September 25, 2003 Contact: (212) 481-1500 Attn: NEWS EDITOR

Also Suspected Member of a Terrorist Group

ZOA URGES FBI TO CANCEL AWARD TO OFFICIAL OF PRO-TERRORIST GROUP

NEW YORK - The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is urging the FBI to
cancel its plans to give an award to an official of an Arab-American group
that has praised killers of Americans and accused America of committing
"genocide" in Iraq.

FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to give the FBI's "Exceptional
Public Service Award" on October 9 to Imad Hamad, the Midwest Regional
director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). The ADC
has praised Hezbollah --which massacred 241 Americans in a 1983 car-bomb
attack in Lebanon-- as "a Lebanese resistance organization engaged in the
legitimate defense of Lebanese land...[t]his hardly qualifies as terrorism."
(ADC president Hala Maksoud, Washington Times, Aug. 25, 1996)

In a letter to Mueller, ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, Chairman of
the Board Dr. Alan Mazurek, and National Executive Committee chairman Dr.
Michael Goldblatt wrote: "Extremists who sympathize with Hezbollah should
not be given awards. It makes a mockery of America's war against terrorism,
and sends a message to terrorists and their supporters that the United
States is not fully committed to fighting terror."

Syndicated columnist Debbie Schlussel (New York Post, Sept. 18,2003) notes
that the Immigration and Naturalization Service fought for more than 20
years to have Hamad deported from the U.S. to his native Lebanon, because it
had concluded that he was a member of the terrorist Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. But due to pressure from Michigan politicians, he
was permitted to remain in America.

Schlussel points out that Hamad has publicly protested the U.S. government's
arrest of four Arab-Americans in Detroit who were part of an Al Qaeda terror
cell, and the prosecution of Omar Al-Shishani for laundering $12-million in
fraudulent checks to finance Al Qaeda. In an interview with Fox-TV's Detroit
affiliate, Hamad defended a Palestinian Authority children's television
program encouraging Arab children to become suicide bombers and murder Jews
and Christians; Hamad called the program "patriotic."

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee: What the Record Reveals

I. Defending Hezbollah:

1. Asked by Geraldo Rivera, "How do you stand about Hezbollah and Hamas? Do
you condemn them?," ADC spokesman Hussein Ibish said: "No. I think that
Hezbollah fought a very good war against the Israelis, a guerrilla war..."
(Rivera Live, CNBC, June 5, 2000)

2. "Everywhere Hezbollah fighters, derided by the Israeli and U.S.
governments as 'terrorists,' conducted themselves in an exemplary
manner...[They are] a disciplined and responsible liberation force." --ADC
spokesman Hussein Ibish, Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2000

3. "I find it shocking...that [one] would include Hezbollah in...[an]
inventory of Middle East 'terrorist' groups...Hezbollah is a Lebanese
resistance organization engaged in the legitimate defense of Lebanese
land...[t]his hardly qualifies as terrorism." --ADC president Hala Maksoud,
Washington Times, Aug. 25, 1996

4. "We are all proud of the heroic resistance of its people and their
steadfastness." --ADC president Maksoud, referring to Hezbollah, ADC Times,
June-July 1996

5. ADC president Hala Maksoud says she supports "the Lebanese and
Palestinian resistance against occupation," and that Hezbollah is "a
resistance organization engaged in the legitimate defense of Lebanese
and." --Commentary, Jan.1999

6. The ADC has "campaigned against two 1997 amendments forbidding most
financial transactions with state sponsors of terrorism." --Commentary, Jan.
1999

II Defending Hamas

1. "I will not call it a terrorist organization. I mean, I know many people
in Hamas. They are very respectable. They don't accept violence. And I don't
believe Hamas, as an organization, is a violent organization." --then-ADC
president Hamzi Moghrabi, Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 27, 1994

2. "Most outrageous of all the allegations 'reported' by Symmes was his
opinion that 'Hamas is a band of murderers'." --then-ADC president Albert
Mokhiber, Washington City Paper, June 11, 1993

3. "We strongly urge the United States not to extradite [senior Hamas

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Supporter

leader] Dr. [Mousa] Abu Marzook to Israel..." --ADC president Hala Maksoud,
in an ADC press release, January 31, 1997

III. Accusing the U.S. of "Genocide"

1. "Embargoes and blockades are genocide." [From a "Children's March to the
UN" leaflet, signed by ADC and other groups, advertising a July 1, 1998
rally]

2. Referred to "the genocidal effects of these sanctions on innocent Iraqi
children, women and men" --Letter, ADC president Hala Maksoud, Washington
Post, February 15, 1997

3. "While there have been levels of non-compliance by Iraq, the regime has
conformed with most of the requirements to dismantle its weapons of mass
destruction."

--ADC press release, Nov. 9, 1997

4. "Ignoring this massive human suffering [in Iraq] is ultimately based on
the racist premise that the lives of Iraqis are less than human." --ADC
Action Alert, October 22, 1997

5. "It is shocking that the US would again target the long-suffering Iraqi
people with lawless missile attacks." --ADC press release, January 25, 1999

IV. Anti-Semitic Statements

1. "You and I both know that Marlon Brando was quite right when he pointed
out that Jews run Hollywood. The decision-makers, the play-callers, are
Jews, completely out of proportion to their numbers. --ADC Los Angeles
president Donald Bustany, Jerusalem Report, Oct.17, 1996

2. "Some Jews ... seem to believe that God has chosen them. And, imbued with
a strong resolve by that belief, [they have] appropriated the property of
others under circumstances that the rest of the world recognizes as outright
theft. Three thousand years ago the Jewish people--led by Moses, Joshua,
King Saul and King David--took by force the land of the people of Canaan. In
this century--still led by Moses in a sense--they took by force and some
unsavory diplomacy the land of the Arabs of Palestine."

--ADC Los Angeles president Donald Bustany, Washington Report on Middle
East Affairs, December 1995

* * *
The Zionist Organization of America, founded in 1897, is the oldest
pro-Israel organization in the United States. The ZOA works to strengthen
U.S.-Israel relations, educates the American public and Congress about the
dangers that Israel faces, and combats anti-Israel bias in the media and on
college campuses. Its past presidents have included Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Dr. Abba Hillel Silver.