Tuesday, October 27, 2009

White Collar Terrorism

Not all terrorists charge into buildings or markets with the goal of killings civilians. There are white collar terrorists as well. What do I mean by this? I mean those who use charities and legitimate businesses as fronts to finance terrorist activities elsewhere. In the past few years European nations have been plagued by charity fronts for Hamas terrorist actions in Israel. A major problem in all of these cases has been the acquisition of substantial enough evidence to convict them. The fronts have protection under the law and they exploit that protection to a maximum. Evidence is hard to come by when the accused hires the best lawyers in the nation to defend them. In the Swedish trial of charity representative
Khalid al-Yousef openly agreed that he had sent money to Palestinian groups who were directly connected to Hamas though he had no knowledge that they were connected at that time and also when it was proven that his charity did have knowledge of a Hamas connection, Khalid al-Yousef stated that he did not know that the money was going to finance terrorist activities. He was acquitted. I don’t know about you, but I find something extremely wrong with this situation. I am not advocating for a lessening of the burden of proof for a conviction, but I am pointing out that there is a major problem. I welcome any comments on how my readers would propose to rectify this situation.

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