass them with unwarranted investigations. Just one example of this was in 2004 when the federal grand jury issued a subpoena for Kinder USA. A Texas based charity that provides food [BELL SOUND] Kinder had to suspend their fundraising for fear that their donors or beneficiaries would get caught up in the investigation and they repeatedly asked the government what the concerns were about the charity. But never received any response. Initially, they resumed their fundraising, but had obviously taken a significant hit to their donor base. And to this day, there has been no action – no further action taken against Kinder. Nor has the government stated why they subpoenaed the records in the first place. Obviously, charities have not been the only ones targeted. As I’m sure many of you are aware, there have been numerous cases of FBI infiltration of mosques and community groups, which is an act that has just severely harmed relationships between American Muslims and law enforcement. And obviously, also, in the headlines has been the recent developments in the NYPD surveillance of community groups and student groups which was also featured in the report, but I will leave that to the speakers to discuss in further detail.

So this brings us to what I suppose you could say is the silver lining to all of this, and that is that despite all of the negativity and in many cases outright Islamophobia, many groups continue to provide aid to educate and to advocate for a free and open civil society. Groups like [UNCLEAR] Mohammad will speak about in much greater detail, Islamic Relief USA is the top foundation of America and many, many others have continued to provide aid abroad and here at home, such as IR USA providing relief after the Alabama tornadoes in 2011. There have also been many initiatives, such as the Muslim Advocacy Accreditation Program. That really shows that the Muslim civil society sector has [OVERLAPPING VOICES] the highest standards for charitable giving. Many have also worked very closely with law enforcement and as I mentioned before, there have been serious setbacks, but also there’s been some significant strides made with certain law enforcement groups in the past years to eliminate Islamophobic training material and help them understand and respect the contributions that American Muslim communities have made to countering terror. And finally, on the public front, many initiatives have focused on education and dialogue to help dispel myths and stereotypes, which is [BELL SOUND] allow my colleagues to [UNCLEAR] greater detail. I will now let the real experts here speak, those who have faced these challenges and have worked to overcome them. So I turn the floor back over to you, Shireen. Thank you very much, everyone.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you, Nathaniel. What we’re going to do now is I’m going to sort of take the moderator’s prerogative and ask a few initial questions. Again, I would ask anyone who is not a presenter to please mute your phone line. You can do that by hitting star six and if you have any questions as we go through – either from Nathaniel’s presentation or as we start our initial discussion with the panelists, please go ahead and type that box, I think that’s kind of the best way to handle questions, so that you can write them as they come up and we can handle them during the open Q and A session. So just by way of brief introduction, and Mohammad if you want to go ahead and turn on your camera, we’ll be able to see you as well, I wanted to just introduce the other members of our panel. Engy Abdelkader is a legal fellow with us here at ISPU and also vice president of KARAMAH. She is a human rights attorney based in New York. Dr. Azizah al-Hibri is the founder and chair of KARAMAH, which is the Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights. And she’s also a professor at the TC Williams school of law at the University of Richmond. And Mohammad Alomari is the chief operating officer for the Organization Relief – Life for Relief and Development. So thank you all for joining us here virtually. It’s nice to be able to sort of see everyone as well as interact with you via the webinar. So again, for those of you who have questions as we go along, please type them in the chat box, I’ll try and field them to our presenters. But I’d like to open up, actually, with just a general question. All of you are sort of active in civil society, related to Muslim communities and have been working on some of these issues that Charity and Security Network discussed in their report. I’m interested in just your initial feedback, very briefly, maybe you can reflect for a few minutes on some of the findings that Nathaniel presented and sort of how you feel the sector has been impacted in general over the last ten years. We’ll get into some of your specific organizations’ work as follow-up, but just, you know, what are your initial reactions to this report and – about the findings? So why don’t we go ahead and start maybe with Dr. al-Hibri?

AZIZAH al-HIBRI:

Yes. It’s an important question and your report mentions that Muslims have continued their charitable giving. One fact of the policies and raids that have taken place, Muslim charities and other educational institutions in the community has been to shift a great deal of the charitable donations from supplying funds for the poor overseas to those who need it in the United States. That is a good – that is a good result. Shifting and focusing on the domestic scene. That does not, of course, eliminate foreign giving. But the other important factor I’d like to mention is that even as you mentioned the level of charitable commitment and donation by the Muslim community, I’d like to argue that it is not at all fully what it could have been, that it’s still [OVERLAPPING VOICES] impact in the Muslim community and we could do a lot more domestically and globally to support Muslims and causes that are dear to all of us in the United States.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you, Dr. al-Hibri. And just a reminder, I know a few people have joined, just please be sure to mute your line by hitting star six so that we don’t have challenges hearing the panelists. Turn it over to you, now, for just your initial response, I guess, to the report and some of the findings that you’ve seen in more – I mean, your work more in the international sector.

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI:

I didn’t know this whole thing is on phone.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Mohammad, can you hear me?

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI:

Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I thought you were asking somebody –

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Go ahead.

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI:

Yeah, you know, I think the report goes at the heart of a lot of the challenges that the Muslim community faces and specifically the charities and non-profit organizations that work for the community, you know, for Life, you know, we’ve been working since 1992. We have to face challenges from the – whether the government actions are, whether they’re, you know, it’s the new regulations or the targeting, you know, the raids and all the other stuff, you know, that we have to face in addition to challenges that we face in the community to rest, you know, assure that we can still operate, that we are still operating, that they can go ahead and still give without fear. So the challenges are, you know, are from both sides. You know, when people in the community hear about, you know, the FBI raiding this organization or that organization or this office and that office, even though their organization wasn’t close or restricted or anything in that fashion, the national, you know, reaction for the community members are, you know, let’s go deal with somebody else. You know, so that fear within the community, it takes a long time to overcome, aside from all the other challenges that we have to face from the government itself.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you. I’m going to come back to some of your comments, cause I think you made some important points there as well, but let me just ask Engy, also, for your initial feedback on the report as well.

ENGY ABDELKADER:

Well, thank you so much for having me here with you today. I thought that the report was an excellent survey of some of the events and challenges that the American Muslim community has been confronting since the September 11^th terrorist attacks. And one of these phenomenons that it highlights is that of religious profiling, specifically by law enforcement officials. Prior to the September 11^th terrorist attack, most discussions in academic, policy, and legal circles focused on racial and ethnic profiling. Following the attacks, there was a shift to the implementation of religious profiling as well. Which [BELL SOUND] as well as civil society as a whole. And that, in turn, also has implications not just for the American Muslim community in terms of having a chilling effect on charitable giving or going to the mosque to see the [BELL SOUND] being surveillanced, etceteras. But also in terms of the larger American community as well. Because it sends a message to the larger American community that perhaps these groups are suspect. And then therefore, we start seeing other initiatives, such as legislative initiatives against Islamic law, for instance, we start seeing private actors engaging in discrimination, in the workplace, in the school, we see increasing hate crimes. So all of these factors are interpolated and it is important for us to understand that government scrutiny based specifically and solely on religious affiliation for factors away from religious affiliation does have an adverse impact upon the greater society as a whole.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thanks, Engy. Well, those are – I think we had some good kind of general feedback here. I want to dive in a little bit to the specifics and, again, just to remind people if you have questions, please go ahead and send them to me via the chat box on the left hand side of your screen and we’ll try and field those as they come up. And also, for those of you who are not presenting, just be sure to mute your phone line, which is star six. So, Dr. al-Hibri, I want to turn back to you, cause you and the work – and KARAMAH itself as an organization has been around for many, many years. And has been [BELL SOUND] civil liberties and issues related to the Muslim community for a long time. But certainly there was an impact, you know, you – I remember when we connected, you talked about the 2002 raids that happened with federal organizations. And I know that you – specifically at KARAMAH and I know many other organizations as well, have made, you know, some internal changes to try and respond to some of this additional scrutiny. Can you talk a bit about sort of your experience, specifically at KARAMAH, going through sort of those challenges and how you as an organization have actually now come out stronger from that?

AZIZAH al-HIBRI:

Yes. We modified our work at KARAMAH in a couple of ways. One of them is to reach out to the grass roots and explain to them and educate them on their civil rights and what has been happening with the new laws and with the new raids. I’ll talk about that at a different point. But as far as KARAMAH’s internal structure, we decided that we’re going – because we are a lawyer organization, the level of due diligence required of us is higher than what you would require from an organization where the leaders are not lawyers. Therefore, we have to be extremely careful in every step we take and when we receive some checks from individuals who have been with – whose name has been bandied around either in the papers or belong to institutions that have been raided and so on, we have to return these checks. We have to put in place a number of precautions to make sure that KARAMAH will never be tainted with any cloud similar to that of other organizations and therefore be crippled in doing its important work. One of the things we did is to buy a [BELL SOUND] pretty expensive for a very small organization. Where we would [BELL SOUND] the names of anybody who are going to work there. And make sure that they are, as far as the due diligence, clean. Not just individuals, but organizations. Many sources of funding, community funding, that were originally available to us are no longer funding [BELL SOUNDS] domestic funding from the Muslim community, we couldn’t take foreign funding from people overseas or Muslim or non-Muslim ones to support the Muslims. So we were stuck with trying to get money from the US government.

And for a long time, we ended up designing our projects in such a way as to be able to get grants from the US government, which also affected our work abroad. Because people saw us being funded by the government. We were fortunate at KARAMAH that we had a serious funding which is private and we are comfortable with and has allowed us to go over the hump for many years. But I would tell you that the effects of the steps that has been taken by the government in its various departments have severely affected KARAMAH. And I will give you one example. It’s not only about fundraising. For example, we want to give online classes where people could come from all over the world and listen to us educate them, you can call it an enlightened view of Islam or whatever adjective you’d like to place, we teach them about leadership, we teach them about conflict resolution. Well, it turns out, we have to take that idea to our pro bono law firm and ask them, what do we have to do to protect ourselves against, you know, any problems that could arise because somebody who signed on online to listen to us might be connected as a relative or to somebody that the US has problems with. So that created a whole set of steps we have to take even for our online [BELL SOUND] not just funding. So you can see that our work is a lot more difficult than the work of some other organizations which is non-Muslim, which could do online classes and does not have to worry as much. Would you like me to go on?

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Oh, sorry. Sorry, I was on mute. [LAUGHS] I was going to say, Dr. al-Hibri, that your comments are tied to the funding challenge and then the impact that that has on your projects and I want to actually turn to Mohammad, because I think that some of those challenges are quite probably similar for you and probably in particular, like KARAMAH’s work, the international work has an even added dimension of complications. So maybe you can talk a bit about your experience there in terms of some of the impact that this has had on your work in the international space.

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI:

Yeah. I mean, Dr. al-Hibri mentioned funding and, you know, for us as 501 C3 nonprofit charity, the majority, overwhelming majority of our funds are cash donations, are from the Muslim community. And, you know, we don’t get any government grants or anything of that sort. We get the in kind donations, which is, you know, medicines and food from other American nonprofit organizations, but our primary cash donations for our humanitarian relief work, whether it’s zakat, collecting zakat, distributing zakat, or if it’s sponsorship, or many other programs that we have, we don’t have the liberty to, you know, depend on any grants, whether from state or local agencies or the federal government. And fortunately – well, fortunately for us, I mean, it’s given us obviously a lot of independence, but it also – our success is dependent upon our reputation. And so when we go to the Muslim community and we say we have this orphan program, we have this zakat distribution program, we have the seasonal programs during Ramadan, we have the food baskets that we distribute during the hajj season, the meat distribution, these programs that we go to the Muslim community and say we can implement them for you – and obviously, we give them the choice, we can implement some of the programs here and it really depends on the donor. If the donor says, well, I want my zakat to go to Palestine or I want it to go to Jordan or Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever country that he wants, we’re obligated to implement there. We have some donors who say, you know, implement here locally in the US. So to face the challenges of the stigma that’s out there, you know, the government raids, the government targeting of many of the charities, whether they were closed out or not, it’s a challenge we’re always facing. People in the community, you know, always come up and ask, you know, how are you guys doing? Are you still operating? Are you still implementing your programs? This and that. It’s a big challenge. It’s a major challenge for us, so overcoming that stigma in the media as well as, you know, whatever is out there in the news, is always something that we have to keep in the back of our mind when we go out and communicate and campaign and market our programs to the community. It’s a major challenge that – something that’s been added to our task of collecting donations. Where it didn’t really exist maybe ten years ago. Or wasn’t a big part of our campaign ten years ago.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you. I want to spend one more – maybe a few more minutes on the challenges and then also talk a bit about sort of the strength and resilience of the community and the organizations as well cause I think that’s an important thing to talk about. But before we get to that, Engy, I know you have been quite active more recently on some of the issues related to the New York Police Department, the surveillance that’s been happening among, particularly, student organizations on the East Coast. Tell us a little bit about that and how, you know, that is connected to some of these other pieces that we’ve talked about earlier in the presentation.

ENGY ABDELKADER:

Yeah, so, I think that the report by the Charity and Security Network highlights responses by Muslim NGO nonprofit organizations throughout the United States to some of the problematic approaches or policies that are being implemented on the government level. And we are seeing increased advocacy with this and we’re seeing more engagement and dialogue by those advocacy nonprofit organizations, such as KARAMAH which Dr. al-Hibri founded and chairs, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council, such as ISNA, [UNCLEAR, MICROPHONE RUSTLING]

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Sorry, Engy, we’re having a little – you’re kind of going in and out. Maybe you can hold the phone a bit closer to you [OVERLAPPING VOICES]

NATHANIEL TURNER:

I think someone out there needs to mute their phone also.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Yeah. There’s some feedback. So if everyone who’s not a presenter, please go ahead and mute your line. It’s star six. Thank you.

ENGY ABDELKADER:

So as I was saying that the reaction has been one of education, advocacy, and engagement. And this is a [UNCLEAR] the continuing reports by the Associated Press regarding the surveillance of Muslim populations, northeast, by the NYPD. So in response, for instance, there are regular federal inter-agency meetings that occur at the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, DC. Which are attended by a [UNCLEAR] group of representatives from about half a dozen Muslim American, Arab American and south Asian organizations with national clout in terms [AUDIO DROPS OUT BRIEFLY] and since those reports came out in August of 2011, representatives from these organizations have been continually dialoging with the Department [BELL SOUND] as well as other representatives from federal agencies regarding the appropriate nature of their surveillance, the fact that the surveillance appears to be based solely on religious affiliation and not on any indication of criminal activity. That sends a message to the Muslim [AUDIO DROPS OUT] people feeling betrayed and compromises the trust that has been established with these federal and local state law enforcement officials.

So it’s an ineffective use of resources and makes for ineffective [UNCLEAR] and so that dialogue has been ongoing since the [UNCLEAR] reports came out in August of 2011. In addition, you see representatives from different organizations in the community, mosque representatives, some elected officials, activists, people from the – that represent the Muslim student associations at the colleges meeting with federal policymakers. So, for instance, one such [UNCLEAR] has been very vocal on the NYPD issue is Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. And he conducted a closed door meeting with leaders from the American Muslim community in his district office in New Jersey on this issue. But not only about this issue, but also addressed concerns to those community members who were in attendance and who obviously were representing other segments of the population what those concerns are. And so I think that that’s advocacy and I think that continuing to engage with the federal government, with policymakers, continuing to educate larger communities is very important because, unfortunately, what the message – the message is sent out by the courts that NYPD or federal law enforcement officials are targeting, are surveillancing Muslim Americans for no other reason than because of their religion. The message that’s sent out to a large group of the population is that Islam and Muslims are inherently fucked up for no other reason than because of their religious identity. And that’s dangerous. And it has a ripple effect that can be felt throughout society. Because if the government is suspicious or is understood to be suspicious of the Muslim community, then the individual will soon [UNCLEAR] be suspicious and therefore, they may feel – maybe even feel that it’s patriotic to discriminate in the employment context [UNCLEAR] hard time in the school context. To perhaps, you know, attack the cab driver who’s perceived to be a Muslim [UNCLEAR, SOMEONE SNEEZES] And again, it is worth highlighting that the Muslim reaction has been one of engagement, advocacy, and education.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thanks, Engy. For the person who just sneezed, you need to mute your phone line, please. [LAUGHTER] Please hit star six to mute your line, cause there’s some background noise there. And God bless you, so [LAUGHTER] Thank you. Well, I want to continue on, I think Engy, you made a good segue into some of the ways that Muslim organizations, or organizations working with effective communities as in the Arab communities or South Asian communities have been actively engaging on the government level and with each other. And actually, one of the questions that was posed to the panel is whether or not you had seen more coalition activity in the past ten years, groups coming together, trying to address some of the challenges, but also in light of maybe more scarce resources working together because of, you know, the need to kind of pool funds and pool talent to address some of these challenges. So Engy started to talk about that. I don’t know if Dr. al-Hibri or Mohammad, if you all have anything that you would want to say on that question.

AZIZAH al-HIBRI:

Certainly. I would say that within the early years, the governmental behavior resulted in fragmenting the community. Because of the fear that it instilled and chilling effect and various kind of ways of fragmenting it such as naming some people as unindicted co-conspirators, something that your report mentioned and so on. So all of that really weakened the community initially in my judgment. However, the community has adjusted to that and the community is now emerging, seeking more cooperation with each other and with also other non-Muslim organizations. It’s actually coming out from what some of the organizations or the community, sort of a ghetto mentality, and it’s becoming very much involved in the American scene and the Muslim scene generally and I think this kind of trend has been great and KARAMAH is part of that trend.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Great. Thank you. Mohammad, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI:

Yeah. I mean, we had situations, you know, the FBI was going around, harassing some of our donors, our large donors, during – just before and after the raid. And, you know,  maybe some folks might not consider a simple question of, you know, why are you giving to this charity, but, you know, a lot of the people in the Muslim community are either immigrants or, you know, children of immigrants and they come from these other countries that are frankly repressive dictatorships. And you have police or FBI asking a simple question like that, they relate it back to the home country of, you know, they’re going to haul you away and put you in jail because you gave to a certain charity. And so that intimidation by itself is enough to scare a lot of people away. And I think it’s that part – that intimidation and that – I mean, we even had the government try to scare away other charities that we partnered with outside the United States. They tried to use – I won’t go into detail of which one it was, but – and we complained about it. We complained, we sent letters to the government saying that this is not right, it’s harassment, and, you know, we will take further action, whatever legal action that we can do to stop it because, you know, in the end, it comes to – it’s, you know, whether you want to classify it as defamation or just simple harassment, it’s a way to curtail the activities of a legal organization that has a legal right to operate and what you’re doing is through harassment and intimidation trying to stop the activity. And so a lot of it, I think, is, you know, goes back to the organization of, will they just fold? And there was an organization that actually, they – through the raid, through the initial freezing of assets, although they came back and unfroze the assets, the charity just ended up closing. And I think that was a scenario that I think was part of the strategy. On one hand, go ahead and close some of these organizations that actually got accused of doing, you know, wrongdoing, and then you have some of these other organizations, they just didn’t like them, through the process of harassment and intimidation, they were just hoping that they would close up and, you know, just close up shop and go away. And so, you know, it was through our determination, number one, to – that we are doing good work within the legal framework and we’re going to stand up for our rights. I think that’s what a lot of the Muslim organizations need to stand up and say, as long as we’re working within the legal framework, whatever rules and regulations are out there, we’ll abide by them. We should not be subjected to harassment and intimidation.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you. A question came in about, you know, the current efforts of Muslim relief organizations, for example, in cleaning up tornado debris in Texas. Or I think Nathaniel mentioned some of the work of organizations like Islamic Relief in the US and I think also I would just add to that the many interfaith efforts that have come and the cooperation between Muslim communities and other communities in the US. How does that – how does that impact the credibility of charities in the eyes of the American public? Are there, in fact, because of this kind of push for Muslim communities or Muslim charities to be out there more in the public, are there actually positive opportunities for engagement, education, outreach? Engy, do you have some thoughts on that?

ENGY ABDELKADER:

I think it’s important for the American Muslim community, including the charitable sector, to be engaged with the larger American public, including contributing to relief efforts, whether it was in response to Katrina or other, you know, other catastrophes, natural disasters that have occurred within our territory. I think it sends a positive message about the American Muslim community. It underscores the fact that we are Americans, it underscores the American identity of that community. And therefore, I think that it is important. And I think that even and separate apart from these relief organizations, you are seeing, even on a very local level, more American Muslims being engaged with charitable initiatives and so, for instance, you see organizations locally that are sponsoring regular soup kitchens. And encouraging both the student population as well as the post-grad population to help out and not just help out other Muslims, per se, but help out other Americans. And I think that’s an important aspect of the American Muslim identity that needs to be highlighted.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Great. Anyone else have something to add there?

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI:

Yes. I mean, to add further, I mean, we responded locally when there was, you know, Hurricane Ike, Hurricane Katrina, you know, we responded with emergency help, food, water, emergency shelter, to the victims, regardless of who they were or what, you know, religion they were. Similarly in Haiti when the earthquake struck there a couple of years ago. We responded with emergency help. You know, a lot of it, it’s guided obviously where the need is, number one, and number two, what the donors are willing to do, because ultimately we’re guided by what the donors ask us to do. If the donor says, help the people of Haiti, we’ll help them. If they say, you know, they want their funds going for a program overseas, we, you know, we have to abide by what the donor’s wishes are. But we certainly do have a lot of programs that are here local meant to address the emergency needs of victims here.

AZIZAH al-HIBRI:

I’d like to just mention a footnote about the efforts of helping others. KARAMAH on a couple of occasions tried to help one country which has had a flood and another which has had an earthquake. In the country where there was a flood, we were approached about donating a significant number of backpacks for children so that they could go to school at the right moment. They had lost everything. We contacted the Justice Department and asked them if that would be okay, because as you might – as you know, there is no safe harbor in the guidelines of the donations. And they said, sure, I mean, no American would think that a backpack is problematic. And we asked them to put this in writing and they ultimately did not do so. Another country we suggested to the Justice Department that we send our volunteers to basically sit with the women who have experienced the catastrophe and counsel them, hold their hand, etceteras, and again, we understood that that falls within the kinds of material support that the various laws have talked about. And when I mentioned this to the AG during the Bush Administration, the Attorney General, he was very surprised about my assertion and said, well, maybe we should meet about it. That meeting never took place. So the law is there. If there is an interest by the enforcement agencies to down a Muslim organization for such work, they can. There is, you know, there is the material support language, which is very over-broad and could therefore result in the bringing down of an organization. And that’s something that we at KARAMAH are very cognizant of.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you. I mean, I think that that’s a good footnote. It’s sort of important to be out there and to be engaging in partnerships and providing these types of services, but at the same time, I think organizations are more aware than ever of this need to, you know, I guess, insure that there is potentially no problematic repercussions for their organizations in that. Just one comment that I wanted to share from one of the participants, I guess it’s not really a question, but along the lines of charity efforts, it’s critical to get out the story that Muslim doctors and dentists around the country offer a network of volunteer medical screenings and services to people regardless of background. The participant is saying that no other religious community does that in such a systematic manner. I’m not sure if that’s – I’m not sure about that exactly. I think there’s many religious communities that do offer these services, but I agree. I mean, I think there’s many efforts, including Mohammad’s and others, to provide charitable medical services around the country and internationally and I think that that’s a very key story. I guess, you know, one of the things that I’d like to sort of reflect on, I mean, here we are, sort of ten years – more than ten years now, after 9-11 and getting on sort of ten years after many of these regulations and challenges have been put in place. And maybe we’ll do this – if there are other questions that people have, please feel free to send them in via the chat box, but as a way to sort of wrap up here, since we’re getting close to the hour mark, maybe each of you can comment a bit about the future. So if there is, you know, one or two things that you think in terms of regulations or just educating the broader community that you think would be critical say for the next ten years. You – just share that with us. What – how would you like to see this sector change or these challenges change in the next ten years? What are your – what are your sort of rays of hope, I guess, for the future? What leaves you kind of feeling positive about this work? Clearly, all of you have been engaged in this and working hard on this for the last several years. So what keeps you motivated in this, looking forward? Dr. al-Hibri, why don’t we start with you?

AZIZAH al-HIBRI:

Yeah. I feel that nothing much will change unless the more the regulations change, otherwise we are subject to political expediency or climate at a certain point in the history of America. We have to start a civil rights movement for Muslims so that they will share the same rights as all other Americans. We have to protect the Constitution. That is what is happening now. And this is a very important issue that we should not overlook. Otherwise, we will continually be at risk. That’s not a good feeling for a religious group who is supposed to be protected by the American Constitution. It’s specifically and particularly a bad feeling for me because I’m a commissioner of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. And when we study other countries and I look at the standards by which we judge other countries about their religious freedom index and how they are performing, I see that we are applying to them many standards that we do not observe in this United States. That is very painful. To see that our, you know, by the standards of the commission, that our rights in the United States as Muslims are being violated in a serious way.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

And what about one thing that keeps you optimistic or going in this work, Dr. al-Hibri?

AZIZAH al-HIBRI:

The Muslim community has learned how to adjust to this situation, not by accepting it, but by working to improve its lot despite what is happening. By pulling together at the end of ten years instead of resenting it, by not being bitter about it. As you say, they continue doing charitable giving and they continuing involving with Americans who are Muslim or non-Muslim. So the Muslims decided that they’re going to go ahead with life and do their best in these United States and justice will [BELL SOUND]

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Great. Thank you. Engy, what are your thoughts or sort of – what would you like to see change in the next ten years? What keeps you hopeful in this work, optimistic about the future?

ENGY ABDELKADER:

So, yeah, I think it’s worth noting that immediately after the September 11^th attacks, there was obviously a severe backlash against the American Muslim, Arab American, South Asian communities and that was commonly understood as being a traumatic response to these terrorist attacks and yet here we are, more than ten years later, and the fact is that hate crimes have – against American Muslims, Muslim employment discrimination claims are at an all-time high. Islamophobic bullying is an epidemic problem. And there continues to be a reported – reports of surveillance, unlawful surveillance by law enforcement agencies. And there is, in fact, even anti-Muslim and anti-Islam sentiment towards our community is also harshening. And so, for instance, six months after the September 11^th attacks a Pew Research Center poll showed that only a third of respondents actually believed that Muslims or Islam – that Muslims were likely to commit criminal or violent actions and that Islam promoted such action. And yet ten years after the September 11^th attacks, Pew conducted that same poll, asked that same question, and now almost half of the American population believes that and I find that problematic. In part, that’s the Islamophobic – the Islamophobic industry, which is, in fact, a multimillion dollar industry [BELL SOUND]

So it also speaks to the importance of what we alluded to earlier, which is coalition efforts by the American Muslim communities – not just American Muslim, but really all communities and organizations that are interested in achieving social justice. And making sure that we highlight the commonality between our groups, so it’s not really just a South Asian problem or an Arab American problem or a Muslim problem. It’s, you know, racial and ethnic profiling has been an issue that Latinos and the African-American community has been complaining about since before even the 1990s. And so therefore, it’s important for us to work in tandem with all these different groups. And realize that we have so much in common and that we’re all fighting for the same goals, justice and fairness, and just having, you know, the American life that many people here dreamed of. In terms of looking to the future, I’m encouraged by the fact that there is more engagement by these communities, by the Arab American and Muslim American and the South Asian communities. You’re seeing a lot more people interacting with the media, you’re seeing a lot more people engaging and willing to contribute to educational forums and writing op-eds and what not and I think that that’s important. There are even more American Muslims who are actually entering the legal profession and journalism because they feel that there’s a dearth of American Muslims writing on the issues of concern to the community. And I think that’s important. And I’m also – I tend to be optimistic when I interact with the youth. I’m encouraged by what I see. I think that they’re willing to be engaged and so, for instance, after [BELL SOUND] the NYPD was surveillancing students who were engaged with the Muslim students associations at their universities in the northeast, many parents came out and told their children [BELL SOUND] college students not to engage and not to attend meetings at the MSA any longer. And whether it’s at law schools or on the university level, I keep hearing from these students who say that that’s wrong. And that they’re going to continue to engage, because they’re not doing anything wrong and that is – it’s wrong for any law enforcement agency to monitor them for no other reason but for their religion. And I think for me, that’s inspiring to hear.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Great. Thank you, Engy. Mohammad, what about you? Thoughts about things that you’d like to see change and then also kind of what keeps you positive and optimistic and engaging in this work?

MOHAMMAD ALOMARI: 

Well, what keeps me positive and optimistic is the nature of our work. The fact that we’re delivering assistance to the most needy, the orphaned, the widowed, the poor, you know, around the world. That’s, you know, that in itself is motivation enough to continue our work. In addition to providing an opportunity for being a vehicle for the  Muslim community to practice their religion by doing zakat. You know, zakat is one of the five pillars of the religion and it’s a duty that every Muslim has to do like he has to do, pray, fast during Ramadan, make the hajj once in a lifetime, he has to pay zakat. And so for the Muslim community to have organizations where they can pay zakat through is I think a major role that our organizations play in providing this service for the Muslim community and, you know, it falls in with the right to practice your religion and, you know, let the American Muslim as an American practice the way he sees fit. And if he wants to give his zakat, you know, to an organization that’s legally registered, legally operating, without fear of intimidation, I mean, that’s a basic right that every American citizen has the right for. So those two things are what provides motivation for us and keeps us positive. Now what we hope to see in the future, you know, obviously, we hope that the climate of fear and intimidation goes away. You know, we realize we have to do due diligence. We have to keep up with whatever the rules and regulations are and that, you know, that goes for everyone, every organization, whether you’re a Muslim or not a Muslim organization. But we just hope that we can operate as organizations, American organizations, just as freely as any other organization regardless of what, you know, religion or background they happen to be of.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you, Mohammad. Nathaniel, let me just turn to you and see if you had any closing comments or reflections on the panel as well.

NATHANIEL TURNER:

Well, first of all, I want to thank all the panelists. It’s really great to have a chance to hear the feedback from this report. And I’ll just keep it very brief. If – for those of you who would like to read the report in its entirety, you can find it on our website, which is www.charityandsecurity.org. And I would just like to mention some of the work that the Charity and Security Network is hoping to accomplish here in the future and hopefully does not take ten years on, but ten years from now, if some of this accomplished, I think that will be fantastic, and that is I think it’s very important that we fix the material support laws that are currently in place which prevent not just things like humanitarian aid, but prevent even peace-building groups from doing conflict mediation with terrorist groups. This has become especially apparent in Somalia, where there’s been numerous problems with groups being able to engage with al-Shabab even if it’s trying to get them to lay down arms. And I think we also still need to reform the procedure for shutting down these charitable organizations. Obviously, no charities have been shut down under the Obama administration, but the fact remains that the laws are still on the books. It could still happen anytime and in the next administration, it could still occur. So we need to have meaningful and common-sense reforms to prevent these kind of things from happening and to respect the due process of these charitable organizations and to respect the humanitarian imperative that these groups have.

SHIREEN ZAMAN:

Thank you. Well, Nathaniel, thank you for the work that you all are doing and for this report. And we’re here just at about one thirty, so I think we’ll take a chance to close out. We did share the link to the report that Nathaniel mentioned there in the chat box. I wanted to just thank all of you, Dr. al-Hibri, Engy, and Mohammad, for joining us today, providing your insights, and especially for the important work that you all are doing. And thank you to all of you who participated and also shared questions. We at ISPU plan to do many of these types of webinars on our research and on issues that are emerging in the community. So we look forward to connecting with everyone soon. Thank you all.

MULTIPLE VOICES:

Thank you.

[END OF FILE] 

Recently, ICNA announced that they are embarking upon a $3 million propaganda campaign to promote Shariah in America:

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18956.xml?genre_id=

ICNA has a division called ICNA Relief, which professes to do all sorts of good works. On ICNA Relief’s web site, they have a section on Zakat, including a Zakat “calculator” which helps Muslims figure out how much money they need to donate to zakat (a form of tithing in Islam):

http://icnarelief.org/site/index.php/articles/zakat-calculator

Note that on ICNA Relief’s zakat calculator page, there is a link to a page labeled “FAQs.” As you might expect, FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions:

http://zakat.110mb.com/index.php?p=1_5_FAQs

Notice that there are several questions on the FAQ page.

Number 15 is of particular interest:

Whom Should we Pay Zakaat to

If you follow that link you come to a new page entitled “Who is entitled to receive Zakat?”

http://zakat.110mb.com/index.php?p=1_12

Answer Number 8 for the question “Who is entitled to receive Zakat?” is the proverbial “smoking  gun.”

8. Fi Sabeelillah: Those who are away from home in the path of Allah. Those in Jihaad, those seeking knowledge or a stranded Haji may be assist with Zakat if they are in need.

Those in Jihaad…(usually spelled Jihad).

No doubt, ICNA will complain that we have misinterpreted or misunderstood the meaning of the term “Jihad.”

ICNA will claim that Jihad simply means to “struggle” or “strive.”

Balderdash.

Let us examine definitions of Jihad from two authoritative sources.

The first is the Quran itself. In this case, specifically The Noble Qu’ran, translated into English by two scholars: Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali, PhD, professor of Islamic Faith and Teachings at the Islamic University, Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah, Saudi Arabia and Dr. Muhammad Mushin Khan of the same institution. The Noble Qu’ran was published by Darussalam Publishers and Distributors, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It has been catalogued by King Fahad National Library. On page 818, in a glossary accompanying the text of the Quran, The Noble Qu’ran provides the following definition of Jihad:

Jihad: Holy fighting in the Cause of Allah or any other kind of effort to make Allah’s Word superior. Jihad is regarded as one of the fundamentals of Islam.

Our second source is Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law.

Reliance of the Traveler is one of the world’s most widely read manuals of Shariah law. It has been endorsed by a variety of Islamic authorities, including Al Azhar University and IIIT (International Institute of Islamic Thought).

On page 599 of Reliance of the Traveler, readers can find the following passage:

o9.0 JIHAD

(O: Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion…

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus is such Koranic verses as:

(1) “Fighting is prescribed for you” (Koran 2:216);

(2) “Slay them wherever you find them” (Koran 4:89);

(3) “Fight the idolators utterly” (Koran 9:36);

and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

“I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah”;

and the hadith reported by Muslim,

“To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.”

Again, no doubt, ICNA will claim that Jihad does not mean warfare to establish the religion. They will claim that the “greater Jihad” is the internal struggle in all men’s hearts, etc.

But if that was really the most widely accepted definition of Jihad, why does Reliance of the Traveler define the recipients of zakat who are in the category listed in ICNA Relief’s zakat calculator so explicitly as warriors?

But there is still more evidence. If Jihad truly means to “struggle” and not warfare to establish the religion, how does ICNA Relief explain the names of all these terrorist organizations?

Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (Pakistan, Bangladesh, India)

Islamic Front for Armed Jihad (Algeria)

Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine (Lebanon)

Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine (Israel)

Islamic Jihad Organization (Lebanon)

Islamic Jihad Union (Uzbekistan)

Jama’at al-Jihad al-Islami (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia)

Laskar Jihad (Indonesia)

United Jihad Council (India)

Regular readers of SFW may recall that Reliance of the Traveler is one of the world’s most widely read manuals of Shariah law. It has been endorsed by a variety of Islamic authorities, including Al Azhar University and IIIT.

Readers may also recall that in the section on zakat (a form of tithing in Islam), Reliance of the Traveler lists 8 destinations for zakat. Number 7 explicitly designates those “Fighting in the Way of Allah,” and defines that to mean those who are engaged in Islamic military operations but who are not on the Army roster.

Well, we overlooked the 4th destination of zakat, but Gates of Vienna reproduced it in a blog posting unrelated to this topic. It is an important posting nonetheless.

(from Reliance of the Traveller):

H8.14 Those Whose Hearts are to be Reconciled

The fourth category is those whose hearts are to be reconciled. If they are non-Muslims, they are not given Zakat but if Muslim, then they may be given it (O: so that their certainty may increase, or if they are recent converts to Islam and are alienated from their kin)

Those to be reconciled include:

-1-		the chief personages of a people (O: with weak Islamic intentions) whose Islam may be expected to improve, or whose peers may be expected to enter Islam;
-2-		or the heads of a people who collect zakat for us from Muslims living near them who refuse to pay it, or who fight an enemy for us at considerable expense and trouble to themselves

Note that last phrase…”who fight an enemy for us at considerable expense and trouble to themselves.”

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/04/halal-slaughter-zakat-and-mad-cow.html

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/04/13/va-man-gets-12-years-for-aiding-terrorists833779/

http://www.zambotimes.com/archives/46261-Abu-Sayyaf-terrorists-resort-to-kidnapping-anew-to-raise-funds-PAF-official.html

Northern Cyprus is said to offer excellent investment opportunities in tourism and agriculture. There’s just one catch: Turkey is essentially an occupying force. Isn’t it funny how we never hear anything about the Turkish occupation of Cyprus anymore, but we hear CONSTANTLY about other disputed lands in the Islamic world?

This is a clear case of Islamic imperialism consolidating on territory seized from the Kafirs…

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n-cyprus-ripe-for-islamic-investors.aspx?pageID=238&nid=18305&NewsCatID=345

The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday detained six Islamists whose citizenship had been revoked for alleged links to groups that fund terrorists, their lawyer said.

The six men “were summoned by the interior ministry and told that they have two weeks to get new nationality and legalize” their presence in the country, Mohammed al-Roken told AFP.

“They refused because this would be an impossible task and because they will always consider themselves UAE nationals,” Roken added.

The lawyer said the men were currently being held in Shahama prison, near the capital Abu Dhabi.

An immigration official quoted in Al-Khaleej newspaper said that the six were put in custody because they had “refused to legalize their status.”

Colonel Ahmed al-Khader told the daily they had violated UAE law by failing to sign a document pledging to acquire new citizenship within a government-set time frame of two weeks.

The UAE revoked the Islamists’ citizenship in December last year for allegedly threatening the Gulf state’s security and safety, a rare move for the emirate.

At the time, the UAE said the six naturalized citizens were being stripped of their nationality because they “had perpetrated … acts threatening the national security of the UAE through their connection with suspicious regional and international organizations and personalities.”

They said some of the organizations were linked to entities mentioned in U.N. lists to combat terrorist financing.

The six had originally carried the nationalities of other countries and were naturalized between 1976 and 1986.

All of them have identified themselves as members of the UAE’s Reform and Social Guidance Association, which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some claimed to have signed a petition calling for political reforms which was launched by UAE intellectuals and activists in March 2011.

The UAE, a federation of seven emirates led by oil-rich Abu Dhabi, has not seen any popular protests calling for reform like those that have swept other Arab countries, including nearby Bahrain and Oman.

The government, however, has increased its clampdown on voices of dissent and calls for democratic reform.

Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders condemned the UAE for the “arrests and trials” of online activists, saying the government was “cracking down harder on bloggers… who criticize the regime.”

Their condemnation came after the authorities shut down the offices of the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Abu Dhabi and the US National Democratic Institute in Dubai in late March.

The government said the two organizations were closed “because they violated license regulations.”

Abdi Mahdi Hussein attempted to help Mohamud Abdi Yusuf send $21,000 to the Jihadist terrorist group Al Shabaab. Now he says (of course) that he had no idea where the money was supposed to go, and besides it didn’t get there.

U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey bought that story and essentially let Hussein go free, with three years probation.

When someone gets convicted of helping to finance a Jihadist terrorist organization, the judge should throw the book at him, no matter what his sob story is.

We don’t know what planet Judge Autrey is living on, but he is one lousy judge…

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/probation-in-money-transfer-case/article_d2625134-832a-11e1-838f-0019bb30f31a.html