Shukri’s fourth and last daughter, Shurook, was born in 2001. Shurook means “dawn” or “sunrise.” However, a cloud was looming over both HLF and the Elashi family business, InfoCom.
On September 5, 2001—six days before the attack on the World Trade Center—close to eighty government agents raided InfoCom. The agents were from the FBI, US Customs, Secret Service, the IRS, Commerce Department, and local police.
“They had a sealed search warrant signed by a district magistrate from Dallas. They spent four days searching,” Ghassan Elashi told me. “They confiscated tens of thousands of documents and copied millions of gigabytes of data from over 200 computer servers.”
About 1,400 square feet of the 7,800-square-foot InfoCom office space was subleased to HLF for storage and a multi-media production and stage studio. The FBI seized HLF documents, videotapes, video editing equipment, and other items. There was extensive media coverage because, as Ghassan puts it, “when Muslims and Islamic organizations are involved, the FBI tips the media so they know there is a raid related to terrorism.” Still, no arrests were made at that point, and no criminal charges were brought until December 18, 2002.
When agents finally left the facility, they presented an order from the Commerce Department prohibiting InfoCom from shipping overseas and freezing over $100,000 in InfoCom’s bank account. Local and national civil rights and advocacy groups immediately came together to support the Elashi brothers, and a press conference was held in front of InfoCom offices condemning the raid.
The agents left InfoCom on the afternoon of Friday, September 8, 2001. On Monday, September 11, at 8:46 am, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
The coordinated, deadly terrorist attack shook the United States to its secure foundations. The effects of this attack and the backlash against it are still being felt worldwide. Throughout the United States, Muslim communities held their breath and waited to see what would happen.
For HLF, there were almost immediate consequences.
“Media came knocking at both InfoCom and the HLF offices asking for interviews and inquiring if we had any advance knowledge about the attacks. It was beyond crazy.” Ghassan sounded as bewildered as I felt. “A local TV station reported that the FBI is looking into the possibility that the 9/11 attack was in retaliation to the FBI raid on InfoCom!” The old stories about HLF supporting the families of suicide bombers were dug up and recirculated.
On December 4, President George Bush announced that he was closing HLF by executive order and declared it a Domestic Terror Organization (DTO).
At the second HLF trial, Mr. McBrien of the US Treasury would describe, under cross-examination by John Cline, how little it really takes to be designated a terrorist organization by the US government.
Mr. McBrien explained that both the President and the US Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, have the authority to designate a Specially Designated Terrorist (SDT) based on, as Mr. Cline described, “a reasonable belief that the person is owned or controlled by or acting on behalf of one of the designated parties….” [emphasis added].
“So again,” Cline pressed, “what is required for a designation under that provision is a reasonable belief. It is not, for example, proof beyond reasonable doubt. It is not proof by a preponderance of evidence, like you have in court. It is a reasonable belief, right?”
“That is correct.”
“[Government agents making the designation] don’t have to abide by any particular rules of evidence. Right?”
“We don’t have rules of evidence under the criminal procedures,” McBrien replied.
Abdulrahman received a phone call at 5:00 on the morning of December 4, 2001. He was told to come to his office immediately or else agents would come to pick him up. Wanting to avoid distressing his parents, who were staying with him, Abdulrahman agreed to go. As he drove, he received several calls from the agents to demonstrate they knew where he was and that they were monitoring his every move.
When Abdulrahman parked in front of his office, his car was surrounded by squad cars and he was violently pulled out of his car. The place was swarming with spectators and press as he was ordered to open the food pantry.
FBI agents questioned a confused Abdulrahman about whether there were weapons or bombs. Their weapons were drawn as he slowly opened the door.
“No, no weapons or bombs. This is a food pantry; I keep food here.”
After confirming that the food pantry contained food, agents escorted Abdulrahman to his office and had him wait while they looked around. He had a display of Palestinian cultural artifacts as well as items commemorating the Palestinian tragedy, like massacres and other events that Palestinians had suffered over the years. One of the agents, a woman, spoke to him in Arabic. She said that she too was Palestinian and that he ought to consider working with the FBI. For Abdulrahman, it was the same offer he had been turning down for months.
When gentle coercion failed, the agents began to threaten him. They told him that they could have him blacklisted. They could prevent him from obtaining employment. They could keep him from being able to even volunteer with relief organizations.
Abdulrahman was no more interested in FBI’s threats than its promises.
“Allah is the One who provides, not you.”
“We felt it in Palestine almost immediately,” Hussein said, sitting with me in a lobby in Chicago ten years later. “HLF was closed by presidential executive order because of ties to terrorism. It was obvious that after 9/11 they needed scapegoats and we were chosen.”
HLF worked with Bank Cairo-Amman at the time, and Hussein was warned that the executive order and their designation as a “terrorist organization” by the US government meant that all HLF accounts would be frozen. That meant losing millions of dollars donated to help the people Hussein worked and lived with daily. Faced with a desperate choice and desperate need, “I withdrew all the money and used it to pay for college scholarships.”
The educational scholarships HLF gave were paid to the institutions directly in installments. But desperate times call for desperate actions and so, Hussein says, “I took the money and paid up front for a whole year for all the students we had on scholarship.” Then, knowing that the HLF employees would be denied their salaries and would have no other means to feed their families, “I paid the employees in advance as well—the money for the hospitals I did the same—I gave them the funds all at once instead of making payments.”
Hussein’s quick thinking helped countless lives and prevented a great deal of donated money from being seized and wasted. He was able to keep his office open for a few more months until the Israelis raided it in 2002.
But the worst of Hussein’s experiences was yet to come. It’s what he calls his “journey” with Shabak, Israel’s secret police or General Security Service (GSS), and it started in early 2002, after he had traveled to the United States. Upon his return to Tel Aviv, the Israeli authorities noticed that Hussein still had his Jerusalem ID even though he had a US passport. They immediately revoked his Jerusalem ID, which meant he could only return to Palestine on a three-month tourist visa issued by Israel.
“When I returned, Shabak stopped me at the airport and wouldn’t let me in until I agreed to meet with them. They gave me an address in Tel Aviv, some hotel.”
Over the next six months, Hussein had more than ten meetings with Shabak agents. In the course of these informal interrogations, he was subjected to three lie detector tests. Once he was walking down the street in Jerusalem when agents pulled over to pick him up. Another time he was on the beach in Tel Aviv.
“They would go on for hours and hours. In the beginning they were so nice; it was like we were all friends. They had some Israelis who spoke Arabic, then they even brought Palestinian collaborators to these ‘meetings.’ They promised me jobs, money, a home, a future for my kids in Palestine, whatever I wanted. But gradually they became very frustrated with me and threatened to kick me out of the country.”
This was particularly hard because Hussein had waited for eighteen years to return to Palestine. “I had asked them to give me jail time—anything just to stay in my country.” But it was becoming clear to him that if he wanted to remain he would have to sell his soul and his people, and that was a price Hussein was not willing to pay.
“They said they wanted me to work with them—‘in order to help us,’ they said.” Hussein was particularly vulnerable because he had his family with him and no job or house to which he could return in the United States.
I would have been terrified, and told him as much.
“In the beginning it was fine; they made it all nice with steak dinners and friendly chats, and promises of money and work. But when I told them I don’t want their money, then there were times they would keep me overnight, and that was scary.”
One particularly horrible night was April 15, 2002. An Israeli Special Forces unit approached the safe house where they had reason to believe that Marwan Barghouti was hiding. Barghouti was the unquestionable leader of the Second Intifada, a man who had supported peace efforts until, like many others, he realized it was hopeless and opted for renewing armed resistance. It was a very tense night everywhere for Palestinians and no one knew how it would end. But it did end peacefully. Barghouti came out of the house and surrendered to the Israeli forces.
Hussein and his captors spent that night in a Tel Aviv hotel.
“Two armed agents were guarding me the whole time. Eventually I was so exhausted that I fell asleep.”
That was not the last interrogation. Agents asked Hussein about everything and anything, information that he had already given, material he had already submitted, or that they had already taken by force. They repeatedly asked him the same three questions: Do you have firearms? Can you use weapons? Do you belong to Hamas? The answer was always no.
When Hussein and I were speaking, something puzzled me about these “meetings.” They were strangely casual, almost normal. What happened at the end of each meeting, I wondered?
The answer, it turned out, was “nothing.” Agents would just let Hussein go back to his life until the next time they picked him up.
“Depending on their mood sometimes they would order room service and fancy food and what not. They reimbursed me for my expenses, and it was all strangely very nice, even friendly. At one point they asked me to come to the US and talk to FBI agents, to help with the investigation there. But when I made it clear to them that I was not working for them and that I never would, and made them realize that I didn’t want their favors, that’s when the mood changed—and the threats began.”
Despite this constant harassment and the ongoing challenges of providing aid, Hussein spent these months still working to reopen HLF’s offices in Jerusalem and fulfill the mission of charity he had embarked on in 2000.
The whole thing came to a head in August 2002 when Shabak agents asked Hussein to wear a wire to entrap a well-known academic and activist. When he refused, they gave him forty-eight hours to leave the country. His Jerusalem ID had already been revoked and his visa was about to expire.
Shabak—so it seems—decides which Palestinians are approved for new visas. By refusing to work with them, Hussein in fact had made the impossibly sad and difficult decision to leave Palestine.
“I felt I was nowhere, neither on heaven or earth. My wife and two girls were [in Palestine]—I had nothing in the US anymore—but couldn’t stay. I left my wife and kids with family in Amman for a year and returned to the US. I worked in a grocery store, drove a cab, and then the school where I used to work as a principal hired me to be a teacher. The rest is history. Thank God I am back and I am OK.”
After Hussein left, the HLF offices were closed for good. The money had all but run out, and he had sold what equipment he could to keep doing charitable work, but there was no one left to take over for him. He distributed the last of the money as best he could and left for Amman and then the United States.
“I was banned from returning to Palestine for nine years. In 2011, I travelled back there—they let me in—and in 2014, I went in again. I go in on a tourist visa, which means that I can stay up to three months.”
The prosecutors in the HLF trial claimed that by closing down the HLF they were disrupting terrorism, disrupting Hamas. As I write, it has been fifteen years since the HLF was closed, and Hamas is doing fine. However, poor Palestinians who were relying on much needed relief from HLF and the dedication of people like Hussein are suffering greatly from this closure.
The year 2002 was also difficult for Ghassan Elashi. US prosecutors indicted Ghassan and his brothers on December 18, 2002, for violating Export Administration Regulations and for dealing with the property of Specially Designated Terrorists. Ghassan describes the violation this way: “We exported four computers to Syria and a printer to Malta. The equipment had ended up in Libya somehow.”
The second charge they had was for dealing with an investment that belonged to Nadia Elashi, Ghassan’s second cousin, who is married to Musa Abu-Marzook. Abu-Marzook was the head of the political office of Hamas. The government alleged that the investment was secretly Musa’s, not Nadia’s.
Ghassan’s brothers were not US citizens, and the US Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) submitted a letter to the court at the bond hearing that it intended to revoke their legal residence status. The government also moved to detain Ghassan before the trial, but the magistrate judge disagreed. Still, Ghassan was forced to stay for eight days in the detention center in Seagoville, twenty miles from his home, while the government appealed the judge’s ruling. Eventually he was released on the condition he wear an ankle monitor. His brothers were placed in solitary confinement for eighteen months.
“I stayed with this monitor until November 2003. It was like house arrest. I was allowed only to go to work and the masjid. No shopping, or doctor visit, no travel of any kind was allowed without prior approval from the probation officer. I could not drive my children to school or even take them to see a doctor. My wife was doing all these tasks.”
Majida told me that their boys, who were young at the time, could not understand what happened. “Why can’t Baba come to our soccer games?” they would ask.
With the closure of HLF, Shukri Abu-Baker was out of a job. His life’s work was destroyed, but being the guy who took a small, unknown charity organization and turned it into the largest Muslim charity in the United States, and one that was well respected and trusted worldwide, Shukri started his own company, consulting for other charity organizations and non-profits. But this too would come to a sudden end on July 27, 2004.