Whereas Insan Hak ve Hurriyetleri ve Insani Yardim Vakfi
(IHH), a Turkish Islamic nongovernmental organization (known in English as the
Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), was a
leading member of the coalition that organized the recent Gaza
Flotilla
to breach Israel’s coastal security by breaking the lawful and
necessary Israeli blockade of Gaza;
Whereas the IHH is a member of the Union of
Good
, a Saudi Arabia-based coalition that was formed to provide
material support to Hamas and other Islamic terror groups and that was named as
a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the United States Department of the
Treasury in 2008;
Whereas a 2006 report by the Danish Institute for
International Studies described the IHH as a front for funding terrorist
organizations and sending Mujahidin (Jihad warriors) to fight in countries such
as Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya;
Whereas in 2001, the IHH was named in a United States
Federal court trial as having played an important role
in
Al-Qaeda’s failed millennium plot
to bomb the Los Angeles
International Airport in late 1999;
Whereas France’s former top antiterrorism magistrate,
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who provided expert testimony in the 2001
millennium plot
trial, recently stated that IHH has
clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad
, and that the
IHH was responsible for moving funds, weapons, and mujahedeen to and
from Bosnia and Afghanistan
;
Whereas in 1997, Turkish security forces raided IHH
facilities and confiscated weapons, explosives, instructions for improvised
explosive devices (IEDs), and materials supporting violent Jihad
terrorism;
Whereas the United States Department of State and
intelligence agencies around the world have confirmed that representatives of
IHH have met with senior officials of FTOs within the last 3 years;
Whereas the IHH reportedly played a major part in
organizing and initiating the calculated and premeditated violent assault
against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) naval boarding party on board the
Turkish Mavi Marmara vessel, the one ship in the six-ship Gaza Flotilla that
refused to comply with the blockade and that deliberately initiated
violence;
Whereas the explicit objective of the Gaza Flotilla
organizers was to breach Israel’s coastal security by breaking the lawful and
necessary Israeli blockade of Gaza;
Whereas the breach would aid and abet Hamas, the
Palestinian FTO that controls Gaza, and that has launched thousands of rockets
at Israeli civilians in the course of its ongoing war against the Jewish State
of Israel;
Whereas Bülent Yildirim, leader of the IHH and the main
organizer of the Gaza Flotilla, explained at a February 2009 Hamas rally in
Gaza that IHH’s Gaza-related operations are part of a global Jihad to overthrow
governments and install Islamist dictatorships, saying: Anyone who does
not stand alongside Palestine … will be toppled
and If they kill
me—that is martyrdom for the sake of Allah … The entire world must know that if
they do not lift the embargo from Gaza, all the Muslims in the world will march
to Gaza.
;
Whereas, according to a June 7, 2010, report by the
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (known by its Hebrew acronym
MALAM), based on security interviews of the Gaza Flotilla participants, at
least 40 of the 500 passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara vessel were IHH
operatives who boarded the ship in an Istanbul port prior to the security
checks conducted at the port in Antalya, Turkey, to which the other passengers,
mostly humanitarian volunteers, were subject;
Whereas, according to this Intelligence and Terrorism
Information Center report, these IHH activists were equipped with
communications equipment, flak jackets embroidered with flags of the Republic
of Turkey, and gas masks; the group operated with a clear internal hierarchy,
with specific activists nominated as fighting commanders and who turned the
upper deck of the Mavi Marmara into its headquarters, blocking it off to other
passengers;
Whereas, according to the Intelligence and Terrorism
Information Center report, files found on laptops owned by the IHH members
pointed at strong ties between the IHH and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
of the Republic of Turkey, and that some of the activists even claimed that
Prime Minister Erdogan was personally involved in the flotilla’s
preparations;
Whereas a June 5, 2010, editorial in The Washington Post
argued that the relationship between Mr. Erdogan’s government and the
IHH ought to be one focus of any international investigation into the [Gaza
Flotilla] incident
; and
Whereas Muhammad Kaya, head of the IHH office in Gaza,
said on May 21, 2010, that the IHH planned to send flotillas to Gaza every
month: Now, therefore, be it
That the House of Representatives urges the
Secretary of State to conduct an investigation into—
(1)the role of the
IHH in providing financial, logistical, and material support to any entity
listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States Department of
State; and
(2)the role of any
foreign governments, including the Republic of Turkey, which may have aided and
abetted the organizers of the recent Gaza Flotilla mission to breach Israeli
coastal security and assault the naval defense forces of the State of Israel.