The leading “Halal Certification” body in the world has been funding Islamic radical groups since 2012, an investigation by Middle East Forum has revealed. In a report by JM Phelps and Sam Westrop of the Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA) has handed out huge amounts of money to prominent Islamist organizations that are linked to terror groups such as Jamaat-e-Islamia, Hamas and Al-Qaeda.
Although IFANCA is a US-based Halal certifier, it also boasts recognition from “three key Islamic economies”—Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. It claims to have certificated over 11,000 food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and personal care products and also works to promote “awareness” of an Islamic lifestyle. Such services are apparently lucrative. In 2019, according to its most recent publicly available IRS Form 990, IFANCA reported over $25 million of income, and almost $70 million of assets—a curious level of wealth for a purported “non-profit” organization.
Tax returns filed by IFANCA from 2012 to 2019 show a steady payment of monies to radical organizations and charities across the country. The Furqaan Academy, for instance, is a division of the Al Furqaan Foundation, whose resident scholar, Sheikh Omar Baloch, overtly spews anti-Semitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories on YouTube. For example, Baloch claims Zionists were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, and the Sri Lanka Easter bombings. IFANCA provided $360,000 to the Furqaan Academy between 2015 and 2018, according to its Form 990s from those years.
GainPeace is the proselytization arm of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the self-admitted US arm of the violent South Asian movement Jamaat-e-Islami. ICNA is also a close partner of Pakistan’s Al Khidmat Foundation, the welfare arm of Jamaat-e-Islami, and, according to Jamaat-e-Islami’s own website, the foundation itself is a financier of terror groups such as Hamas. Between 2016 and 2019, IFANCA gave $112,000 to GainPeace and $31,250 to ICNA Relief, ICNA’s charitable arm, according to Form 990s from those years.
IFANCA gave $10,000 in 2019 to the Khalil Center, a project of the Zakat Foundation of America (ZFA), which DeSales University academic Ahmet S. Yayla reports is proxy of the Turkish regime in America. In addition, ZFA founder Halil Demir was a former official of the Benevolence International Foundation, which the US Treasury designated in 2002 as “financiers of terrorism” because of its close links to Al Qaeda.
ZFA has also funded Palestinian groups with links to terrorist groups, such as the Unlimited Friends Association for Social Development (UFA), a Gaza-based organization with close ties to senior Hamas leaders, as well as the Islamic Charitable Society in Hebron, which German intelligence services once described as the “most important Hamas association in the West Bank”.
Between 2016 and 2018, prominent Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was designated in 2014 by the United Arab Emirates as a terrorist organization, received $40,000 from IFANCA. Also financially supported by IFANCA is the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago (CIOGC), an umbrella organization for a variety of radical members, including the Hamas-linked Americans Muslims for Palestine; Islamic Circle of North America and its terror-tied sister organization Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD; along with radical charities such as Islamic Relief, Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Zakat Foundation of America. Between 2015 and 2018, CIOGC received $41,200 from IFANCA.
From 2015 to 2019, however, IFANCA’s grants to all these radical groups and others totaled under $22 million, less than its annual revenue in just 2019. Middle East Forum investigations revealed that according to all of its publicly-available tax returns, IFANCA’s other most significant yearly expenditures include several million annually on salaries for approximately 40 employees, along with millions spent each year on unexplained “consultant and foreign office” expenses.
Certainly, this non-profit has provided lucrative employment for IFANCA’s senior officials. IFANCA president-director Muhammad Munir Chaudry’s base salary has averaged nearly $358,000 from 2015 to 2019. More interestingly, IFANCA has also funneled over $3 million to Chaudry’s personal charity, the MM Chaudry Family Foundation: $1.5 million in 2017 and 2018, and another $250,000 in 2019. Thus far, according to all the tax returns available at the time of writing, filed for tax years 2017 and 2018, the entirety of the MM Chaudry Foundation’s revenue comes from IFANCA, and not a single dime has yet been spent by the charity on charitable purpose; with the only expenditure recorded being just over $8000 of “investment” and “bank” fees.
Meanwhile, millions of seemingly untaxed income is otherwise added to IFANCA’s already substantial coffers. In 2019, IFANCA raised $14 million more than it spent. It is hardly surprising that IFANCA’s total assets in 2019 were over $70 million, of which—according to its 2019 990—an astonishing $60 million was invested in securities, along with almost $10 million of owned land and buildings. The precise origins of IFANCA’s actual revenue remain unclear. IFANCA’s 2019 tax returns show that only $2.7 million of its $25 million income actually derives from “certification,” with the rest otherwise generated from unexplained “consulting fees,” “supervision fees,” “plan approval fees,” “conferences,” and investments.
Certainly, IFANCA’s finances do not compare with other major Halal certification bodies around the world in countries with similarly-sized Muslim populations. Take, for example, the UK’s Halal Monitoring Committee (HMC), which reported a 2019 income of over £2.5 million ($3.5 million)— a tiny fraction of IFANCA’s annual revenue—and less than $800,000 in total assets. Moreover, HMC employs four times as many staff as IFANCA for approximately the same reported salary costs. The globally-known Halal Food Authority reports similar numbers. In other words, the financial power of other Halal organizations is dwarfed by IFANCA’s $70 million war chest and tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue. This leads to the question of where IFANCA is getting its money from.