Humanitarian or Terrorist--the Mystery of Muhammad Salah

He says he’s a man of good deeds, a humanitarian. And that, Muhammad Salah says, is what has derailed his life--a simple act of charity.

In Islam, it’s known as zakat.

The government says he’s a man of deception, a conspirator. And that, it says, is why he’s in trouble--for funneling cash to the militant Islamic group, Hamas, for guns and bombs to attack Israel.

In U.S. law, it’s known as financing terrorism.

Muhammad Salah has been entangled in a controversy that has spanned nearly six years and 6,000 miles, taking him from mosques in America to the West Bank to an Israeli prison and now, back home. And it’s not over yet.

Now, Salah--the emissary, the inmate, the U.S. citizen and, according to federal officials, the high-level Hamas operative--is about to face off against the government in a Chicago courtroom. At stake: his home, his money and his future.

Federal prosecutors, in a civil action, recently seized more than $1.4 million in cash and assets from Salah and the Quranic Literacy Institute, an Islamic education center accused of funding and helping to conceal his activities.

Salah was stripped of his two bank accounts totaling $130,000. His house in south suburban Bridgeview could be next.

And he can forget about a job, his attorney says, because he’d have to tell any potential employer the government has classified him as a terrorist.

“This is an extraordinary punishment these people are living under,” attorney Matthew Piers says of the Salah family. “It’s a form of internal exile, crazier than what you read about in apartheid South Africa. This was done with no charges, no hearings. It’s grossly unconstitutional.”

Prosecutors are letting their legal papers speak for them, but they note this is the first time civil forfeiture laws--a common weapon against drug dealers--have been used in the United States to stop cash from being sent abroad to bolster terrorism.

But this is not the first time Muhammad Salah has surfaced on the government’s radar screen.

Three years ago, his assets were frozen when he was placed on a federal list of specially designated terrorists, joining such notorious names as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Abu Nidal, a Palestinian who gained infamy for more than 90 terrorist acts, including 1985 attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports.

When the government first moved against Salah, he was in an Israeli prison, sentenced to five years after pleading guilty to being a member of Hamas and channeling money to the group that has claimed responsibility for waging a war of terrorism in Israel.

Salah has since insisted he was tortured and threatened into making false confessions and forced to sign documents written in Hebrew, which he does not understand.

And he denounces as lies a portrayal of his Israeli interrogation in the book, “God Has Ninety-Nine Names,” in which author Judith Miller describes a calm, almost cocky Salah detailing Hamas’ political command in the United States and talking freely about money he handed out for weapons, safe houses and equipment to fashion false identification cards.

Today, more than six months after he was released from prison and declared himself “super-innocent,” Muhammad Salah still hasn’t cleared his name.

“I am a peaceful man,” he maintains, sitting stiffly in a starched white shirt and gray suit in his lawyer’s downtown conference room.

When he speaks of his fears of being poisoned, raped and killed in prison, his words are animated and eager. But he chooses his words slowly and cautiously when discussing Hamas.

“They [Hamas] have run schools, hospitals, mosques. They do so much for the Palestinians,” he says. “I am against violence, no matter who’s the source of it. I’m not a supporter of any specific organization.”

And although he denies belonging to Hamas, he pauses, then adds: “Hamas does not ask for membership.”

But his alleged links to Hamas--and statements he made in 1993 while in Israeli custody--dog him in his latest confrontation with the U.S. government.

In a 37-page FBI affidavit, the U.S. attorney’s office has outlined a case far more complex than one man fighting for his house and his bank accounts. It echoes the long-held notion among many in Israel that the United States harbors an underground network that funnels cash to Hamas.

The government’s case puts a face on that network: Muhammad Salah.

A 45-year-old father of four with piercing gray eyes and a fringe of gray beard, Salah was born in Jerusalem and lived as a child in a Palestinian refugee camp. He and his family were run out of their house on the West Bank during the Six Day War in 1967.

He immigrated to America three years later and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He studied chemical engineering, worked with his brothers in grocery stores, then as a used-car broker. But he says his true calling was helping the poor.

“In Islam, charity is second to prayer,” he says. “But the way to do this is secretly. If you give to me with your right hand, your left hand should not know.”

It was on what he describes as a charity mission to Israel in 1993 that his current troubles began. Responding to a series of Hamas-linked attacks on police and military units, the Israeli government had deported more than 400 Palestinians.

Salah says an Islamic cleric had given him money and dispatched him to help families of the deportees.

“All over the world money was being raised in mosques,” explains Piers, the lawyer. “This was the human rights issue for the decade for the Palestinian community.”

When Salah was arrested in Gaza, he had distributed more than $97,000 and, Israeli interrogators say, had extensive notes from meetings with more than 40 Hamas operatives. About $100,000 was found in his hotel room.

Salah insists the money was for medicine, housing and other peaceful purposes.

“I am 90% sure it was used for humanitarian reasons. They need it so much,” he says. When pressed how he knew for certain, he responds: “How do you know it didn’t go to American settlers to kill Palestinians?”

The FBI affidavit details a far different picture of Salah.

It says he told Israeli authorities he had been involved with Hamas since around 1988, had recruited new Hamas members, conducted background checks and participated in training activities that “included mixing poisons, development of chemical weapons, and preparing remote control explosive devices.”

Citing bank and airline records, the FBI also said Salah and others used wire transfers from accounts in Switzerland and the United States to deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in banks, to supply cash to Hamas.

In one instance, the FBI says, Salah gave a Hamas member more than $48,000 to buy guns to carry out attacks against Israel--including an M-16 rifle used to kill an Israeli soldier in 1992.

“Why are Americans relying on such information?” Salah asks, his voice rising in frustration. “The Israelis couldn’t prove it against me.”

Proving a direct cash-to-terrorism link is very difficult, says Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.

Many donors in the United States may be contributing to Palestinians’ social needs, he says, but “those humanitarian purposes have a fuzzy definition. How do you define some of the sustenance that you give to families of suicide bombers?”

Hamas, he adds, is an affluent organization whose humanitarian and military operations are expanding, and cracking down on one man will not change that.

“This is a system that collects money aimed at the destruction of a sovereign state,” he says. “It’s a very elaborate and sophisticated system. It also launders a lot of money. . . . To assume neutralizing the funds of a certain individual will resolve the problem is wishful thinking.”

When the government goes to court, it also will face the Quranic Literacy Institute.

Prosecutors say Salah was a Hamas courier when he claimed to be a computer analyst at the institute, based in suburban Oak Lawn. Salah says he volunteered at the center, which translates sacred Islamic texts.

Ralph Brown, the institute’s attorney, praises Salah and rejects the suggestion that the center’s money found its way “to any kind of improper activity, let alone terrorist activity.”

“We are very much back to the days of Joe McCarthy,” he adds. “We are being attacked because of an association.”

Unemployed and awaiting his day in court, Salah spends most of his time at home reacquainting himself with his children--including a daughter who was an infant when he entered prison.

“I’m determined to fight this to my last drop of sweat,” he says. “I feel the American government has treated me very unfairly. I hope someday I’ll get back to my normal life.”