Unfortunately, there are many people who claim that this website is either owned, funded, or managed by HAMSA or the American Islamic Congress.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
This is an independent campaign, run solely by a group of students who volunteer their time to blog about, publicize, and run this website and its many activities.
HAMSA provides neither the counseling nor funding for us, but did play a role in discussing Kareem’s situation with media outlets, because they were the first to start a petition for him. But that petition is not part of this website. In fact we have a separate independent petition as well, which actually belongs to this website. This shows that HAMSA and the Free Kareem campaign are not related, in any way, or else we wouldn’t have created a separate petition about it.
This campaign is hosted by Mideast Youth, also completely independent of outside efforts and influences.
As for me, Esra’a, I did this campaign because I consider Kareem to be a good person and a good friend despite disagreeing with everything he wrote about (I’m proudly a Muslim.) That is as far as the reasoning goes for why this campaign exists and why we managed to create a lot of noise with it. Dalia Ziada, despite her activities with HAMSA and AIC, occasionally works on this campaign as she was the person responsible for giving me all of Kareem’s news for publication on this website as well as any relevant translations. This was before her official involvement with AIC, and she did it independently… just another friend helping Kareem out.
As far as our donation goes, contrary to popular belief we are not personally gaining anything from it and it’s quite disgusting to stomach these rumors. The money is handled by Chris Kilmer, a student in New York (also not part of AIC or HAMSA), who will transfer the money to Shahinaz (Wa7damasrya) who will then take the money to Kareem. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that we cannot act upon the money as soon as we get it simply because we need to think of the strategy on exactly how much we should send, where to, and how often. That’s why we took a while to find both a reliable person to handle the money as well as an effective plan, as well as asking Kareem what he wants to do with the finances. We wanted to make sure that we raised enough money before sending the money on a monthly basis. We weren’t using the money to vacation in Hawaii like some people made it sound like. Please do your research before defaming and undermining our work like this.
As far as sending the money to Kareem’s lawyers, this is not pay for such services. The donation option is for Kareem and Kareem only, and HRINFO has neither contacted us about this option nor did they ever reply to our attempts to contact them personally. In any case, they are not entitled to this money. It is meant to keep Kareem as comfortable as possible by sending him basic needs as well as any amount he requests for. If HRINFO is concerned about the donation option – they are more than welcome to contact us, but they have yet to do so. Therefore we cannot be blamed for not being clear enough when people spent more time feeding rumors than to actually research this themselves, by simply calling or e-mailing us about the issues that they don’t find clear enough.
If you would have noticed, for those who actually were responsible enough to contact me and my fellow campaigners, you’d soon realize that any decision went solely by me and was not approved or run by anyone else. That proves that I hold complete responsibility for this campaign, not HAMSA, not AIC, not Bush, not Ghandi. This is independent. It will always be independent, and we will never ever attach this to any other NGO because we want to lead it ourselves the way we see fit. If you care about Kareem you are more than welcome to join us and find out how the management truly works. If not, then please be decent enough not to link us with any organization without having any basis for such claims. Receiving an organization’s occasional help, especially in gaining press contacts, does not mean we are a part of them.
In other words, spare us the rumors, and let’s all focus on freeing Kareem instead.
Read Shahinaz’s post as well for further clarifications.
