Also Suspected Member
of a Terrorist Group

NEW YORK – The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is urging the FBI to cancel its plans to give an award to an official of an Arab-American group that has praised killers of Americans and accused America of committing “genocide” in Iraq.

FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to give the FBI’s “Exceptional Public Service Award” on October 9 to Imad Hamad, the Midwest Regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). The ADC has praised Hezbollah —which massacred 241 Americans in a 1983 car-bomb attack in Lebanon— as “a Lebanese resistance organization engaged in the legitimate defense of Lebanese land…[t]his hardly qualifies as terrorism.” (ADC president Hala Maksoud, Washington Times, Aug. 25, 1996)

In a letter to Mueller, ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, Chairman of the Board Dr. Alan Mazurek, and National Executive Committee chairman Dr. Michael Goldblatt wrote: “Extremists who sympathize with Hezbollah should not be given awards. It makes a mockery of America’s war against terrorism, and sends a message to terrorists and their supporters that the United States is not fully committed to fighting terror.”

Syndicated columnist Debbie Schlussel (New York Post, Sept. 18,2003) notes that the Immigration and Naturalization Service fought for more than 20 years to have Hamad deported from the U.S. to his native Lebanon, because it had concluded that he was a member of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But due to pressure from Michigan politicians, he was permitted to remain in America.

Schlussel points out that Hamad has publicly protested the U.S. government’s arrest of four Arab-Americans in Detroit who were part of an Al Qaeda terror cell, and the prosecution of Omar Al-Shishani for laundering $12-million in fraudulent checks to finance Al Qaeda. In an interview with Fox-TV’s Detroit affiliate, Hamad defended a Palestinian Authority children’s television program encouraging Arab children to become suicide bombers and murder Jews and Christians; Hamad called the program “patriotic.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee:
What the Record Reveals

I. Defending Hezbollah:

1. Asked by Geraldo Rivera, “How do you stand about Hezbollah and Hamas? Do you condemn them?,” ADC spokesman Hussein Ibish said: “No. I think that Hezbollah fought a very good war against the Israelis, a guerrilla war…” (Rivera Live, CNBC, June 5, 2000)

2. “Everywhere Hezbollah fighters, derided by the Israeli and U.S. governments as ‘terrorists,’ conducted themselves in an exemplary manner…[They are] a disciplined and responsible liberation force.”
—ADC spokesman Hussein Ibish, Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2000

3. “I find it shocking…that [one] would include Hezbollah in…[an] inventory of Middle East ‘terrorist’ groups…Hezbollah is a Lebanese resistance organization engaged in the legitimate defense of Lebanese land…[t]his hardly qualifies as terrorism.”
—ADC president Hala Maksoud, Washington Times, Aug. 25, 1996

4. “We are all proud of the heroic resistance of its people and their steadfastness.”
—ADC president Maksoud, referring to Hezbollah, ADC Times, June-July 1996

5. ADC president Hala Maksoud says she supports “the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance against occupation,” and that Hezbollah is “a resistance organization engaged in the legitimate defense of Lebanese land.”
—Commentary, Jan.1999

6. The ADC has “campaigned against two 1997 amendments forbidding most financial transactions with state sponsors of terrorism.”
—Commentary, Jan. 1999

II Defending Hamas

1. “I will not call it a terrorist organization. I mean, I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable. They don’t accept violence. And I don’t believe Hamas, as an organization, is a violent organization.”
—then-ADC president Hamzi Moghrabi, Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 27, 1994

2. “Most outrageous of all the allegations ‘reported’ by Symmes was his opinion that ‘Hamas is a band of murderers’.”
—then-ADC president Albert Mokhiber, Washington City Paper, June 11, 1993

3. “We strongly urge the United States not to extradite [senior Hamas leader] Dr. [Mousa] Abu Marzook to Israel…”
—ADC president Hala Maksoud, in an ADC press release, January 31, 1997

III. Accusing the U.S. of “Genocide”

1. “Embargoes and blockades are genocide.” [From a “Children’s March to the UN” leaflet, signed by ADC and other groups, advertising a July 1, 1998 rally]

2. Referred to “the genocidal effects of these sanctions on innocent Iraqi children, women and men”
—Letter, ADC president Hala Maksoud, Washington Post, February 15, 1997

3. “While there have been levels of non-compliance by Iraq, the regime has conformed with most of the requirements to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.”
—ADC press release, Nov. 9, 1997

4. “Ignoring this massive human suffering [in Iraq] is ultimately based on the racist premise that the lives of Iraqis are less than human.”
—ADC Action Alert, October 22, 1997

5. “It is shocking that the US would again target the long-suffering Iraqi people with lawless missile attacks.”
—ADC press release, January 25, 1999

IV. Anti-Semitic Statements

1. “You and I both know that Marlon Brando was quite right when he pointed out that Jews run Hollywood. The decision-makers, the play-callers, are Jews, completely out of proportion to their numbers.
—ADC Los Angeles president Donald Bustany, Jerusalem Report, Oct.17, 1996

2. “Some Jews … seem to believe that God has chosen them. And, imbued with a strong resolve by that belief, [they have] appropriated the property of others under circumstances that the rest of the world recognizes as outright theft. Three thousand years ago the Jewish people—led by Moses, Joshua, King Saul and King David—took by force the land of the people of Canaan. In this century—still led by Moses in a sense—they took by force and some unsavory diplomacy the land of the Arabs of Palestine.”
—ADC Los Angeles president Donald Bustany, Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1995