Matthew Levitt was the lead man for the US Treasury Department on the issue of terrorism financing for several years. He was especially effective when it came to sanctions against Iran. Now he is in the non-profit sector and has written an interesting article for Foreign Policy magazine about the potential impact of the slaying of Osama Bin Laden on tracking down Al Qaeda’s financiers.
One clue that Levitt is no longer in government service is the fact that the word “Jihad” appears in the title of the article. Our politically correct bureaucracies have long since banished that word from their lexicon.
One thing that we heard through the grapevine about Levitt when he was at Treasury was that he never really “got” the whole issue of Shariah-Compliant Finance as a possible threat. This was very unfortunate given his excellent work on Iran and elsewhere. After all, the Wikileaks documents reveal that the State Department was concerned about Shariah Finance being a backdoor method to fund terrorism and Shariah Finance is tied to zakat, which the 9/11 Commission detailed as a funding source for Al Qaeda way back in 2004.
Nevertheless, this latest article by Levitt is worth the time to read it…
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/11/checkbook_jihad
