Last February I discussed an exceptional story by Amanda Garrett in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in which ties between Cleveland-area imam Fawaz Damra and Islamic terrorist organizations were revealed:

It would appear that Damra did not have a change of heart after his hateful speech of 1991; it would appear that he, AT MINIMUM, still sympathized with the murder of Israeli civilians, and possibly contributed financial support for The Movement and Hamas, as recently as 2001. This is not going away, cannot be explained away, and this poison sits at this very moment at the center of the Cleveland Islamic community.

....President Bush was right - not simplistic, not paranoid - when he said you are either with us or against us in the War on Terror, which includes Palestinian terrorist's ongoing campaign against Israeli civilians. Cleveland's, and America's, Islams must decide where they stand in the war - no more coy riding the fence - and declare their position unambiguously. This supporter of terror, of murder, Damra, is a disgrace - his insidious influence must end.

Imam Fawaz Damra helped lay the groundwork for an organization that ultimately merged into al-Qaida in the late 1980s.

He was an unindicted co-conspirator of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. And he passionately raised money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which killed dozens of Jews in Israel during the 1990s.

Yet Damra, spiritual leader to thousands of Muslims in Northeast Ohio, seemed to fly comfortably beneath the radar of U.S. terror investigators - until Tuesday.

FBI agents swooped in on the Palestinian cleric at his Strongsville home, arresting him on a relatively minor - and rare - charge for lying on his immigration forms a decade ago to conceal his ties to terror groups.

....In the mid-1980s, he co- founded the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., part of a network that recruited and trained Muslims to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a venture that dovetailed with U.S. government efforts in the region.

When the Soviets withdrew, however, there was an international fight over what to do with the leftover money and power.

Like many Alkifah centers around the world, the Brooklyn chapter was drawn into the al-Qaida network created by Osama bin Laden. The mosque itself fell under the sway of Omar Abdul Rahman, known as the "blind sheik," who was later blamed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

....The 1991 video shows Damra at a Muslim gathering in Cleveland, disparaging Jews in Arabic as "pigs and monkeys" and raising money for the killing of Jews by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

....In 2003, more questions surfaced when former University of South Florida Professor Sami Al- Arian was charged with racketeering, accused of heading the American branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A 121-page federal indictment claimed that money for deadly bombings in Israel might have come, in part, from a secret fund established in Cleveland.

Damra is not named in the indictment, but terror experts say that Damra is unindicted co-conspirator No. 1. That co-conspirator offered to hold a fund-raiser for Al-Arian's group as recently as 2001.

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