CAIR concedes it doesn't legally exist

By Art Moore

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' latest legal brief in its "Muslim Mafia" lawsuit provides no evidence it suffered damages and effectively concedes it filed the complaint under a false name, concludes a lawyer defending a father-and-son team that conducted an undercover probe to document the Muslim group's ties to terrorism.

CAIR's reply to a motion to dismiss its lawsuit against former Air Force special agent P. David Gaubatz and his son Chris, who served a six-month CAIR internship posing as a young Muslim convert, "concedes that they don't have any legal damages, but they hope they'll find some," said attorney Daniel Horowitz, who filed the motion to dismiss in December.

CAIR alleges the Gaubatzes obtained access to the Muslim group's property under false pretenses, removed internal documents and made recordings of officials and employees "without any consent or authorization and in violation of his contractual, fiduciary and other legal obligations to CAIR."

However, asserted Horowitz, CAIR is on a "fishing expedition," filing a lawsuit with the hope that "after the expenditure of unknown amounts of money and time, it might find some damages."

"If CAIR is conceding that they have no interests that prevent the materials from being disclosed, what is their excuse for trying to suppress the book?" Horowitz asked. "It's about time the American public put an end to these legal abuses by CAIR."

In his motion to dismiss, Horowitz argued that CAIR is unable to demonstrate it suffered harm and, furthermore, has no claim because the group does not legally exist. Horowitz explains that CAIR changed its name to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network almost immediately after it was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

As WND reported yesterday, the Gaubatzes' legal counsel, in compliance with a subpoena served by the FBI, turned over to federal authorities 12,000 of pages of internal CAIR documents obtained in the undercover probe that allegedly confirm the D.C.-based Muslim group's role as a front for terrorist groups that seek Islam's domination over the U.S.

The documents provided key material for the book "Muslim Mafia," co-authored by David Gaubatz and "Infiltration" author Paul Sperry. The authors assert CAIR is acting as a front for a conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood – the parent of al-Qaida and Hamas – to infiltrate the U.S. and establish Saudi-style Islamic law.

Horowitz contends CAIR's reply does not address his allegation that the group used a non-existent entity to file the lawsuit, "dismissing the use of the wrong name by calling it a 'misnomer.'"

"This is not like confusing the name 'Dan' with 'Don' or 'Tim' with 'Tom'," Horowitz said.

"CAIR forms groups, dissolves them, takes credit for them or disclaims them as it sees fit," he said.

The legal name change in May 2007 to Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network, for example, came just two weeks after the Justice Department's designation of CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation. The Texas-based group was convicted of channeling funds to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Horowitz points out that when he defended Michael Savage in CAIR's case against the radio talk host, CAIR's own attorneys appeared separately for CAIR and for CAIR Action Network, or CAIR-AN.

"CAIR and CAIR-AN are two distinct corporate entities," he said, "and while CAIR-AN may be a successor to CAIR, the name problem goes far deeper than mistakenly using a predecessor corporation."

'Negative light'

In its legal reply to Horowitz, CAIR concedes it cannot sue over First Amendment-protected activities such as publishing information about the organization.

But Horowitz argues that CAIR, nevertheless, focuses its entire complaint "on the attacks on its self-proclaimed character as a civil rights organization."

CAIR, he points out, says Chris Gaubatz' mission was both to collect and to "misappropriate information" that was "to later be disclosed publicly and used to cast CAIR in a negative light."

Those actions, CAIR claims, "caused CAIR and its officials and employees to suffer unwarranted harassment up to and including threats of violence."

But Horowitz argues that in CAIR's legal briefs, "no specific threats are alleged and no attempt is made to show that the alleged wrongful conduct had any relation to the alleged threats."

He also points out CAIR's original pleading does not make it clear that the documents taken from CAIR were consigned to the shredder.

CAIR says in its reply brief that much of "Muslim Mafia" is "devoted to critiquing CAIR" and, contrary to the defendants' claims, is "a decidedly unserious book that only warrants CAIR's attention due to the criminal and tortious conduct which it admits Defendants perpetrated upon CAIR."

Horowitz calls that statement another concession by CAIR that it suffered no damages.

"If all that warrants 'CAIR's attention' is the alleged 'criminal and tortious conduct,' there is simply no federal jurisdiction," he contends.

Horowitz calls CAIR's complaint "an impermissible end run around First Amendment protections."

"The fact that 'CAIR' is upset or that members may have been threatened does not weaken the First Amendment protections," Horowitz argues.

CAIR's claim of breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract is based on its allegation thath Chris Gaubatz signed a confidentiality agreement when he began his internship. But CAIR has not been able to produce evidence any agreement was ever signed, and Horowitz says that even if signed, "this document would have been signed between a non-existent corporate entity and Chris Gaubatz. There need to be two parties to a contract."

WND

Legal Jihad to Silence Christian Action Network? – by Ryan Mauro

A group called the Muslims of the Americas is threatening to sue the Christian Action Network (CAN) for a YouTube video where an MOA member is confronted at the Muslim Day Parade in Washington, D.C. in September by several citizens concerned about the group’s extremism and paramilitary training of its members.

(Full disclosure: I work as a national security researcher for CAN.)

Unfortunately for MOA, the tape in question was made by members of the American Congress for Truth, not the Christian Action Network.

The MOA is reacting to CAN’s pressure by trying to silence the organization and label them as anti-Muslim hate-mongers that are part of an evil Zionist plot.

The legal notice denounces the ACT members’ characterization of MOA’s isolated communities as “compounds” and “training camps” as being “false and defamatory” but does not deny that paramilitary training takes place at these sites.

In December, CAN published a YouTube video showing excerpts of two tapes provided to me as the national security researcher for the organization by a confidential law enforcement source where MOA’s female recruits are seen receiving guerilla warfare training at their headquarters in New York called “Islamberg.”

They are seen practicing the scaling of fabricated walls, combat involving knives and swords including throat slitting, moving with stealth, marching in military formation and fatigue, and simulating ambushes culminating in firing guns into a lake.

The second tape explains the meaning behind this training. Two leaders from MOA are shown declaring the United States a Muslim country and warning that they “will not stand idly by and let our country be destroyed” and they will defend it from both foreign and domestic enemies targeting Muslims.

Islamberg responded to this latest tape with a bizarre video of their own on their YouTube channel accusing CAN of “media terrorism” by using a “digitally-created Muslim hate video.”

The legal notice also tries to discredit an earlier tape uncovered by CAN showing MOA’s Pakistan-based leader, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, giving his recruits firearms training and instruction on detonating explosives, killing guards, hijacking vehicles, and other aspects of the jihadi trade.

On the tape, Gilani is seen telling his viewers that if they are interested in his “advanced training courses in Islamic military warfare,” they can contact his International Quranic Open University offices in Pakistan, the U.S. or Canada.

The MOA lawyer that wrote the notice claims that the offer to train Muslims was “computer generated” and says that everyone on this tape are part of the Kashmir Liberation Front and none are Americans. This latest video showing training at Islamberg, which was released after the legal notice was published, easily rebuts any denial that training is being offered to Americans.

On November 27, eight days after the threat to sue CAN was written, the MOA website published a rant by Sheikh Gilani that only served to further expose his extremism.

He describes CAN as a “Zionist front group” that are “mere pawns of a larger, futile plot to destroy Christian-Muslim unity.” He compares CAN’s campaign against MOA to his perceived Israeli manipulation of the U.S. government to get it to invade Iraq and make it “a virtual slave of the Zionist World Order.”

He also claims that Israel was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that “evil, inhumane masterminds” carried out the 9/11 attacks and blamed it on Osama Bin Laden and other Saudi “activists” to facilitate the invasion of Afghanistan.

He continues, saying “they sent Daniel Pearl to target me.” Gilani has previously claimed that Pearl was part of an assassination plot against him and that he is still alive. Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani when he was kidnapped and beheaded, and although Gilani was detained and released and not charged with involvement, these statements establish a motive for wanting Pearl dead.

His anti-Semitic extremism really shines through when he discusses Jews. “…I have never seen, in the whole of my life or even in the past thousand years, a Jew who will tell the truth,” he says. In one of his poems, Gilani also described Jews as “an example of human Satans.”

Gilani claims that he will be succeeded by the Mahdi, the messianic figure of Islam, who he claims to have met and even introduced to some of his disciples. “He is in his thirties and will appear to all at the age of forty,” Gilani writes, adding that the Mahdi will declare himself during the hajj in Mecca and that Jesus will arrive at the Dome of the Rock to unite Muslims and Christians after his appearance.

He also says that he knows and has met Jesus in the first heaven. He finishes with saying that Muslims are not afraid of death and love martyrdom more than the Zionists “love their gold, jewelry, women and wine.”

The members of MOA believe Sheikh Gilani speaks on behalf of Allah and follow his every word.

He says he is a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. On the propaganda tape received by CAN, one of the MOA speakers says that they follow Sheikh Gilani as Catholics follow the Pope. With thousands of followers in the U.S. ready to act on Gilani’s single command, we cannot give into the threat of a legal jihad to silence us from warning about this threat.

FPM

Hamas helping British dhimmi lawyers target Israel

A new and insidious form of the courtroom jihad. Why is a group that is considered a terrorist organization in Britain able to operate so freely in that country?

"Hamas helping British lawyers target Israel," by Con Coughlin in the Telegraph, December 21

Activists from Hamas, the Palestinian group, have been helping British lawyers bring war crimes prosecutions against Israeli officials in London.

The group, considered a terrorist organisation in Britain, is believed to have provided information which helped sympathisers secure an arrest warrant against Tzipi Livni, Israel's former Foreign Minister at Westminster Magistrates Court earlier this month.

Mrs Livni, who was a cabinet minister during last year's Israeli military offensive in Gaza, was forced to cancel a trip to London last week.

A major diplomatic incident was averted only after Mrs Livni, who is now Israel's opposition leader, was alerted to the warrant and pulled out of a speaking engagement at the last minute.

It has now emerged that a committee set up by the Hamas government was providing information to help pro-Palestinian lawyers investigating alleged war crimes.

Diya al-Madhun, the judge who heads the committee, said: "We provide documents, reports and evidence of crimes to all international bodies aiding the Palestinian people in bringing Israeli civilian and military leaders to trial and issuing warrants for their arrest.

"We have provided a group of independent lawyers in Britain with documents, information and evidence concerning war crimes committed by Israeli political and military leaders, including Livni."

He added however that the foreign lawyers acted independently and were not hired by the Islamist Palestinian group.

Hamas is considered a terrorist organisation by Britain, Israel, the US and the EU, but it is seen by its supporters as a legitimate resistance movement....

With thanks to JihadWatch

Murder by Lawfare - How Liberal Lawsuits are Taking American Lives

by Daniel Greenfield

The thirteen US soldiers murdered at Fort Hood were killed by the bullets fired by Malik Nidal Hassan, but there were those who helped Nassan fire his bullets, who did everything but hold his gun and pull the trigger for him.

The initial FBI review has found that the Justice Department guidelines for opening a criminal investigation were too high, in turn investigators have said that it now requires a very high standard of evidence in order to convict a terrorist plotter.

Pursuing charges before all the evidence is in hand can backfire – suspects have sued authorities before, claiming they were falsely imprisoned victims of witch hunts… Five Muslim immigrants were convicted last year of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, but they were acquitted of attempted murder after prosecutors acknowledged they were probably months away from acting.
...

In January 2006, agents watched as a young man suspected of links to terrorists walked out of an Atlanta Home Depot with materials that could be used to make a bomb.

They knew Syed Haris Ahmed had researched bombmaking techniques online and shaved his head, as some jihadis have done before an attack.

However, they decided to wait to arrest him and keep building a stronger case – and risk a potential terror attack.

Not being able to stop a terrorist before he strikes. Not being able to remove Muslims who are engaging in threatening behavior on a plane. Not able to take action against a terrorist plot for fear that the terrorists will be allowed to walk free. That is what the domestic version of the War on Terror looks like today.

Those are the wages of Lawfare, the legal campaign on behalf of terrorists waged by well known liberal legal advocacy groups such as the ACLU, and the much wider base of liberal organizations and newspapers who lobbied on behalf of captured terrorists and republished every single one of their claims of torture… to the extent that the Al Queda manual made it a default for captured terrorists to cry abuse once on trial.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver, who was captured together with Al Queda operatives, became a cause celebre for liberals and liberal groups from Amnesty International to People for the American Way to the American Jewish Committee to George Clooney who was interested in making a movie about him and starring as his lawyer.

They turned Salim Hamdan into a martyr and breathlessly repeated every single one of his statements. And they won. They won with Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. And they won again at trial. Hamdan was freed a few months after sentencing to return to Yemen.

The liberal establishment had fought its hardest for Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard… and they won. America lost. That wasn’t the only time they won.

From day one every terrorist in Gitmo, every terrorist plotter seized on American soil plotting to murder Americans had the liberal establishment in their corner and fighting on their behalf.

From trial lawyers queuing up to defend them to the editorial pages of every liberal newspaper in America clamoring that they had been victimized, that the charges against them were worthless and that America had besmirched itself by not bowing to the wishes of the aforementioned trial lawyers. And they won.

From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, from Hamdan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they won. They successfully smeared US soldiers and interrogators and CIA agents as monsters, torturers and kidnappers.

They successfully portrayed Al Queda terrorists as sensitive victims and martyrs of a latter day Gulag.

The same press that wouldn’t report on any of Castro’s atrocities a few miles south of Guantanamo Bay if you put a gun to their heads, put on their novelist hats and transformed butchers into loving fathers, and dedicated fanatics into misunderstood patriots. And they won.

More at CFP

Soft Jihad in the West: the Islamist Lawfare - the other side of Violent Jihad

How Islamist Lawfare tactics target free speech
Middle East Forum Legal Project Apr 29, 2009

By Brooke Goldstein, Aaron Eitan Meyer

Are American authors who write about terrorism and its sources of financing safe? Are counter-terrorist advisors to the New York City Police department safe? Are U.S. congressmen safe when they report terrorist front groups to the FBI and CIA? Are cartoonists who parody Mohammad safe from arrest?

Must a Dutch politician who produced a documentary film quoting the Koran stand trial for blasphemy of Islam in Jordan? Is anyone who speaks publicly on the threat of radical Islam safe from frivolous and malicious lawsuits designed to bankrupt, punish, and silence them? These days, the answer is no.

Lawfare is usually defined as the use of the law as a weapon of war [1], or the pursuit of strategic aims through aggressive legal maneuvers.[2] Traditionally, lawfare tactics have been used to obtain moral advantages over the enemy in the court of public opinion,3 and to intimidate heads of state from acting out of fear of prosecution for war crimes.[4] Al-Qaeda training manuals instruct its captured militants to file claims of torture or other forms of abuse so as to reposition themselves as victims against their captors.[5] The 2004 decision by the United Nation's International Court of Justice declaring Israel's security fence a crime against humanity, which pointedly ignored the fact that the fence contributed to a sharp decline in terror attacks, is another example of lawfare aimed at public opinion.[6]

Yet, lawfare has moved beyond gaining mere moral advantages over nation-states and winning lawsuits against government actors. Over the past ten years, we have seen a steady increase in Islamist lawfare tactics directly targeting the human rights of North American and European civilians in order to constrain the free flow of public information about radical Islam.

The Islamist Movement

The Islamist movement is that which seeks to impose tenets of Islam, and specifically Shari'a law, as a legal, political, religious, and judicial authority both in Muslim states and in the West. It is generally composed of two wings-that which operates violently, propagating suicide-homicide bombing and other terrorist activities; and that which operates lawfully, conducting a "soft jihad" within our media, government, and court systems; through Shari'a banking;[7] and within our school systems.[8]

Yet Islamism, the drive to promulgate Islamic values as they are defined by various Imams and Muslim leaders, is the ideology that powers not only Hamas and Al-Qaeda, but motivates organizations such as the Canadian Islamic Congress, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Council on American Islamic Relations.[9]

Both the violent and the lawful arms of the Islamist movement can and do work apart, but often, their work reinforces each other's. For example, one tenet of Shari'a law is to punish those who criticize Islam and to silence speech considered blasphemous of its prophet Mohammad. While the violent arm of the Islamist movement attempts to silence speech by burning cars when Danish cartoons of Mohammed are published, by murdering film directors such as Theo Van Gogh, and by forcing thinkers such as Wafa Sultan into hiding out of fear for her life, the lawful arm is skillfully maneuvering within Western court systems, hiring lawyers and suing to silence its critics.

Go on reading here: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18029.xml

Welcome to 'Lawfare' - A New Type of Jihad

By Brooke Goldstein

The Islamist movement has two wings - one violent and one lawful, which can operate apart but often reinforce each other. While the violent arm attempts to silence speech by burning cars when cartoons of Mohammed are published in Denmark, the lawful arm is skillfully maneuvering within Western legal systems, both here and abroad.

Islamists with financial means have launched a "legal Jihad," filing frivolous and malicious lawsuits with the aim of abolishing public discourse critical of Islam and with the goal of establishing principles of Sharia law (strict Islamic law dating back to the 9th Century) as the governing political and legal authority in the West.

Islamist Lawfare is often predatory, filed without a serious expectation of winning, and undertaken as a means to intimidate, demoralize and bankrupt defendants. The lawsuits range in their claims from defamation to workplace harassment and they have resulted in books being pulped and meritorious articles going unpublished.

Forum shopping, whereby Plaintiffs bring actions in jurisdictions most likely to rule in their favor, has enabled a wave of "libel tourism." At the time of her death in 2006, noted Italian author Orianna Fallaci was being sued in France, Italy, Switzerland and other jurisdictions by groups dedicated to preventing the dissemination of her work. Read more ...

Source: Family Security Matters