Com­ment: Con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Pamela Geller has researched the fund­ing appa­ra­tus behind the con­tro­ver­sial “Ground Zero Mosque” project in New York City–the build­ing of a Mosque and Islamic activ­i­ties cen­ter two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

It turns out that the fam­ily and milieu of Abdul­lah Alireza are involved with the insti­tu­tions work­ing to finance and real­ize the Mosque project. As dis­cussed in FTR #392, this reveals the mosque financ­ing project to be part of a milieu that involves mem­bers of both the Bush and Bin Laden fam­i­lies, one of a num­ber of ven­tures link­ing the two clans.

“Bin Laden/Al Qaeda Fund­ing Ground Zero Mosque Imam Rauf” by Pamela Geller; Atlas Shrugs; 7/31/2010.

Excerpt: . . . The Attor­ney Gen­eral must exam­ine and inves­ti­gate the alleged ties and fund­ing by Xenel Cor­po­ra­tion and Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan. Who is Xenel? They fund the Imam and .....

The web­site lists Xenel Indus­tries Ltd. as a pri­mary donor to the Al-Falah Pro­gram. Xenel, a Saudi owned con­glom­er­ate, “pro­vides devel­op­ment, man­u­fac­tur­ing, invest­ment, trad­ing and ser­vices through­out a wide range of areas of inter­est” rang­ing from health­care and infra­struc­ture to oil and real estate, accord­ing to the company’s web­site (www.xenel.com).

On Decem­ber 10, 2002, the Orlando Sen­tinel pub­lished an arti­cle describ­ing the research of a local trade union regard­ing Xenel, who had just been awarded a $100 mil­lion con­tract to build the city of Orlando a new state-of the-art con­ven­tion cen­ter. The arti­cle reveals that Xenel CEO Abdul­lah Alireza sits on the exec­u­tive board of Dar al-Maal al-Islami (DMI), a bank based in Switzer­land. Hay­dar Mohamed bin Laden, half brother of Osama bin Laden, also sits on the twelve mem­ber exec­u­tive board.

Accord­ing to State Depart­ment records and the August 2002 brief filed by the fam­i­lies of 9/11 vic­tims, DMI is involved in “al Qaeda financ­ing through sev­eral of its sub­sidiaries, includ­ing […] Faisal Islamic Bank and Al Shamal Islamic Bank.” Dur­ing the 2001 trial of those sus­pected in the 1998 embassy bomb­ings in East Africa, Faisal Islamic Bank was impli­cated directly in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties by for­mer al Qaeda oper­a­tives: Ahmed al-Fadl, a finance man­ager for al Qaeda, tes­ti­fied that al Qaeda accounts in Khar­toum were held at Faisal Islamic Bank. . . .