Storm Track Infiltration: A New Form of Financial Jihad

Muslim charitable organizations are not the only way Jihadists can funnel financial support to their cause. Ever morphing in response to pressure on this form of crack-down, the financial jihad has turned to a new way to skirt anti-terror laws.

Essential to the aims of the jihadists is the Muslim sacrament of zakat. Zakat, one of the pillars of Islam, requires Muslims to donate 2.5 percent of their incomes to charity. As the indictment in the Holyland Foundation case showed, most of the money that the five defendants transferred to Hamas was transferred through zakat committees in Palestinian cities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. These committees then transferred the monies to Hamas terrorists, their family members, political leaders and terror cells.

THE ESTABLISHMENT of charitable front organizations is merely one of many ways in which jihadist groups have raised funds. Today terror analysts fear that a new means has been found to skirt anti-terror laws and finance terror while rendering the financial systems of the West vulnerable to Islamic manipulation and control. The fear is that through the burgeoning presence of Shari'a-compliant investment houses, jihadist groups and financiers will be able to raise enormous sums of money to fund their nefarious activities aimed at global domination.

In the pursuit of the holy Euro, countries in Europe are rushing to create Shari’a-compliant vehicles to tap the lucrative Muslim investment market. International investment and banking firms have also entered the fray. The Shari’a compliant investment market is growing – and growing fast.

What the greedy bankers don’t know is that Shari’a compliment finance is not part of ancient Shari’a law.

Islamic clerics tout Shari'a-finance as one of the central components of Islam. But this is untrue. Shari'a economics did not exist until the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood Maulana Abul Ala Mawdudi and Sayyd Qutb invented it them in the 1940s and 1950s. As Alex Alexiev explained in a recent paper on the subject published by the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, the purpose of Shari'a economics was to mobilize Muslim support for radical Islam by promoting Muslim exclusivity and separatism. That is, the purpose of Shari'a finance is religious and political, not financial.

Given the religious rather than financial aim of Shari'a-compliant investing, it isn't surprising that Shari'a-compliant investments are little more than a word game. Paying lip service to the Koranic prohibition on interest-based transactions and risky investments, Mawdudi and Qutb invented various means to cover the fact that Shari'a-compliant investments involve both interest payments and risk.

UNDERSTANDING that Shari'a-compliant investments are the same as regular investments, banking and other financial institutions in the West that are naturally interested in attracting Islamic investors have enthusiastically opened Shari'a-compliant portfolios. Unfortunately, the banks' enthusiasm is raft with security and perhaps even criminal implications.

And guess who sits on the organizations that drive the Shari'a-compliant movement?

In order for investments to be defined as Shari'a-compliant, they must receive the approval of Shari'a advisors. Only certain Islamic entities are entitled to issue religious rulings or fatwas that can recognize investments as Shari'a-compliant. These entities include the Fiqh Academy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, which is associated with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC); the European Council for Fatwa Research, and the Fatwa Council of North America. All of these entities are associated with the radical pro-jihadist Wahabi and Salafi schools of Islam adhered to by groups such as al-Qaida and Hamas.

Similarly, the groups that these organizations spawned for the express purpose of overseeing Shari'a-compliant investments and the people authorized and recognized as Islamic authorities capable of declaring an investment Shari'a-compliant are identified with political Islam and, in several cases with terror financing and support. For instance, radical cleric and jihad ideologue Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi is recognized as an expert in Shari'a-compliant investments. So is Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani.

It may work out that by bringing what is essentially a cartel sympathetic to jihad into their institutions, they will inadvertently be picking up the slack caused by the shuttering of non-profits like the Holyland Foundation.

What was it that Lenin said? That the capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with? Are we selling that same rope to the Jihadists today?

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