Press Virtually Ignores Upheld Holy Land Foundation/Hamas Funding Verdict, Fails to Mention CAIR Connection

On Wednesday, as Terry Baynes at Reuters reported, "A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the convictions of five leaders of an Islamic charity on charges of funneling money and supplies to Hamas, designated a "terrorist" group following a 1995 executive order by President Bill Clinton. ..." The organization involved was the Holy Land Foundation based in Texas. The five involved received sentences of 15 to 65 years.

Reuters appears to have been virtually unique in covering the story at a national level, and from all appearances very few establishment press outlets picked it up. What follows are various search results in attempts to find coverage of the story:

• The Associated Press's main national site, search on "Holy Land Foundation" (not in quotes) -- No results.
• AP's main site again, on "Holy Land" -- Nothing relevant.
• AP's main site again, on "Muslim charity -- Nothing relevant.
• New York Times, search on "Holy Land Foundation" (not in quotes) -- Nothing relevant.
• Washington Post, search on "Holy Land Foundation" (in quotes) -- no results.
• Google News search on "Holy Land Foundation" (in quotes, sorted by date, with duplicates) -- about 57 results in the relevant time range (Dec. 7-9; link is to last page containing those results). Among the results obtained are roughly a half-dozen from the Associated Press, which indicates (because it wasn't found at its national site) that the AP irresponsibly treated it as a local story, and a couple dozen outlets carrying Baynes's Reuters story. No other result appears to be from an establishment press outlet.

For a story of this nature, the number of news results and sources which bothered to cover the story at all obtained is very small.

At American Thinker, Rick Moran reiterated a point which the AP and Reuters both chose to omit:

This is the same trial that the Council on American-Islamic Relations - CAIR - was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

This is the same CAIR which in mid-November filed 15 records requests attempting to find and presumably expose examples of what it calls "Anti-Muslim Law Enforcement Trainings." It's also the same CAIR which, as part of a continuing congressional budget resolution passed a few days later, was at least for the moment and assuming it's enforced (prognosis: doubtul) prohibited from engaging law enforcement authorities in bogus "outreach" attempts.

Andrew McCarthy at National Review also weighed in on the significance of the loss on appeal, with a pointed barb at the establishment press (bold is mine):

... documents recovered by the FBI at the home of a Brotherhood operative established the Brotherhood’s overarching role in the Hamas support scheme, including bylaws showing that the “Brotherhood had directed the collection of 'donations for the Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e., Hamas].'"

Also recovered at that time was the internal memorandum in which the Brotherhood’s American leadership asserted:

The Ikhwan [i.e., the Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

That is why I called my book about the Muslim Brotherhood’s war on the West The Grand Jihad. It is what the Brotherhood and its affiliated organizations are about wherever in the world they operate. When you cite the undeniable facts out here in journalism world, they call it “Islamophobia.” Fortunately, in American courtrooms, it is still possible to see it for what it is: overwhelming evidence.

Let's hope it stays that way if the case is heard by the Supreme Court.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.