Terrorist Organizations: Equal Opportunity Reaffirmation

By Michael Kraft

The unanimous decision yesterday by a federal appeals court to uphold the State Department’s designation of Kahane Chai, a “militant” Jewish group based in the West Bank, as a terrorist organization is a reminder that the U.S. Government’s efforts against terrorists are aimed not only at violent Muslim groups, despite frequent complaints by some Muslims.

Indeed, it was a 1994 attack on Palestinians in Hebron by a supporter of Kahane Chai, as well as bus bombing attacks the same year by Hamas against Israeli civilians, which helped prompt the U.S. law aimed against fundraising for foreign terrorist organizations.

The three-judge panel of U.S, Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia yesterday supported the State Department’s 2004 redesignation of Kahane Chai as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The group is an offshoot of the Jewish Defense League, which was founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated by an Arab terrorist in New York in 1990.

Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg said that then Secretary of State Colin Powell acted reasonably in reaffirming the original designation because of links between Kahane Chai to death threats against Israeli police officers and former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.

The designations are made under provisions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996. (P. L. 104-132). The law makes it illegal to provide funding or other forms of material support to groups formally designated by the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Treasury, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO’s). The initial designation was made in 1997 but under a sunset provision designations have to be renewed every two years or they would expire.

Currently 42 groups are designated following the State Department’s preparation of detailed administrative records that have to be approved by the Justice and Treasury Departments. The list includes includes Middle Eastern groups such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and half a dozen other Palestinian groups, as well as Kahane Chai and its alias Kach, and various terrorist organizations in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Two other designated groups --or their U.S supporters -- have appealed the designation as allowed under provisions of the 1996 law. They are the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known as the Tamil Tigers, which recently resumed their offensive against the Sri Lanka Government, and the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), an anti-Iran group that had been supported by Saddam Hussein and conducted attacks on Iranian court facilities and other civilian targets.

These 1996 provisions were a major step in the effort to take the offensive against terrorism funding – a campaign that accelerated after 9/11. Previously U.S counterterrorism laws focused primarily on state sponsors of terrorism. But beginning in the early 1990’s there was a growing awareness in the U.S. Government that an increasing number of terrorist groups were turning to front companies and fund raising among sympathizers instead of depending on such terrorist-supporting countries as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria for financial support.

Although there were early efforts to criminalize the provision of material support for specific acts of terrorism, the law to curb fund raising for terrorist organizations themselves was precipitated by two series of terrorist attacks in the Middle East.

The first event was the action by Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an American-born immigrant to Israel, who shot and killed 29 Arabs at a mosque in Hebron in February, 1994 before being beaten to death. He was believed to have been affiliated with Kahane Chai or Kach, small groups of right wing Jewish extremists who had been involved in several terrorist acts and raised funds in the U.S. The Hebron massacre prompted the State Department and Justice Department to convene interagency meetings to determine whether (a) existing laws could be used to curb money flows to terrorist groups and/or (b) whether new laws were needed. The second event was a series of deadly bus bombings in Israel later that year by the Palestinian Hamas group, the same organization that won the Palestinian elections earlier this year.

The massive 1994 Crime Bill was then working its way through Congress at the time but the interagency group, on which I served for the State Department, concluded that this bill was not the best vehicle for adding potentially controversial counterterrorism measures. So a decision was made to introduce separate new legislation for the 1995 Congressional session. That bill was enacted after modifications and lengthy hearings more than a year later as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

At the same time the Clinton administration took a stop-gap measure. It used its authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to issue an executive order in January 1995 freezing the assets of 12 Middle East terrorist groups on the grounds that they threatened the use of force to undermine the Middle East peace process. The “dirty dozen” included 10 Palestinian groups and two Jewish groups, Kahane Chai and Kach (which have since merged).

Thus, the actions by both the right wing Jewish extremists involved with Kahane Chai as well as the terrorist attacks by HAMAS and other Arab groups were key factors in developing the 10-year-old law authorizing the designation of foreign terrorist organizations and banning the knowingly provision of material support to them.

A salient difference, however, is that the Israeli Government declared Kahane Chai a terrorist group (in 1994, three years before the U.S) and the group is condemned by most Israelis and Jews as an extremist fringe element. Meanwhile, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorist groups have widespread support, overt or tacit, of many Palestinians and other Arabs and their leaders for their suicide bombings and other attacks aimed deliberately at civilians.

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