A Michigan charity described as a “Hezbollah front” by the Treasury Department was raided by the FBI on July 24, 2007, for allegedly providing support to Hezbollah. 

FBI agents seized financial records and other paperwork from the Goodwill Charitable Organization (GCO), which the Treasury Department alleges is a branch of the Iranian-based Martyrs Foundation, a group that funds Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and aids Palestinian suicide bombers and their families.

The Treasury Department is also freezing the Martyrs Foundation’s U.S. bank accounts and assets and forbidding Americans from doing business with the group. 

Another Dearborn-based charity, Al-Mabarrat Association, was also raided as part of the investigation of Hezbollah’s financial supporters.  Al-Mabarrat apparently will be allowed to remain open while the GCO was shut down

Al-Mabarrat’s Arabic Web site claims that the organization is “based on the ideas of the spiritual guide Sayyid Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.” Fadlallah, a Hezbollah spiritual leader based in Lebanon, is on the Treasury Department’s list of specially designated terrorists.

Fadlallah has sanctioned suicide bombings and states on his Web site that they are “like any other operation in the line of Jihad.”  His Web site also insists that Jews in “Zionist settlements” are not civilians and jihad is necessary to “save the nation from oppressive Zionism and Israeli barbarism.”