Rights groups demand release of Holy Land Five

Washington (QNN)- Human rights groups have called for the release of the Holy Land Five, a group of Palestinian-American men who were convicted and imprisoned in the US over accusations of funding terrorism.

As families of the accused marked the14th anniversary of their conviction, Within Our Lifetime, the Coalition for Civil Freedoms, and the Samidoun Prisoner Network, launched a campaign on Thursday demanding the release of the three remaining Holy Land Foundation Five.

“November 24th 2022 marks 14 years since the Holy Land Foundation 5 were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned in the US for the crime of sending food and medicine to orphans in Palestine,” the Palestinian-led Within Our Lifetime said in a statement.

“Three of them remain imprisoned today. It’s time to bring them home,” the group added.

The Holy Land Five are five Palestinian men who were active leaders in the Holy Land Foundation. The five men, became known as the Holy Land Five, are Shukri Abu Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Ghassan el-Aashi, Mohammed Mezain and Abdulrahman Odeh.

The Foundation was based in Texas and was once the largest Islamic charity in the U.S. before it was targeted by the Bush administration and zionist forces as part of the racist “War on Terror” and shut down in December 2001, leading to the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of five Palestinian men.

The Holy Land Foundation was repeatedly targeted by Zionist organizations in a series of reports and investigations because of its effective work in providing support to occupied Palestine.

The Foundation was a large charity that raised millions of dollars for impoverished people in occupied Palestine, providing much-needed support and blunting the effects of the occupation on the Palestinian people.

It was in 2004 when the homes of the Holy Land Foundation Five were raided and the men arrested and not until 2007 that their trial began.

After a first trial ended in a hung jury, a second trial handed lengthy prison sentences to each on charges of “material support for terrorism” after accusing the charity of funding Hamas group.

The charges were all related to the HLF, which was founded in 1989 and focused on getting medical care and humanitarian aid to impoverished Palestinians via “Zakat committees”.

Leaders of the Foundation were placed under surveillance by the FBI since 1993 while notorious Islamophobic, racist and Zionist commentators like Steven Emerson repeatedly attacked the Foundation, accoridng to the Within Our Lifetime.

Three of them, Mufid Abdulqader, Ghassan Elashi, and Shukri Abu Baker remain imprisoned today. The two others, Abdulrahman Odeh and Mohammed El-Mezain, sentenced to 15 years each, were released in 2020 and 2022 respectively.

The HLF5 were convicted on false charges of “providing material support to terrorism,” despite the fact that they were never even accused of funding the legitimate armed resistance to Israeli occupation and colonization.

Indeed, the same charities funded by the Holy Land Foundation were also funded by the International Red Cross and even USAID, the US Agency for International Development.

The American Civil Liberties Union has said the Holy Land Foundation case was part of a pattern of the US government targeting faith-based charities “on the basis of unsubstantiated evidence and without even basic due process protections”.