The Anti-War Movement Money Trail

Byron York of the National Review has an investigative article in in the New York Post this morning templating the money trail for the anti-war group "Not In Our Name."

The trail features all the usual suspects, including Mumia Abu-Jamal ex-fund raisers, and the suspected Palestinian terrorist fund raiser and recently arrested Professor Sami Al-Arian of the University of South Florida.

Key passages from the article:

"The organization was created in March 2002 by a gathering of left-wing activists that included representatives from the Revolutionary Communist Party, the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party, Refuse and Resist!, the International League of Peoples' Struggle and the National Lawyers Guild, among others. The organizers intended for Not In Our Name to stage protests across the country and also draft, according to the group's organizing document, a "Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience to be issued by well-known artists, intellectuals, activists and people in public life, lending their moral authority and their unified voice to the resistance movement."

At least in the latter goal, Not In Our Name has been extraordinarily effective. But it had to split in two to succeed. There had been concern among organizers that some of those who might be inclined to sign the statement might not want to be associated with Not In Our Name's activist wing. So the group created two separate entities, one called the Not In Our Name Statement (which handles the manifesto and the collecting of celebrity signatures) and the other called the Not In Our Name Project (which handles street demonstrations and other protests)."

"For its fund raising, the Not In Our Name Project is allied with another foundation, this one called the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. Founded by several New Left leaders in 1967 to "advance the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination," IFCO was originally created to serve as the fundraising arm of a variety of activist organizations that lacked the resources to raise money for themselves.

In recent years, IFCO served as fiscal sponsor for an organization called the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (their partnership ended when the coalition formed its own tax-exempt foundation). Founded in 1997 as a reaction to the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act, the coalition says its function is to oppose the use of secret evidence in terrorism prosecutions.

Until recently, the group's president was Sami Al-Arian, a University of South Florida computer-science professor who has been suspended for alleged ties to terrorism. (He is still a member of the coalition's board.) According to a New York Times report last year, Al-Arian is accused of having sent hundreds of thousands of dollars, raised by another charity he runs, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Times also reported that FBI investigators "suspected Mr. Al-Arian operated 'a fund-raising front' for the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine from the late 1980s to 1995." Al-Arian also brought a man named Ramadan Abdullah Shallah to the University of South Florida to raise money for one of Al-Arian's foundations - a job Shallah held until he later became the head of Islamic Jihad."

The groups have been quite successful. The most recent IRS records available for IFCO, from the year 2000, show that the foundation took in $1,119,564 in contributions. For their part, organizers of the Not In Our Name Statement report that they have taken in more than $400,000 in recent months for the purpose of publishing their statement. It is not possible to say who is giving the money, or whether it comes from many people or just a few; federal laws do not require tax-exempt foundations to reveal their donors - or even whether donations are received from inside or outside the United States."

Little Green Footballs has detailed how the Clinton Administration and pre-9/11 Dubya Administration sat on the Islamic foundation fund raising investigations for political and campaign fundraising reasons. Now that we are at war, the political pull of these groups on the Bush43 Administration has vaporized with the WTC.

It is only a matter of time before Sami Al-Arian's alledgedly illegal fund raising cash flow is traced into this anti-war movement money-nexus. The Feds will start issuing subpoenas for financial records, as well as conducting terrorist investigation related IRS audits for all and sundry. This will reveal to the Federal government exactly who is on these groups' donor lists, for later evaluation and cross checking with foreign intelligence sources to shake out money laundering transactions.

This is the Department Of Defense's "Total Information Awareness" initiative written sideways.

And there is one more thing, thanks to the Congressional Democrats protection of the Clinton Administration's "Nixon Abuses" using IRS power. These donor lists will be used by Republican campaign operatives for IRS audit threat-driven shake downs of these donors, both to get more campaign money and to deny that same money to Democratic candidates and causes.

This is very much a case of "no good deed goes unpunished" for Democrats.

See also Little Green Football's take on the same article here.