Sheikh Raed Sallah, chief of the Islamic Movement's northern branch, became mayor of Umm el-Fahm, at whose helm he stood for 10 years.
Sallah and like-minded extremists enjoyed all democratic freedoms and resorted to all the opportunities of a liberal environment, so atypical of the Middle East.
Sallah was never one to mince words. Thus last September, at his movement's rally, he exclaimed: "Beware you Jews. We have exposed your nefarious scheme to desecrate Islam's holy sites." The context of this warning could hardly be misconstrued, since the rally opened with a minute's silence for "the Islamic struggle's shahids" (martyrs), a term which includes suicide bombers.
Earlier in the week Sallah and a dozen associates were remanded in custody on charges of funneling funds to terrorist organizations under the guise of a charitable institution.
Israel's entire Arab community seems solidly united behind Sallah, thereby unilaterally transforming this from a straight-forward criminal case into an all-encompassing political one. Current Umm el-Fahm Mayor Suleiman Agbariya determined that "the arrests are a show to impress [US Secretary of State] Colin Powell." Secular MK Ahmed Tibi, a close confederate of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, maintained that the Islamic Movement is a legitimate organization dedicated to "charity and welfare." Another secularist, communist Muhammad Barakei of Hadash, sees the entire affair as "a malicious manipulation to slander the whole Arab sector. This mountain will dwindle to a molehill."
It must be admitted here that the police has a spotty record when it comes to high-profile cases, irrespective of ethnicity or religion. Likewise, our media has been known to seize on a good story and pronounce a guilty verdict, sometimes rendering the actual trial an anticlimax.
However, the very code name given this investigation, "The Labor of Ants," indicates that this has been a slow, meticulous process of compiling evidence, rather than a publicity stunt or an overnight caper. No less than 800 police and Shin Bet investigators, under the personal direction of the heads of both organizations, have been systematically gathering information for more than two years.
Even a legal stickler like Justice Minister Yosef (Tommy) Lapid predicted Wednesday that "from the very detailed material I saw, this won't turn out to have been a lot of hype with little substance. Very weighty proof has been amassed."
If ostensibly humanitarian activities are indeed convincingly shown to have been a front for financing terror, then it will be bitter food for thought for our democracy. If the alleged conspirators functioned as conduits, laundering money from abroad to make the dispatching of suicide bombers possible, then they have betrayed the freedoms they enjoyed, no less than those suspected of similar offenses in Texas and Florida.
It is instructive to recall how vehemently residents of Sallah's own city balked at the notion of its being ceded to the jurisdiction of the projected Palestinian state. The plethora of speculative scenarios produced here over the past few years contained proposals that Umm el-Fahm be included in the framework of a possible territorial swap. The protesting residents, however, declared that they are Israelis and demand to stay part of this state. Considering their pro-Palestinian passion, this newly discovered patriotism is puzzling.
Under these circumstances, it behooves Israeli Arab leaders to remind their electorate that those who wish to enjoy the benefits and rights of Israeli citizenship cannot claim the liberty to abuse that citizenship in order to facilitate the brutal murder of fellow citizens and eventually destroy the very state whose passport appears so coveted.
Fabricating tall stories about a sinister frame-up will only trap ordinary folk in a vicious cycle of self-deception and self-imposed isolation. Israeli Arabs, understandably, bristle at an entire community being tarred by the actions of the few. But it is difficult for most of us not to implicate the community as a whole when its leaders seem more concerned with denying the problem than condemning support for terrorism.
The trial of the arrested Islamic Movement members can be seen as an opportunity for Israeli Arab leaders to break with the path of radicalism and violence. If this opportunity is not taken, the trial will make turning away from this path, and improving the lot of Israeli Arabs, that much harder.
No Israeli Arab leader can take it for granted that democracy will endlessly let its trust be breached. In Lapid's own words: "We won't damage Israel's liberal foundations, but neither will we be the fools who allow assaults against our existence under the presumption that all is permissible."

 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1052918980016