View From a Height

Muslim Charities and the Tsunami

Muslims in Colorado are apparently using some discretion in deciding where to direct their Tsunami relief money. Although it's not clear that it's always for the right reasons.

No doubt most of this is for the right motivations,

Chaudhry, of the Colorado Springs mosque, heard about Islamic Relief on CNN. The mosque checked to make sure the group wasn't on a government website listing charities with suspected terrorism links.

This is the new reality of safeguarding one of Islam's most sacred traditions, Chaudhry said.

"That's what we should do," he said. "We don't want to support the wrong organization. For most people who give money, it's a religious obligation. That money should really go to poor people, not support any political agenda."

I was also glad to see the charities gaining credibility by intergrating themselves into rigorous accounting and transparency regimes:

Some Muslim charities, meantime, are redoubling their transparency efforts. One is the organization the Colorado Springs mosque singled out: Islamic Relief USA, part of an international Muslim charitable network undertaking a $10 million tsunami fundraising effort.

The agency conducted a self- audit after Sept. 11, posts its financial records on the Web and advertises its four-star ranking from Charity Navigator, a group that ranks charities' efficiency, said Arif Shaikh, a spokesman for the Burbank, Calif.-based nonprofit.

At the same time, there was the requisite carping and whining about how the government is trying to make sure that those dollars don't just blow themselves up:

Helping the poor is central, it's mandatory, especially under the circumstances," said Liyakat Takim, a University of Denver religious studies professor who teaches about Islam. "On the other hand, Muslims have to be careful because they don't want to jeopardize their positions or get into trouble with Homeland Security. Muslims are far more careful as to where and who they give their funds to now."

...

Following Sept. 11, President Bush signed an executive order allowing the government to shut down and freeze assets of organizations linked to funding terrorism. As a result, four Islamic charities in the United States have been raided or shut down by the government, and millions of dollars have been frozen.

None of the raids has led to terrorism-related criminal convictions. One high-profile case will head to court this month when three members of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation go on trial on charges of funneling cash to a relative who is a high-ranking official with the militant group Hamas.

While U.S. Muslim organizations have condemned using charitable donations to fund terrorism, some are concerned the government went too far to punish groups without a finding of wrongdoing. The independent 9/11 commission echoed those concerns in its report last year.

"At this point, the Muslim community in America has kind of thrown up its hands and said, 'We have no idea what the government is going to do next,"' said Ingrid Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary. "There is a cynicism building that is rather unhealthy. But that's not stopping people from giving."

Naturally, it's a non-Muslim professor doing the complaining. In fact, the Holy Land Foundation has been under suspicion for almost a decade. My friend Yehudit Barsky, who has been following this stuff for many years, has a comprehensive discussion of Hamas, linking it to a number of US charities, using sources that date back to well before 9/11.

The problem here, as usual, isn't that the government has moved too quickly, but that it coddled a non-existent "peace process" by moving too slowly. In anything, four is not enough.

These kinds of complaints are aimed at "criminalizing" the war by reducing it to law enforcement standards. This might be useful is the government were to start thinking about these charities as RICO targets, but that's clearly not the aim of Ms. Mattson.