Mosque Foundation

Mosque Foundation

Radical ties

Evidence has implicated officials at the Mosque Foundation. Among them, Holy Land Foundation fundraiser Kifah Mustapha serves as a mosque imam and associate director. Like CAIR, Mustapha, mosque director Jamal Said was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF case and was included on the Palestine Committee telephone list. A federal judge refused a request by CAIR and other groups to be purged from that list. Such a list never should have been made public, ruled U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis, but prosecutors provided "ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA, NAIT, with NAIT, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas."

Said also spoke at conferences for another Palestine Committee entity, the Islamic Association for Palestine.

In 2004, the Chicago Tribune profiled the Mosque Foundation, detailing the "bitter fight in Bridgeview that saw religious fundamentalists prevail over moderates."

Yet Senator Dick Durbin visited the mosque March 2011, smiling broadly among several mosque leaders with a history of radical statements and connections, including Imam Jamal Said, Kifah Mustapha and Oussama Jammal.

Both Said and Mustapha were listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the HLF trial. Jammal defended Hamas operative Mohammed Salah, who was once a mosque regular.

Like Awad and Ahmed, prosecutors placed Said, in the Palestine Committee and his contact information is No. 20 on the committee's telephone list. He also spoke at Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) conferences. The IAP, now defunct, was a Palestine Committee entity, court records show.

Said urged the audience at the 2000 IAP conference "to be generous and give plenty, to keep the light in the houses of our martyrs burning. We have boxes here to say 'Help us, help the Aqsa cause, Islamic Association for Palestine!'"

"There is no better charity than to pay for the family of a martyr," he added.

Kifa Mustapha, third from the right in the photograph, also is identified by prosecutors as a Palestine Committee member. Court records show he did volunteer work for the IAP and was a paid HLF employee from 1996-2000 serving as a fundraiser and as its Illinois representative.

In 1998, the Mosque Foundation held a rally to support Salah after the U.S. government moved to seize assets belonging to Salah, his wife, and their business called the Quranic Literacy Institute (QLI), after asserting they were all tied to money laundering for Hamas. During the rally, Oussama Jammal condemned the move as discriminatory. "Politically motivated attacks on our community are an unfortunate reality that must not be accepted," Jamal said. "The stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as being terrorist is wrong and it must stop."

Jammal also questioned the facts behind 9/11. Following the attacks Jammal asked, "How certain are we that it was Arabs who were behind it?"

The Mosque Foundation has also hosted IAP events, including one in June 2001 in which Mustapha spoke as an HLF representative.