Catching Up with Enaam Arnaout of Benevolence International Foundation

There are many sad stories about Muslims who were sent to prison. Not all of them were misguided romantics framed by the FBI. Some earlier victims of the “War on Terror” were sincere followers of Islam, who went out of their way to serve the poor and hungry in war torn areas around the globe. Many of these people like Iraqi Dr. Rafil Dhafir, of Help the Needy and Palestinian Shukri Abu Baker of Holy Land Foundation, will likely die in prison due to their long sentences, for no crime besides raising money to feed Muslims living under US and Israeli military occupation. 

Dr. Aafia Siddique, a child development researcher who became passionately obsessed with helping the Bosnians, started a collection of used boots while studying at at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She made a purchase in a military surplus outlet, possibly steel toed boots, sparking FBI interest. Dr. Siddique and her three children were kidnapped while awaiting a train in Pakistan in 2003. She and at least one son spent years being tortured in Bagram prison in Afghanistan until news of her existence was spread by prisoners who were released as a result of a bombing by the Taliban. Siddique was released to the US after inquiries from the UK as to her whereabouts following these reports. She remains imprisoned in a mental hospital in New York State despite repeated requests from the Pakistani government to have her repatriated.

Therefore, it is on a bright note that TMO reports that our dear Syrian brother Enaam Arnaout was released in July 2010. He is alive in Chicago and doing reasonably well after serving nine years in a CMU prison in Terre Haute, largely for his involvement in supplying the Bosnian army with steel toed boots in an effort to help prevent injuries from land mines. Prosecutors accused him of defrauding donors to Benevolence International Foundation, which was collecting money for humanitarian relief, in providing “military equipment.” However, this author clearly remembers that BIF fundraisers focused on the need for protective footwear. There was no fraud involved.

The whole case made very little sense to the public, since we thought the US was supposedly on Bosnia’s side in the war. Court documents imply that the charity was targeted by neocons in the Bush administration because international money exchanges made by Islamic charity organizations often use mechanisms outside of the western banking system. 

Muslims sponsoring orphans in foreign lands were not considered the threat, per se, but the ability of Muslim organizations to move money around in order to perhaps influence the outcome of world events – keeping people alive  to fight another day – was seen as a threat to the world order. 

Arnaout’s drama unfolded in 2002, when he was taken away from us, shortly after his charity office in Palos Hills, IL was raided by the FBI. Bush closed all the orphanages and clinics that American Muslims sponsored in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan and China; upon which thousands of children, including polio victims, were depending on for their survival. 

The Chicago Tribune reports: “About a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration highlighted the charges against Arnaout, saying he had provided material support to al-Qaida. But on the day of his trial in 2003, the Syrian native pleaded guilty to diverting charity money to pay for boots, uniforms and other equipment for Islamic fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya. The government dropped charges that he aided a terrorist group.

“According to his lawyers, Arnaout was released in July 2010 from federal prison to a halfway house, then placed on home detention so he could work as a used-car salesman. By February 2011, he began his three-year supervised release.”

That he received so light a sentence (nine years) is remarkable, especially after the publicizing of his old photos from LIFE magazine in the 80’s showing him walking next to Osama bin Laden, testifying to Arab News on Soviet napalm bombing, and US news reports that he had driven bin Laden’s wife to the airport. 

While he was working on his masters degree in Pakistan, he met many public figures including Abdullah Azzam. Arnaout fought in the Battle of Jaji in 1987 against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and is regarded by many as a war hero. 

Now 50 years old, Arnaout lives alone in Chicago and works long hours at a used car lot in order to support his six children, who live abroad. He has not seen them, nor their mothers, since his release from prison due to fears that he might be subject to arrest if he travels to those countries because of his history. Arnaout communicates by Skype with his family regularly. 

Arnaout gained permission from a judge to travel to Saudi Arabia twice during his probation period in order to see his elderly mother, brother, and other family members. He was greeted with rose petals and great festivities, as he kissed his mother’s feet. His travel was delayed due to harassment by Turkish and Jordanian authorities at airports, despite being cleared for travel by US authorities. His probation period will end in February 2014.

Arnaout is the eighth of ten children, three of whom were murdered in their home in Hamah by a special force of the Syrian army in 1980, due to his brother Bassam Arnaout, a famous leader of an Islamic Brotherhood splinter group of front fighters in militant opposition to Hafez al Assad’s government.

Myths and Facts about al-Qaeda

The media myth of a global Islamic conspiracy never got much traction in America before 2001 because the minority Muslim American population simply did not seem like much of a threat, because Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States are loyal US allies, and because Americans generally have a positive attitude toward wealthy investors. After 9/11 pro-Israel propagandists exploited public ignorance and created a nightmarish fantasy of al-Qaeda in order to put the US and allies into conflict with the entire Islamic world. What is al-Qaeda? What do they believe? What do they actually do?

Osama bin Laden first used the term “al-Qaeda” in an interview in 1998, probably in reference to a 1988 article written by Palestinian activist Abdullah Azzam entitled “al-Qa`ida al-Sulba” (the Solid Foundation). In it, Azzam elaborates upon the ideas of the Egyptian scholar Sayed Qutb to explain modern jihadi principles. Qutb, author of Social Justice in Islam, is viewed as the founder of modern Arab-Islamic political religious thought. Qutb is comparable to John Locke in Western political development. Both Azzam and Qutb were serious men of exceptional integrity and honor.

While Qutb was visiting the USA in 1949, he and several friends were turned away from a movie theater because the owner thought they were black. ‘But we’re Egyptians,’ one of the group explained. The owner apologized and offered to let them in, but Qutb refused, galled by the fact that black Egyptians could be admitted but black Americans could not,” recounts Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower. Qutb predicted that the struggle between Islam and materialism would define the modern world. He embraced martyrdom in 1966 in rejection of Arab socialist politics.

Azzam similarly rejected secular Palestinian nationalist politics as an impediment to moral virtue. He opposed terrorist attacks on civilians and had strong reservations about ideas like offensive jihad, or preventive war. He also hesitated to designate any Muslim leader as an apostate and preferred to allow God to make such judgments. Inspired by the courage and piety of Afghan Muslims struggling against the Soviets, Azzam reinterpreted Qutb’s concept of individual and collective obligation of Muslims in his fatwa entitled “Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Iman (Faith).” Qutb would have prioritized the struggle of Egyptian Muslims to transform Egypt into a virtuous Islamic state while Azzam argued that every individual Muslim had an obligation to come to the aid of oppressed Muslims everywhere, whether they are Afghan, Kosovar, Bosnian, Thai, Filipino, or Chechen.

John Calvert of Creighton University writes, “This ideology… would soon energize the most significant jihad movement of modern times.”

At Azzam’s call, Arabs from many countries joined America’s fight against Communism in Afghanistan. No Arab jihadi attack was considered terrorism when Azzam led the group, or later when bin Laden ran the group. Because the global Islamic movement overlapped with the goals of the US government, Arab jihadis worked and traveled frictionlessly throughout the world between Asia, Arabia and America. Azzam was assassinated in Pakistan in 1989, but legends of the courageous sacrifices of the noble Arab Afghans energized the whole Islamic world.

After the Soviets left Afghanistan, bin Laden relocated to Sudan in 1992. At the time he was probably undisputed commander of nothing more than a small group, which became even smaller after he lost practically all his money on Sudan investments. He returned to Afghanistan in 1996, where the younger Afghans, the Taliban welcomed him on account of his reputation as a veteran war hero.

There is no real evidence that bin Laden or al-Qaeda had any connection to the Ugandan and Tanzanian embassy attacks or any of the numerous attacks for which they have been blamed. Pro-Israel propagandists like Daniel Pipes or Matthew Levitt needed an enemy for their war against Muslim influence on American culture more than random explosions in various places needed a central commander. By the time the World Trade Center was destroyed, the Arab fighters surrounding Osama bin Laden were just a dwindling remnant living on past glories of Afghanistan’s struggle against Communism. Al-Qaeda has never been and certainly is not today an immensely powerful terror organization controlling Islamic banks and charities throughout the world.

Al-Qaeda maintained training camps in Afghanistan like Camp Faruq, where Muslims could receive basic training just as American Jews go to Israel for military training with the IDF. There they learned to disassemble, clean and reassemble weapons, and got to associate with old warriors, who engaged in great heroism against the Soviets but did not do much since. Many al-Qaeda trainees went on to serve US interests in Central Asia (e.g. Xinjiang) in the 1990s but from recent descriptions the camps seem to currently provide a form of adventure tourism with no future enlistment obligations.

Although western media treats al-Qaeda as synonymous with Absolute Evil, much of the world reveres the Arab Afghans as martyr saints. Hundreds of pilgrims visit Kandahar’s Arab cemetery daily, believing that the graves of those massacred in the 2001 US bombing of Afghanistan possess miraculous healing powers.


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article.

Bin Laden Hype Misled Public

Khaleej Times


A National Public Radio rehashing of the 1999 Egypt Air crash made me uneasy. It seemed like an effort to indoctrinate listeners to believe that Muslims would commit suicide by deliberately crashing passenger jets. I wondered what was coming.

The sky was blue and deceptively cheerful in New Jersey a few weeks later on September 11, 2001, when I heard about the attack on the World Trade Center. My husband called and told me to turn on the television. 
As soon as I saw the flames and explosions, I recognised a professional made-for-TV event.

As I watched the endless repetition of dramatic camera shots, I perceived an attempt to hypnotise the public with a list of suspects that had emerged before any serious investigation could possibly have begun. One ridiculous news story claimed that Mohammed Atta had left behind a handwritten note at the airport that began, “In the Name of Allah, my family, and myself!” No Muslim would ever use such a construction. Grandiose spectacles like 9/11 have not typically characterised Islamic militants. The Taleban used to kill a handful of Russian occupation soldiers a day.
 In the years since the WTC fell, there has never been any repeat attack on American soil.

Reuters reported on September 13, 2001, that Osama bin Laden told Taleban officials he had no role in the terror attacks in the United States. Bin Laden may be a lot of things, but he is not known to be a liar. “We asked from him, (and) he told (us) we don’t have any hand in this action,” stated Taleban ambassador Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. Rather than provide evidence against bin Laden, the US imprisoned Zaeef in Guantanamo. He now lives under house arrest in Kabul.

On September 18, 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials had warned Washington beforehand that “large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent,” and specifically linked the plot to bin Laden.
Problems in the official version soon developed. Some of the TV photographs were faked, at least 7 of the alleged hijackers were alive, and one had died before 2001. Bin Laden videotapes aired on TV were proven fraudulent and mistranslated.

On June 5, 2006 Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI told Muckraker Report that bin Laden “has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Robert Dreyfuss reported that former CIA officials claimed Department of Defense officials were “producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war.” Political analyst Eric Margolis notes, “Such ‘experts’ echoed the White House party line and all were dead wrong. Yet amazingly, many are still on air, continuing to misinform the public.”

A man whose nine children were killed when the US bombed his home told Yvonne Ridley, “There has been a lot of fighting around here between the Taleban and the Americans. They are searching for Osama bin Laden but everyone knows he is not here.”

The Pentagon has used the bin Laden hype for years to justify stationing warships and submarines off the Pakistani coast; kidnapping and torturing prisoners such as Abu Zubaydah and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammad based on hearsay by anonymous sources; and testing new hi-tech weapons like Predator unmanned drones and air-sucking thermo-baric bombs on a defenseless population. The US government arrested thousands of Muslims and deported hundreds. Not a single one of them has ever been convicted on terrorism charges.

In February 2009, 9/11 widow Beverly Eckert died in a plane crash days after she voiced her concerns to President Obama about the 9/11 investigation. Eckert was suing the Federal government to force testimony about what went wrong that day. She formed a Family Steering Committee to address the 9/11 Commission with questions like why on September 9th the president already had a war plan on his desk to go into Afghanistan; how the passports of two alleged hijackers survived the inferno; why Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the metal from the collapsed towers sold as scrap for recycling overseas.

“That metal was evidence which could have helped explain the collapse,” Eckert believed. She asked why high-ranking Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans for the morning of September 11 “apparently because of security concerns?” What are the names of the individuals and the financial institutions that bought “puts” on American Airlines and United Airlines during the three weeks prior to 9/11? Who profited? Why didn’t F-16s intercept the hijacked airliners? Why was protocol not followed on 9/11? Why did Dick Cheney hinder CIA and FBI investigations?

“If what the government has told us about 9/11 is a lie,” said William Rodriguez, a WTC janitor who survived the attack, “somebody has to take action to reveal the truth.”


Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics