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The group’s lawyers say that providing aid to Hizballah shouldn’t be illegal, since it is primarily a political and religious group. They also say that the case should be limited to a routine cigarette-smuggling claim rather than anything related to counterterrorism statutes.
    The suspects were initially accused of fraudulently obtaining visas and of setting up sham marriages. Their main economic activity alledgedly consisted of buying cigarettes in large quantities from outlets in North Carolina and smuggling them to Michigan. Later, authorities charged eight men and one woman with providing assistance to Hizballah. These individuals are accused of planning to purchase night-vision goggles and cameras, stun guns, blasting equipment, binoculars, radars, laser range-finders, mine-detection equipment and advanced aircraft-analysis and design software; they also had wired money between accounts controlled by Hizballah operatives and even arranged life-insurance policies for operatives who might be killed in action. The government, unable to resist the pun, dubbed its sting “Operation Smokescreen.” A trial for the nine key players is scheduled for the spring of 2002.
    I myself can testify to how widespread grassroots fund-raising efforts are here in the United States. I have been at multiple conferences at which money has been raised for jihad, with passionate speeches that spare few details about the ultimate objectives of the fund-raisers.
     
Networking
     
    By far the most important tactic utilized by terrorist groups in America has been to use nonprofit organizations to establish a zone of legitimacy within which fund-raising, recruitment, and even outright planning can occur. The use of charitable organizations by jihad warriors and their supporters is a complicated subject. Often, the organizations are perfectly legitimate, but they wittingly or unwittingly provide a forum for evil. Many of these organizations react strongly when accused of collaborating with or facilitating the work of terrorists, for understandable reasons. If their official policy is to oppose and denounce terrorism, how much responsibility must they bear for the contrary behaviors of individual members or guest speakers?
    At the meeting of the Muslim Arab Youth Association that I happened upon in 1992, for example, I was at a conference of a group that does very little, at least on the surface. MAYA runs conferences which other groups attend, and where speakers make speeches; it produces and sells an Arabic magazine, Almujtamaa, and it helps Muslim youths meet one another. At its Web site, you can download a “marriage application” in English or in Arabic. The organization does not issue many press releases, and those that they do are perfectly respectable. After September 11, 2001, MAYA promptly issued a condemnation of “these apparently senseless acts of terrorism against innocent civilians, which will only be counterproductive to any agenda the perpetrators may have had in mind.” The release added the observation that “No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts.” 10
    Yet, as I have witnessed firsthand, MAYA’s conferences bring together many promoters of hate and violence, and serve as fund-raising opportunities for groups that funnel money to the families of terrorists, perhaps even to the terrorists themselves. I have been accused of anti-Muslim bias for charging MAYA and similar organizations with supporting terrorism. I do not mean to suggest that all members of MAYA are sympathizers, much less collaborators. But I do believe that the organization must take responsibility for what happens at its conferences.
    Appendix C of this book will lay out the case against some of the most prominent of such organizations, ones with legitimate sounding names such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council, or the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
     
Direct Organizing
     
    I should note