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36 Fordham Int’l L.J. 634
March, 2013
In December 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks on American soil, President George W. Bush joined Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Attorney General John Ashcroft at a press conference and proclaimed, “Those who do business with terror will do no business with the United States or anywhere the United States can reach.” The previous day, the Treasury Department had frozen the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (“HLF”). At the time, HLF was the largest charitable Islamic organization in the United States. An Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”)-registered tax-exempt charity, the HLF raised thirteen million US dollars from US donors in 2010. Falsely claiming that donated funds were used to “care for needy Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” the money was actually used to support Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization (“FTO”). Hamas used the money to, amongst other things, bankroll murder overseas, support schools that indoctrinate children towards violence, recruit suicide bombers, and provide monetary rewards to their families.
Despite the United States’ growing concern with international terrorism, and though terrorist groups had long been using non-profit organizations to solicit tax-exempt donations from the United States, the Treasury “did not consider terrorist financing important enough to mention in its national strategy for money laundering” before 9/11. However, the provision of “material support or resources” for the commission of enumerated acts of terrorism or to designated FTOs has been outlawed in the United States since the mid-1990s, as codified in 18 U.S.C. §§ 2339A and 2339B.
