On Dec. 3, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision to award the family of terrorism victim David Boim $156 million from three Palestinian charities.
Boim was fatally shot at a bus stop outside Jerusalem in 1996 by Hamas terrorists. His family filed suit against three charities whose money supported Hamas. The decision, handed down by Seventh Circuit Court, affirmed the basic principle that no distinction exists between the charitable and the terror wings of Hamas. The court reaffirmed the awarding to Boim’s family of $156 million to be paid by the three defendants, the Islamic Association for Palestine-National, the American Muslim Society and the Quranic Literacy Institute. Chicago resident Muhammad Salah was also charged, but the court dropped him from the case because at the time of Boim’s murder, Salah was in an Israeli jail for financing Hamas. The court also sent civil allegations against a fourth charity, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, back to U.S. District Court for a decision on whether it should have to pay part of the $156 million.
As blogger Matthew Levitt at the Counterterrorism Blog noted, “coming on the heals of the “guilty on all counts” verdict in the HLF criminal trial last week, the Boim ruling is not just another landmark counterterrorism ruling but one more in a series of financial setbacks for Hamas.”
The court’s opinion in Boim v. Holy Land, et al., 05-1815, 05-1816, 05-1821 & 05-1822, 00 C 2905 is excerpted below:
“…consider an organization solely involved in committing terrorist acts and a hundred people all of whom know the character of the organization and each of whom contributes $1,000 to it, for a total of $100,000. The organization has additional resources from other, unknown contributors of $200,000 and it uses its total resources of $300,000 to recruit, train, equip, and deploy terrorists who commit a variety of terrorist acts one of which kills an American citizen. His estate brings a suit under section 2333 against one of the knowing contributors of $1,000. The tort principles that we have reviewed would make the defendant jointly and severally liable with all the other contributors. The fact that the death could not be traced to any of the contributors and that some of them may have been ignorant of the mission of the organization (and therefore not liable under a statute requiring proof of intentional or reckless misconduct) would be irrelevant. The knowing contributors as a whole would have significantly enhanced the risk of terrorist acts and thus the probability that the plaintiff’s decedent would be a victim, and this would be true even if Hamas had incurred a cost of more than $1,000 to kill the American, so that no defendant’s contribution was a sufficient condition of his death.
This case is only a little more difficult because Hamas is (and was at the time of David Boim’s death) engaged not only in terrorism but also in providing health, educational, and other social welfare services. The defendants other than Salah directed their support exclusively to those services. But if you give money to an organization that you know to be engaged in terrorism, the fact that you earmark it for the organization’s nonterrorist activities does not get you off the liability hook... The reasons are twofold. The first is the fungibility of money. If Hamas budgets $2 million for terrorism and $2 million for social services and receives a donation of $100,000 for those services, there is nothing to prevent its using that money for them while at the same time taking $100,000 out of its social services “account” and depositing it in its terrorism “account.”
Second, Hamas’s social welfare activities reinforce its terrorist activities both directly by providing economic assistance to the families of killed, wounded, and captured Hamas fighters and making it more costly for them to defect (they would lose the material benefits that Hamas provides them), and indirectly by enhancing Hamas’s popularity among the Palestinian population and providing funds for indoctrinating schoolchildren.. Anyone who knowingly contributes to the nonviolent wing of an organization that he knows to engage in terrorism is knowingly contributing to the organization’s terrorist activities. And that is the only knowledge that can reasonably be required as a premise for liability. To require proof that the donor intended that his contribution be used for terrorism—to make a benign intent a defense— would as a practical matter eliminate donor liability except in cases in which the donor was foolish enough to admit his true intent. It would also create a First Amendment Catch-22, as the only basis for inferring intent would in the usual case be a defendant’s public declarations of support for the use of violence to achieve political ends.
