Date Posted: Tuesday, March 23, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 23 (MASNET) - In the wake of Israel’s assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual guide of Hamas, a U.S. Muslim group on Tuesday announced pursuing litigation to enforce violations relating to the sale of weapons by the U.S. that are used against civilians.

The Muslim American Society’s (MAS) Freedom Foundation said it was initiating a legal campaign in order to get Congress to enforce provisions of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits the use of U.S. weapons against civilian targets, on Israel.

At a press conference organized in front of the U.S. State Department along with various civil rights and religious organizations, MAS Freedom Foundation Executive Director Mahdi Bray said the organization was developing a legal team to take the issue to the courts.

MAS Freedom “plans to begin to put together a legal team that will bring about litigation in U.S. courts that will hold Israel in violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act,” said Bray.

“The extra-judicial assassination of Sheikh Yassin was a horrendous act of lawlessness conducted by the Israeli government, violating both international and U.S. law,” he said.

The civil rights and advocacy group said attorneys representing the case would include C. Peter Erlinder, a distinguished law professor from the William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and Myra Verhyden-Hilliard of the National Lawyers Guild and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice.

In pursuing the legal track, Bray said the coalition of groups was calling on the U.S. government to renounce Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders.

“American tax dollars are funding Israeli lawlessness,” he stated.

The group also announced it would pursue avenues on the congressional front saying it has requested Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Representative Henry Hyde (R-IL), chairman of the House of Representatives’ International Relations Committee, to investigate and hold hearings on the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, and especially Israel’s lack of compliance with the legislation.

Imam Abdul-Malik Johari of the Coordinating Council on Muslim Relations, speaking as a faith leader in the Islamic community, addressed the coalition’s strategy and methodology in pursuing legal recourse.

“The approach we want to take is the American Muslim approach,” said Johari. “That we object to the Israeli government’s violations of international law, its disrespect for human rights and their aggressive drive to create a climate of Armageddon.”

“We, as citizens, from whom the government extracts tax dollars, say ‘Not in Our Name’, and that we pray and will struggle by any means necessary,” he said, borrowing a line from noted assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X.

As American Muslims, Johari added that “we oppose the killing of innocent men, women and children, the elderly, and the handicapped, regardless of their race, religion or nationality.”

Acknowledging the existence of persistent violence in the region between Israel and the Palestinians, Bray said that rather than levying persistent hardships on the Palestinian people, both the U.S. and Israel needed to recognize the central cause of the conflict.

“One of the central factors contributing to the conflict in the region is Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories,” he said.

The group was joined outside the State Department by members of the coalition, including former congressman Reverend Walter Fountroy of the Civil Rights Roundtable, Imam Johari, Joe Grove of the Middle East Affairs Division of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Reverend Grayland Hagler of the United Church of Christ, Myra Verheyden-Hilliard, and supporters from the ANSWER coalition.