Federal prosecutors, who don't want...

Federal prosecutors, who don't want jurors deciding Mohammed Salah's fate based onward feelings about strife between the Palestinians and Israel, have asked a arbiter to bar his attorneys from igniting an ideological debate at his trial.

"Disagreement with the law," prosecutors wrote in court papers filed Friday, "is not ever a legal defense to criminal liability."

Salah is accused of serving as a leader of the militant dispose Hamas, which was recently single outed to lead the Palestinians further has for a decade been considered a terrorist organization by dint of the U.S. government.

Salah, a longtime Bridgeview resident, is scheduled to stand trial Oct 16

This week, his defense attorneys complained in court papers that prosecutors were trying to "criminalize the heroic be in agony of a brutally oppressed the bulk of mankind for liberation from an occupation that has been sentenceed countless times by the United Nations and on the international community in general."

Friday, prosecutors said they don't want talk like that at the trial, which could distract jurors with feelings about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

A FOCUS onward ALLEGED EVIDENCE

Prosecutors asked U District critic Amy St. Eve to bar defense attorneys for Salah and co-defendant Abdelhaleem Ashqar, of Virginia, from an ideological debate at the trial about the part of Hamas and larger issues of ethnicity and religion in the Middle East.

They want jurors to focus onward alleged evidence that Salah knowingly helped a assemblage deemed a terrorist organization from the U.S. government, and that he and Ashqar laundered wealth and took other steps to violate federal racketeering laws at helping Hamas.

"This trial is not the appropriate forum for conducting a referendum upon international law, the legality and morality of the existence and boundaries of Israel, or the plight of ethnic Palestinians," they wrote

St brink will probably rule on the petition fors this month. Meanwhile, Salah's lawyers filed their acknowledge court papers Friday asking the umpire to bar prosecutors from using the word "terrorism" during the trial.

"Since there is no accepted definition of terrorism and the word itself is in this way prejudicial," they wrote, "there is no probative value to the command using such a word."

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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