Second Chance for Salah

Earlier this week Chicago got a visit from the head of US Homeland Security, worried about possible terrorist strikes this summer and citing our street security cameras as a model for the nation. Yesterday Muhammad Salah, the "simple businessman" who received $1 million from a top Hamas leader according to bank records, has gotten a slap on the wrist sentence here in the US. Tribune:

In a case that riveted Chicago's Muslim community, a Bridgeview businessman accused of aiding terrorists was sentenced Wednesday to 21 months in prison for lying in a civil lawsuit. [snip]

Salah, a U.S. citizen, had won a key victory in February when a federal jury acquitted him of conspiring to support Hamas extremists and found him guilty on a less serious charge of obstruction of justice.

But federal prosecutors argued that Salah's lies -- about his role in Hamas and, later, they said, about alleged torture by Israeli agents -- deserved a 10-year prison term. [snip]

Prosecutors charged Salah and two co-defendants in 2004 with being top leaders in the Palestinian extremist group Hamas and engaging in a long-running conspiracy to funnel millions of dollars to support Mideast terrorism. Salah was arrested in Israel in 1993 and spent nearly five years in prison there on similar charges.

The indictment also charged that Salah lied under oath in written answers he gave in a civil suit filed by the family of David Boim, an American student killed in a Hamas shooting. [Boim was from the Chicago suburbs, murdered at the age of 17 in Israel, waiting for the bus.] In 2004, a federal jury awarded Boim's parents $156 million after finding that Salah provided support to Hamas. [snip]

"The message to the community is that you cannot lie in a court of law," St. Eve told Deutsch.

Even the jurors who acquitted Salah on terrorism charges disbelieved Salah's version of his 1993 interrogation, St. Eve said. "I talked to the jury afterward," St. Eve said. "They believed the [Israeli] agents."

The jurors acquitted Salah of the terrorism charge because they believed he had withdrawn from Hamas activities long ago and was no longer part of any conspiracy, St. Eve said.

Salah says he's a patriot. Maybe he'll write a book on who the real conspirators are. Maybe not. He might have some of that $1 million stashed away. Now he has a second chance.