31-Dec-06: Terror Sinks Roots in Even the Best of Neighbourhoods

Five months ago, in an article called "BBC Exposes Hamas' UK Terror Financiers", we wrote about a BBC Panorama expose of Interpal. That's a British charity certified by the US authorities as a terrorist front organization but happily in business in the UK all these years, riding above the storm. The BBC calls Panorama its most important documentary programme.

We pointed our readers to a transcript of the Panorama programme here, and to a streaming video edition of the entire one-hour film.

Today, the BBC reports that

...the Charity Commission has launched a formal investigation into the London-based Palestinian charity Interpal. The commission says there are "concerns about the potential for indirect and inappropriate links" between Interpal "and organisations or individuals who appear to support the militant or terrorist activities of Hamas".

This about-face comes after years of the British authorities refuting claims from Israeli and American sources about those "inappropriate links", while downplaying strong documentary evidence that Interpal plays a central role in the global jihadist enterprise. An earlier Charities Commission investigation stubbornly provided Interpal with a clean bill of health.

That investigation, it now turns out, was "not in depth." Who'd ever have thought it?

But to their credit, the Panorama team kept plugging away, undaunted by the status and prestige of Interpal as one of Europe's largest Moslem charities, according to Wikipedia. If you catch the show, you'll be left in little doubt about what Interpal really stands for. As today's BBC item says:

The programme showed how Interpal's Managing Trustee Dr Essam Yusuf doubled as the key trustee for a coalition of Islamic charities chaired by Dr Yusuf Qaradawi, who has championed suicide bombings in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

We've not the only ones to have a hard time understanding the British authorities and their hands-off attitude to the purveyors of terror. Their capital city has turned into Londonistan right under their prim and proper noses.

In the interests of full disclosure, our interest in this story is personal. On 9th August 2001, Hamas murdered our fifteen year-old daughter with the financial backing of overt and hidden supporters in Europe and throughout the Arab world.