The ruling establishes a major precedent. If you give money to a group engaging in terrorism, you are liable, even if the money was not meant for terrorism. This assumes you knew what the group was doing and they have been deemed as terrorist.
An appellate court has upheld a $156 million judgment against two organizations found to have provided financial support to Hamas and sent the claim against a third back to district court for a new trial. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling Wednesday that eliminated the distinction between supporting the violent and social wings of a terrorist group.
“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,” Judge Richard Posner wrote for the majority.
It is, afterall, okay for Israel to treat Palestine the way the Nazis treated the Warsaw Ghetto.
Hmm. So if you wanted to do work in the (now shrinking) LTTE-controlled area of Sri Lanka, where ALL aid money goes through the LTTE, you’d have a choice of getting shot by them for noncompliance or never returning to the U.S. Or, of course, letting people starve. How humane of us. And abandoning people to starve never encourages them to turn to terrorism…
Fortunately, governments around the globe, especially Japan and the EU, see things in far grayer terms. S’pose we’ll arrest any of those world leaders for “supporting terrorism” if they come to the White House?
In the aftermath of WWII, several of the soon-to-be founding fathers of Israel had prices on their heads from Britain, who called them terrorists.