Lee An­na Ma­haraj

Re­porter

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

Na­tion of Is­lam T&T rep­re­sen­ta­tive Dr David Muham­mad says the Gov­ern­ment’s re­cent is­suance of a ter­ror­ist black­list, along with its move to freeze lo­cal as­sets of the three or­gan­i­sa­tions lo­cal­ly, is mere­ly an at­tempt to please the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment.

Last week, the Gov­ern­ment des­ig­nat­ed three Mid­dle East­ern or­gan­i­sa­tions—Hezbol­lah, Hamas and Iran’s Is­lam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard—as ter­ror­ist en­ti­ties, trig­ger­ing an im­me­di­ate freeze on T&T as­sets linked to the groups.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Dr Muham­mad al­so said that, as far as he is aware, there have been no re­ports of any as­sets be­ing frozen thus far.

“I don’t even think that Hezbol­lah or the Is­lam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion of Iran have any as­sets in Trinidad, and the on­ly group that would be di­rect­ly in as­so­ci­a­tion would be the Shi­ite mem­bers of the Shi­ite Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty, who them­selves have, for sev­er­al decades in this coun­try, been pro­vid­ing so­cial ser­vices to the com­mu­ni­ties, and have not even once been in­volved in any kind of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty or be­hav­iour. So, I don’t even think there are any as­sets that are linked to these groups or move­ments to be frozen,” he said.

Dr Muham­mad added: “I will ad­mit that in the days of ISIS, there were some Trinida­di­ans who did leave our shores to go over to join ISIS. But peo­ple from al­most all over the world were par­tic­i­pat­ing in what they saw at the time as some kind of cause. It’s com­mon knowl­edge that there were Trinida­di­ans in­volved in that, but in terms of Hamas and Hezbol­lah, the Shi­ite Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty is sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er in com­par­i­son to oth­er Mus­lim groups, for one, but you know those kinds of links and con­nec­tions, I don’t think they ex­ist.”

Dr Muham­mad shared that fund­ing for the Na­tions of Is­lam T&T is not an is­sue for them, as the or­gan­i­sa­tion is in­de­pen­dent­ly fund­ed.

“The is­sue of fund­ing has been of no con­cern, nor in­ter­est to our­selves. We don’t re­ceive, nor do we seek fund­ing, and nev­er have ever in our en­tire his­to­ry from any gov­ern­ment agency for any­thing. So, we’re not wor­ried about fund­ing. We are taught by our lead­er­ship, the Ho­n­ourable Min­is­ter Louis Far­rakhan, as an in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tion that part of the way that we jus­ti­fy our ex­is­tence as a move­ment is to be able to be in­de­pen­dent, self-re­liant and self-suf­fi­cient un­der god,” he said.

He al­so ex­pressed con­cern about what he de­scribed as a lack of dis­cus­sion by the Gov­ern­ment and me­dia re­gard­ing ca­su­al­ties in the Is­rael-Hamas war.