Arizona resident Tahnee Gonzales has pled guilty to causing damage at a mosque in Tempe, Arizona, a year after she live-streamed videos online of her and another harassing Muslim congregants and breaking into a mosque – in one instance with her children in tow.
Her unpleasant behavior has rightly led to punishment. But the details of her sentencing, as part of her plea agreement, are baffling. According to Arizona Republic, Gonzales has been placed on “supervised probation,” under which she is required to complete “225 hours of community service at Helping Hand for Relief.”
Regular readers of Islamist Watch will be familiar with Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD). A wealthy international aid charity, HHRD is an arm of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a U.S. proxy for Jamaat-e-Islami, one of South Asia’s most prominent Islamist movements, responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Bangladeshis during that country’s 1971 Liberation War. Just last month, the Indian government partially banned Jamaat-e-Islami because of its involvement with “extremism and militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere.”
HHRD officials and staff openly identify as Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) operatives. Chairman Mohsin Ansari, for example, is an alumnus of Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, the student wing of JI’s branch in Pakistan. Along with pro-Islamist and openly anti-semitic rhetoric, Ansari frequently promotes JI on his Facebook account, and attends JI rallies and events in America, Europe, and Pakistan.
More importantly, HHRD openly works with designated terrorist organizations. In December 2017, HHRD organized a conference in Pakistan in conjunction with the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation and the Milli Muslim League, the respective charitable and political wings of the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the deadly 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. A year before Helping Hand’s conference, in 2016, Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation was itself designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.
Harassing Muslims and breaking into a mosque should indeed be punished by the courts. Most reasonable people, however, would question the wisdom of this particular court-ordered redress. Gifting taxpayer-financed labor to a terror-tied charity with a long history of extremist activity is an enormous mistake.
