I’m Not The Only One

by Daniel Cuevas

Originally published on Political Storm on December 25, 2004.

Lots of things I see on television make me groan in disgust; but none have urned my stomach as much as the taxpayer-financed propaganda campaign launched by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and its whipping boy, the Partnership For A Drug-Free America (PDFA).
One commercial (I can’t remember which organization put it out) features sound bites from various teenagers, telling the viewer how the marijuana they purchased helped fund terrorists. The DEA Museum in Arlington, Virginia and its traveling museum currently have an interesting exhibit,
“Target America: Drug Traffickers, Terrorists and You.” The traveling museum began its tour last September in Manhattan and it insists that selling and trafficking drugs has become a lucrative source of income for terrorist organizations. The government has gone so far as to link drug use with terrorism. They’ve even invented a new word to describe it: narco-terrorism.
I get it. The DEA and PDFA want people to stop using illegal drugs and abusing the legal ones. And just as the government has used September 11th as an excuse to rob Americans of their civil liberties, these two agencies want to exploit the tragedy of that day to get people to stop using drugs by using an angle that has no evidence of any link between Islamic terrorist organizations and drug trafficking or selling.
Do not misinterpret this column as defending drug abuse. I’ve seen what drugs can do and how low it can bring a person. And I’m talking REAL drugs, not marijuana. Drugs are already bad on their own. But, it is unnecessary to
convince people not to use real drugs by linking them to terrorism.
Providing this B.S. link between drugs and terrorism will only hurt their credibility as authorities on drug abuse, when people discover there’s no evidence to back this claim. And once people stop believing what these two very influential groups tell them about drugs, the factual information they
provide about drugs will lose credibility as well.
The DEA’s museum exhibit can’t seem to link Islamic terrorist organizations to narco-terrorism, either. Even this exhibit admitted that the majority of the terrorist groups who engage in narco-terrorism are Colombian rebels and other leftist Latin American militias. Last time I checked, it
wasn’t 19 Colombians who hijacked those airplanes on 9-11.
The few traces of evidence involving narco-terrorism and the Muslim world the DEA could find was in opium production in Afghanistan. Even our liberal and conservative news sources have been unable to find incidents in which
Islamic terrorists have been found to use narco-terrorism so much that it would warrant a DEA-sponsored nationwide campaign linking drugs to terrorism.
And what makes the DEA an expert on terrorism? Of the various federal agencies which are now intertwined with the Department of Homeland Security, the DEA is not one of them.
So now that we understand drug trafficking is not the way Islamic militant groups raise money for terrorist activities, let’s examine some more credible sources of income.
As politically incorrect as this may sound, Islam and its many mosques around the world may be the biggest donor to terrorist groups. Just last August, ABC News reported that a mosque in Anaheim, California was a major donor to a Texas-based charity called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which has been found to funnel millions of dollars to the Palestinian group Hamas, which has been identified by our government as a terrorist organization. Another mosque in Springfield, Missouri (notice these are not large cities) owned by the Oregon-based Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, is being investigated for allegedly donating to terrorist organizations.
The imam for the California mosque, Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, claims he believed the Holy Land Foundation’s mission was to give supplies and food to the needy in Palestine; not to aid Islamic militants, and I believe him.
Most Christians are obliged to offer a tithe to their church, which is traditionally 10 percent of their income. But few Christians ever ask their ministers or priests exactly how the church uses that tithe because they trust that their church is using their donation in a benevolent way. Church leaders may not take the time to investigate a religious charity, taking their claims of service at face value.
But for all anyone knows, their local church might just be unknowingly sending these donations to Bible-thumping rednecks who blow up abortion clinics and assassinate abortion doctors. The same may very well ring true for
imams and those who faithfully go to mosque and give donations without ever questioning where that money ends up.
Now if a mosque in the United States, which should be the least likely nation in the world to find donors for Islamic terrorist groups, can unknowingly support Hamas, imagine how easy it is for mosques outside of the U.S., especially in the Middle East, to help finance such groups as Hamas,
Al Qaeda, or the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
The second biggest source of income for terrorists? Oil -
indirectly. According to the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) the countries with the five largest known oil reserves in the world are, starting with the largest, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, all Middle Eastern Islamic nations. These five nations alone contain a combined 668,577 million barrels of oil, OPEC records claim, which amount to about 64 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

According to the CIA, these five nations are all extremely wealthy with Gross Domestic Products in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars, except for Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose GDPs skyrocket into the hundreds of billions of dollars. These nations didn’t become wealthy by dominating the global falafel market; they did it by selling scores of gallons of oil to Japan and Europe. With America’s growing fetish for gas-guzzling vehicles, we too are responsible for making billionaires out of Middle Eastern oil barons.
The increased personal wealth among these countries’ citizens means larger donations to their favorite mosque or Islamic charity. And whether or not they are aware of it, their mosque could very well be funneling the money to
charities which may be fronts for terrorist groups.
The third biggest source of income for terrorists? African diamonds, known by many in the international community as “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds.” For years, money from the mining and trafficking of African diamonds have been known to finance many of the bloody civil wars in
Africa.
Only after September 2001 did the U.S. government pay more attention to money laundering committed through the trafficking and sale of African diamonds. The London-based Global Witness, a group dedicated to exposing the connection between the exploitation of natural resources and human rights violations in various parts of the world, reported April 2003 that Al-Qaeda operatives in Kenya and Tanzania had established diamond mining and trading companies going as far back as 1993.
Even though President Bush and Congress were smart enough to enact the Clean Diamond Trade Act of 2003, banning the sale of blood diamonds in the U.S. and several trade organizations in the jeweler and diamond industry have adopted policies refusing to buy blood diamonds, the worldwide demand for diamonds is overwhelming, and eventually some dealers may find it cheaper to purchase these illegal diamonds on the black market. How sadly ironic that diamonds, a universal symbol of love and affection, is being used to help Islamic terrorists demonstrate their hate for America.
Why doesn’t the U.S. government run commercials linking diamonds and oil to terrorism? Why don’t we see a government-sponsored commercial featuring a Desperate Housewife-type with a huge diamond wedding ring or a rapper with lots of “bling bling” hanging off his neck and they can both explain how their lust for precious gems helped terrorists buy one more submachine gun or a few more sticks of dynamite to strap to their bodies? Or maybe the
government could run a commercial with a suburban soccer mom or some yuppie who can explain how their gas-guzzling SUV helps mosques in Saudi Arabia funnel money to Islamic fundamentalists. How about a Public Service Announcement urging Muslims to ask their religious leaders just where their regular donations end up?
Sure, these commercials may seem a bit exaggerated or extreme, but not as much as the ones linking drugs to terrorism.
Drugs have served America as a convenient scapegoat for many years. But now that we are faced with a real threat like terrorism, perhaps it’s appropriate to devote more of our energy and resources to fighting terrorism and the things that really finance it.