Asylum for Mosab Hassan Yousef from Planck's Constant

Normally you will not see me supporting anyone related to Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef. But Mosab Hassan Yousef is a hero ¹ that we need to keep in America.

Photo: Mosab Hassan Yousef, right, walks into his deportation hearing with former Israeli security service agent Gonen Ben-Itzhak, left, at the immigration detention center in San Diego Wednesday, June 30, 2010. Yousef says he will be killed if he is deported from the United States to the West Bank. The oldest son of one of Hamas' founders, he was an Israeli spy for a decade, and he abandoned Islam for Christianity, further marking him a traitor. ((AP Photo/Denis Poroy))

Immigration denied Yousef's asylum request in February 2009, arguing that he had been involved in terrorism and was a threat to the United States. But Yousef who became a Christian and an Israeli spy will be granted U.S. asylum after he passes a routine background check, an immigration judge ruled today.

Why he was not granted an immediate asylum is hard to understand. How stupid can immigration officials be? Blogger LEL at Fiery Spirited Zionist has a theory about that:

Perhaps the Obama administration wants to deport Mosab Hassan Yousef because it would like to silence his voice regarding the true nature of hamas and islam. After all, the administration seeks to legitimize hamas and reach out to the muslim world. Having someone like Yousef on the talk show circuit advocating banning the koran because it inspires hatred and violence and explaining there can never be peace with the palestinians because their religion forbids acceptance of a Jewish state, is a problem for the Obama agenda. What if the Obama administration made a deal with hamas to send Yousef back? We know hamas will kill him if he is deported. I don't think the administration cares.

Hopefully the immigration check will go well. Yousef, who has been living in San Diego, was cheered by supporters as he left the hearing and said he would like to become a U.S. citizen. That's what this world needs more of: former Muslims who renounce violence.

Notes

(1):

NRO, Asylum for Yousef
Mosab Hassan Yousef must have encountered nearly everything on his unlikely journey. But surely he never ran across anything as stupid as the American immigration bureaucracy.
Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a Hamas founder, and was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. At the age of 18, he purchased some machine guns and planned to join the terrorist organization’s militant wing. But he was arrested with the guns, and during a stint in Israeli prison, he had a change of heart — and joined Hamas as an undercover agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet after his release from prison in 1997.

...

In 2007, he came to the U.S. and applied for asylum. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service denied his application in 2009, on the grounds that he provided material support to a terrorist organization. This is madness.

The department bases its argument on Yousef’s autobiography, Son of Hamas. In it, he reports that when Shin Bet agents showed him pictures of Hamas members who were suspected of involvement in a March 2001 bombing, he told the agents that he’d driven some of the members to safehouses. Of course, this is the kind of thing that spies do routinely — assist the enemy when asked, especially in small ways, so as not to blow their cover. Common sense indicates that our material-support rules don’t apply to support that’s provided — at the behest of a U.S. ally — within a broader attempt to bring down a terrorist organization.