“I was 13 / when you created a fighter out of me,” Nida Abu Baker writes in a poem addressed to the judge who sentenced her father to 65 years in prison. As the guilty verdicts started to echo through the Texas courtroom on November 24, 2008, Nida stood and yelled at the judge: “All he did was help kids all over the world, he even helped people here. And this is how you repay him?” The judge’s face turned crimson as he ordered the teenage Nida to be quiet or face arrest. She sat down in shock next to her mother. “You may have shut me up then,” she reflects in the poem, posted not long ago to her Instagram. “But I will most definitely not shut up now.”
This spring, Nida takes a seat on a stage at a book event in Plano, Texas, on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. “Every Palestinian political prisoner is my brother and my father,” she begins her talk. “When I say my father’s name, I am saying all of their names … When you say free Palestine, know that you also mean free our political prisoners.” Behind her is a projection of her father’s latest poetry collection, Light from Deep Under, with a pre-order QR code and the logo of the Dallas chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Nida is the middle child of Shukri Abu Baker, a Palestinian American artist and founder and former CEO of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The HLF was once considered the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the government declared it a terror organization due to its work in Palestine and shut it down, charging Shukri and four others with material support for terrorism.
The HLF, like other Muslim nonprofits based in the U.S., was founded by immigrants who left homelands disrupted by U.S. imperialism and sought ways to bridge the gap between the worlds they came from and the relative comfort of their new lives. But the catastrophe of U.S. foreign policy followed them. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Muslims in the U.S. were caught up in the so-called war on terror — subject to intense surveillance, rampant Islamophobia, and aggressive prosecution under new laws that criminalized acts of charity and tenuous connections to alleged terror groups. In the case of the HLF, the U.S. government admitted that the funds it distributed went to Palestinians in need and that the group had no connection to Hamas; nonetheless, the U.S. managed to secure convictions under broad material support statutes. Today, Shukri and HLF co-founder Ghassan Elashi are incarcerated in neighboring prisons in Beaumont, Texas — the last of the “Holy Land Five,” as the defendants came to be known, who are still in prison.
Now 31, Nida spends her time raising awareness about the political nature of her father and Elashi’s incarceration. On the legal side, Shukri has exhausted his appeals, and their only hope would be a petition for clemency, or compassionate release (which a coalition of prominent human rights groups called on Joe Biden to offer in 2022). In Nida’s public advocacy, she draws connections between his case and the broader Palestinian liberation movement, which includes the struggle to free the nearly 10,000 Palestinians currently incarcerated by Israel, some of whom are children as young as 12. “The life I live is normal for a Palestinian in Palestine. Pretty much every prisoner in Palestine is a political prisoner,” Nida tells me.
The fact that her father is incarcerated in the U.S. is distinct in one particular way: “In Palestine, families of political prisoners are not looked at with pity; they’re looked at with pride.” Palestine has a long history and social understanding of the importance of struggle on behalf of political prisoners; their release is celebrated (despite Israel banning such festivities), and they are welcomed back into their communities. Organizations like Samidoun Network coordinate international solidarity actions, while groups like Adameer, a Palestinian human rights group, monitor conditions and provide pro-bono legal aid (both groups have been criminalized by Israel and listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. Treasury for that support).
“There are political prisoners in the U.S.,” Nida tells me, “it’s just that no one talks about it.” Black and Indigenous movements have long highlighted the cases of prominent political prisoners — Imam Jamil Al Amin, Sundiata Acoli, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier — as has the Puerto Rican independence movement. But it’s just as often the case that people imprisoned on politically motivated charges aren’t thought of in that way, and the burden of caring for them — and keeping their politics and principles front and center — falls on their families.
Ever since 9/11, just the words “terrorism” and “Muslim” are often enough to scare off would-be supporters in the wider public. I grew up in a Muslim community in the Bay Area, and I’ve experienced how guilt-by-association continues to stalk us, stripping us of our voices and political courage. The label of terrorist has been used to bully and persecute Muslims from school hallways to the halls of Congress. We find ourselves lowering our voices, silenced by the power of that word, especially when wielded by the U.S. government. Regardless of the facts or the evidence or lack thereof, the accusation sticks. And the fear persists.
But with the upswell of organizing against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and high-profile detentions in the U.S., like Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil’s, the families of the Holy Land Five are sensing a change. “People were not saying their names until recently,” says Zaira Abu Baker, Nida’s older sister. “We had that fear of the words ‘Hamas’ and ‘terrorist’ … Now you’ve got these white boys and white girls with no religion, in universities, saying the word ‘Hamas.’ You’ve got your average Joe talking about it, so now we can talk about it.”
Witnessing FBI agents seize her father from their home at age 10, confronting a federal judge at 13 — Nida was obviously politicized from a young age. She started organizing as a teen with the Coalition for Civil Freedoms, a collective of civil rights and civil liberties groups working against the abuses of the “war on terror.” Her first lobbying trips and meetings with the families of other political prisoners were eye-opening, she tells me: “I always knew that there were other families that were impacted post-9/11, but to actually see them, to hear them … It shows you that you’re not alone.”
“I was 13 / when you created a fighter out of me,”
But it’s more recently that Nida has taken the family advocacy baton from her older sister Zaira. In a Substack post, Nida describes how she married in 2017, gave birth during early Covid, and spent the pandemic deeply worried about her father’s well-being in prison. By October 7, 2023, she had divorced her son’s father. “Being a single mother, starting again from scratch in a new apartment, with no money, no furniture, learning how to parent all over again while watching your extended family and friends suffer behind your phone screen was something way beyond my comprehension,” she wrote. “I couldn’t think. I couldn’t sleep.” Out of that incomprehension, she found action. The pace of her public appearances at Palestinian solidarity events and protests has increased enormously since then.
Before the event in Texas, I give Nida a hand unloading boxes of T-shirts from the backseat. When I ask her who usually helps her with this kind of thing, she looks at me and chuckles. Inside the venue, we get to work, folding shirts printed with a logo her father designed. The merch is to raise funds for her family, a way for her father to provide from behind prison walls. She shows me a handful of the prayer beads that her father started making during the pandemic, mashing together stale bread and paint for the beads and unraveling the corners of his prayer rug for the tassels. The beads are vibrant, multi-colored orbs that look just as if they were made from clay. Nida tells me he can’t make as many as he used to; he has developed arthritis, and rolling the beads has become too painful. He now sends them to her to finish off with tassels and sell.
Onstage, Nida shares one of her father’s poems: “I occupied my mother’s womb, / my modest home, my woman’s heart … I have not occupied a people, / their soil, their sea, their sky.” (The same poem was read by Code Pink protesters in December 2023, at the offices of New York Senator Chuck Schumer, to call attention to his role in maintaining U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza.) As she concludes her talk, the audience stands and applauds. Supporters approach her afterward: an organizer with Code Pink Dallas, in a flowing pink floral skirt and a black “Free the HLF5” tee; a middle-aged white woman, who I overheard say she’d only just learned about the case; old friends of the Elashi family. I hear the word amu used to refer to Shukri and Ghassan — Arabic for “uncle” but also a term of endearment and respect for elders — in conversations around the room.
A few days later, Nida and I drive around the neighborhood she grew up in, past the Islamic school she attended. Eventually, we arrive at the old offices of the HLF. I recognize the building from the photographs in news articles — a corporate complex with large, softly tinted windows. Long gone are the block letters identifying the building as the Holy Land Foundation. I ask Nida if we should park, take a look around. She’s hesitant. She worries her hijab would call attention to us, maybe someone would call the cops. I try to reassure her by saying I would tell them I’m a journalist working on a story. But a few years back, a filmmaker had visited the building and been asked to leave, and she was an older white woman, so what were our chances?
Nida grew up with her father under surveillance and public scrutiny. “We had landlines back then, and whenever it was staticky, I would joke around and say, ‘Okay, FBI, I know you’re listening,’” she says. “It was just like a normal part of my life.”
Long before 9/11, there was already an effort underway by Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to enact stiffer penalties for nebulous connections to foreign terror groups — and to cast suspicion on Palestinian Americans in particular. The ADL launched a campaign to have HLF stripped of its nonprofit status — a foreshadowing of today’s “nonprofit killer” legislation pushed by the Trump administration. Around that time, the ADL was discovered to be operating a network of informants who spied on primarily Arab, Muslim, and leftist Jewish organizations and their leaders. Despite the egregious scandal, the group was highly influential in shaping anti-terror legislation passed following the 1993 Oklahoma City bombing. (Ironically, the HLF was one of the organizations to respond to that horrific attack, organizing a blood drive and donating close to $5,000, as Miko Peled notes in his exhaustive and powerful book, Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.)
Even though the bombing in Oklahoma was orchestrated by domestic white supremacists, “the resulting antiterrorism laws enacted by Congress exclusively targeted foreign organizations,” in the words of a recent report from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). In 1996, legislation allowed civil cases to be made against domestic organizations that were deemed to be working with alleged foreign terrorists, and it established penalties for “material support” for terrorism, which would be widely applied after 9/11.
In December 2001, the Bush administration froze the HLF’s assets; Shukri and others were indicted in 2004. The prosecution was in keeping with the legal climate of the era, when due process was overturned in the name of “national security.” An anonymous expert witness from Israel was allowed to testify against the five men, which lawyers believed had never been done before in a U.S. courtroom. It can’t be understated just how much the prosecution relied on racist tropes of Islam, Muslims, and Arabs. They played videos of suicide bombings, demonstrators stomping on and burning an American flag, schoolchildren marching around with Hamas flags in schools. Videos that had nothing to do with the HLF, but which helped to cement an association in jurors’ minds. After an initial mistrial, prosecutors obtained guilty verdicts and outrageously long sentences that amounted to life imprisonment for Shukri and Ghassan. “Their sentences make no sense,” Nancy Hollander, one of Shukri Abu Baker’s lawyers, tells me. “If they had been in Israel, their sentences would have been five years.”
The reverberations of the case were felt throughout Muslim American communities. This was part of the government’s strategy: Over 200 individuals and organizations were listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the case, accused, without evidence or proof, of being affiliated with Hamas and condemned by association. “They threw us in there too,” says Mustafa Carroll, now the executive director of the Texas chapter of the Council on American Muslim Relations (CAIR). “They said CAIR was the PR wing of Hamas. Can you believe that crap?”
It was so obvious and “pathetic,” Carroll tells me. It was of a piece with the FBI’s “campaign of mass entrapment,” as Richard Beck describes it in his book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. One study of hundreds of “terror” prosecutions carried out in the wake of 9/11, which Beck cites, found that nearly 75 percent were based on “suspicion of the defendant’s perceived ideology and not his/her criminal activity.” Many were plots entirely concocted by the FBI. In other words, the government needed an enemy, and so they created one. But there is something specific about the HLF case, Noor Elashi, daughter of Ghasan, insists: “This was a very intentional targeting of a charity to scare people from donating to Palestinians. This was cutting the lifeline of Palestinians in order to disempower them.”
Palestinians and supporters of their cause in the U.S. now find themselves under renewed threat of surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration — and a lot of it can be traced back to a precedent set by the HLF prosecution. The case is “the lynchpin” for legal repression of the pro-Palestinian movement, says Diala Shamas, a senior attorney at CCR. “Its ghost lives on very prominently. It’s emblematic of the attempt to equate any act of solidarity with Palestinians with support for Hamas.”
The HLF prosecution is regularly still used to make bombastic claims that pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. are fronts for Hamas, still trumpeted by lawmakers and Zionist groups as “the largest terrorism financing prosecution in U.S. history.” Canary Mission, which doxes anti-Zionist activists, recently published a dossier on the HLF case, linking it to student encampments.
This case is the lynchpin for the legal repression of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Since the fall of 2023, a series of lawsuits has been filed against organizers with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), alleging that the group serves as a “propaganda division” for Hamas; the suits are “copycats,” as Shamas describes them, of a lawsuit brought against the HLF by relatives of Daniel Boim, who was killed by Hamas in 1996. The family argued that HLF and other organizations should also be held responsible due to their alleged material support of Hamas. They were awarded $156 million in damages in 2004, but by then, the government had already shut down the HLF. Now, the plaintiffs in the copycat suits — who include survivors of the October 7 attack in Israel — are claiming that American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is an “alter-ego” for the HLF and that because the HLF was charged for material support of Hamas, AMP supports Hamas. And because AMP has ties to SJP and its national branch, the student encampments are somehow part of Hamas’ “propaganda division” and should be liable for monetary damages. It’s an ouroboros of allegations, all stemming from an original case that was so riddled with errors that one defense attorney said it left him “so disgusted … and so convinced of the unfairness and lack of integrity of the judicial system” that he almost quit practicing law.
In a statement to the Columbia Spectator last spring, grad student Maryam Alwan of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, who is named in one of the new suits, described it as an attempt “to defame and procure life-threatening harassment, fabricating allegations in order to manufacture consent to a genocide that has reached its most horrific stages yet.” A judge recently dismissed one suit in Virginia, but as Alwan’s statement suggests, the legal entanglement has its financial and emotional costs, even if they don’t succeed.
“We live in a legal system that has scrutinized and in many ways criminalized efforts for mutual aid to Palestinians,” says Shamas. “That’s an intended outcome of these material support laws. That’s exactly what the state wanted to achieve when it criminalized the Holy Land Foundation.”
But we’re in a different political moment, Shamas adds. “There is a massive surge of solidarity with Palestinians. In the post-9/11 environment, the level of fear and silence around those cases, and therefore, the isolation of the defendants and isolation of the families, was extreme. I think that’s a lesson for today. We see this in the case of Mahmoud Khalil. The huge amount of solidarity and standing with him that we’ve seen is actually a political force that can have a concrete impact on the state’s calculus.”
That same sentiment was echoed by Nerdeen Kiswani, the Palestinian American co-founder of Within Our Lifetime, a grassroots Palestinian rights group that has revived advocacy on behalf of the HLF Five. Growing up in New York, she remembers HLF donation boxes by the cash register of any Muslim- or Palestinian-owned grocery store. She reflects on Israel’s weaponization of poverty and hunger in Gaza, on the current state of famine there — “that’s something that the HLF recognized decades ago.” But Kiswani also remembers how the case became a cautionary tale for Muslims after 9/11. “People didn’t want the same outcome they faced,” she says.
The government’s crackdown on student activists is also meant to spread fear, Kiswani adds. Just like with the HLF, “they wanted people to look at that and say, ‘I don’t want to end up like them. Let me be quiet. Let me not say anything.’ But the more people silence and isolate themselves, all we’re doing is just making those who do continue to speak out even more vulnerable. So we have to continue to speak out as a community to prevent these cases from having their intended outcome.”
After Mahmoud Khalil was released from immigration detention, Nida posted regular reminders that he was not the only Palestinian prisoner in the United States. She keeps showing up at solidarity events, posting Shukri’s poems, bringing this recent history right up into the present. The Abu Baker family’s long and often lonely struggle shows both the promise and limits of solidarity in the case of political prosecutions. Khalil, like other student activists, is still fighting deportation. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators charged with arson and property destruction, like Casey Goonan and Jakhi McCray, are facing the possibility of decades in prison. The legal fight is only one front, and it won’t always succeed.
This spring, I meet Nida and Zaira at a Yemeni café in Plano, near the suburbs where they both live. A third sister, Sanabel, passed away when Nida was 19, five years into their father’s incarceration. Sanabel suffered from an autoimmune condition, which was Shukri’s motivation for starting the HLF in the first place; he found it intolerable that children in Palestine could never receive the critical medical care his daughter did. “Knowing that he had to sit alone in a prison cell while we were around my sister.” Nida’s voice trails off. She turns back toward me. “You know, I literally never talk about it one-on-one. When I talk about it onstage, it’s so different.” It’s a sentiment she repeats more than once, making it clear that although she shares her family’s story openly, she keeps her feelings closer to her chest.
Zaira is a licensed therapist, and she is cognizant of the toll the case has taken on their family. She worries about Nida. When she talks about it, she uses the Islamic concept naseeb, which means destiny, or fate, and which is often used as a source of comfort, a reminder that there is a greater plan in place. “You almost feel like, who am I to complain about anything? Total families are being crushed, literally crushed,” Zaira says. “But if this is your naseeb, your test in life, you need to figure out a healthy balance and how to get through.”
After my talk with the sisters, I imagine an alternate timeline in which the amus continued their work in their community, inspiring the next generation of humanitarians. What if Zaira had been able to continue on the path she had envisioned as a teen, to direct their relief efforts? Maybe there would have been an HLF women’s shelter that connected women from Richardson, Texas, to Ramallah, Palestine. How different would these communities have been if the resources poured into protecting their fathers from the U.S. government had gone toward aid? Infrastructure that the HLF built in Gaza is being destroyed by Israeli bombs. “The schools and the hospitals that they established, gone,” Nida tells me.
I meet up with her once more this fall, at the Palestine Will Live Forever festival in Seattle, an event that fosters solidarity between various groups facing political persecution by raising funds for organizations like the Transgender Law Center, HEAL Palestine, which helps Palestinian refugees, and Water Warrior, which supports Indigenous youth healing. I stand to the side of the stage as she walks up to the microphone stand. Her gaze is steady and grounded. “Until we are all free, we will not rest; until we are all free, we will not stop,” she says. “Until we are all free, we will not break!” She concludes with a poem from her father’s collection.
The next morning we’re driving to the airport when her phone rings. “It’s my dad,” she says softly. An automated woman’s voice echoes through the phone: “Call from Beaumont federal prison.” The line connects. “Salaam alaikum, Baba,” Nida answers, holding the phone on speaker.
“I congratulate you on everything you are doing,” Shukri says, his voice clear and steady. I immediately recognize Nida’s cadence in his. His accent, a lilt of Arabic with a Texan y’all, is a reminder of the many countries he has been forced to call home. “I want to do more, but I am pushed down because of the physical limitations I am going through. But y’all are doing the work, so that gives me a level of comfort. Because y’all are doing it.”
Sarah O’Neal is a writer and artist from the Bay Area. Her work has been featured in The Nation, KQED, and Bandcamp.
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