Alamoudi Tied to Al-Qaeda

Abdurahman Alamoudi is the founder of the American Muslim Council, a "civil rights" group; as an advisor to the Pentagon, he hand-picked all of the military's Muslim chaplains; he's rubbed elbows with Clinton, Gore, and Bush; and the AMC often gave talks to FBI agents.

Alamoudi is a also a terrorist financier and a committed jihadi. In 2000, he famously exhorted a pro-Palestinian rally outside the White House with "We are ALL supporters of Hamas. Allahu Akhbar! . . . I am also a supporter of Hezbollah." He was a character witness for Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheikh who was convicted for masterminding the 1993 WTC attacks. AMC leaders and conference speakers keep being deported and/or convicted on terrorism charges; and last year, Alamoudi himself was sentenced to 23 years in prison for, among other things, raising money for terrorist groups. There's much, much more, so the AQ connection is pretty predictable news.

Concern is mounting over the connections between a Boston Islamic group and a high-profile Muslim activist, Abdurahman Alamoudi, after a recent statement by the federal government that Mr. Alamoudi had a "close relationship" with Al Qaeda and that he raised money for Al Qaeda in America.

Alamoudi - who is serving a 23-year sentence in federal prison after having pleaded guilty in 2004 to participating in a Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah - is also a founder of the Islamic Society of Boston. The society is now embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over the society's efforts to build a mosque with the aid of public subsidies [and Saudi cash].

That lawsuit, according to journalists and terrorism investigators, is part of a larger trend of litigation by Muslim groups that, they say, is having a "chilling effect" on the ability to report domestic ties to terrorism.

In July, Alamoudi was cited in a Treasury Department press release designating the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a U.K.-based Saudi oppositionist organization, led by Saad al-Faqih, as providing material support for Al Qaeda. MIRA "received approximately $1 million in funding through Abdulrahman Alamoudi," the statement said.

Alamoudi, an Eritrean-born naturalized American citizen, was arrested in 2003 on charges of having participated in a Libyan assassination plot against Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, an allegation to which he admitted in the 2004 plea agreement with federal prosecutors. He was also stripped of his American citizenship after admitting to having obtained it fraudulently.

The rest of the article focuses on the ISB's legal maneuvers, and Islamic groups' use of vexatious lawsuits in general to silence journalists and critics.