Dateline: Tennessee, USA
By: North Carolina Dad
From: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

-Complaint cites judge in terror-linked case
Woman protecting sons from Islam charges divorce court rules broken

Judicial ethics complaints are being filed against a Tennessee judge by a
woman battling her Muslim husband in a divorce case she fears could leave
her teen sons at the mercy of violent Islamic jihadists and a lawyer who was
asked to take notes in the case.

The woman, Rosaline Ghawji, is seeking a divorce from her husband, prominent
Memphis doctor Maher Ghawji, because she alleges he has “ties to terrorism
[and] has threatened to kill her and her two boys if they did not abide by
radical Islamic doctrine,” according to a statement from her general
counsel’s office.

The statement from that office alleged Judge Donna Fields of Circuit Court
in Shelby County for the state’s 13th Judicial District “grossly violated”
the Canons of Judicial Ethics.

A lawyer who was hired to take notes at her divorce trial also is filing a
complaint after Judge Fields ordered him out of the audience and onto the
stand to testify in the divorce case.

In her complaint, Mrs. Ghawji alleges the judge has improperly excluded
terrorism issues from her trial, which started Jan. 2. As a result of a
variety of influences, including that from the FBI which she said, “has
likely turned her husband into an informant,” her trial lawyer was allowed
to withdraw “without good cause” so that she no longer effectively can
present her case.

Even though the judge’s ruling to let the lawyer go came just days before
the trial, she said the judge refused to delay the hearing, and told her she
must go forward, even without counsel.

Then Fields put one of Mrs. Ghawji’s out-of-state lawyers on the witness
stand, plucking him from the audience where he was taking notes, and
ordering him to testify about attorney-client communications with Mrs.
Ghawji, she alleged.

“To coerce the lawyer to testify Judge Fields threatened him with fabricated
criminal charges of kidnapping based on the simple fact that the Ghawji
children had not gone to school that day,” the statement said.

“The attorney client privilege is the most sacrosanct of all client rights,”
the statement said, and the judge’s conduct “warrants the most severe
punishment.”

Larry Klayman, the woman’s private general counsel and Judicial Watch
founder, also said he was filing a complaint for the judge’s alleged
violations of the attorney client privilege with Mrs. Ghawji.

“This case is important to redress the culture of extrajudicial bias and
prejudice that has pervaded this case and to set an example that the court
system cannot be allowed to abuse client rights with impunity,” the firm’s
statement said.

Mrs. Ghawji, a Christian woman who once served as an FBI informant on her
husband’s alleged support of terrorism, said she wants a divorce because her
husband, a self-described radical Muslim, told her he would be proud if
their sons blew themselves up for Allah.

Joe Kaufman, who has run an anti-terrorism organization for several years,
noted that both of the Ghawji sons have, in e-mails and other
communications, told friends their father was planning to take them to Syria
against their will, and one noted that his grandfather has promised to beat
him up when he arrived there.

If Mrs. Ghawji’s allegations are correct, she is up against some of the most
radical factions in the world today, including the adherents of blind Sheikh
Omar Abdul Rahman, now serving a life sentence in the SuperMax prison in
Colorado on accusations he helped in the planning of the 1993 World Trade
Center bombings in New York.

She has said her husband’s brother once bragged “we got them” when an
explosion at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia killed 19 Americans.

She also alleges her husband had an affair with a spokeswoman working for
the Islamic Society of Central Florida.

That organization, she said, tried to sponsor a fundraiser featuring Siraj
Wahhaj, who is on the U.S. Attorney’s list of potential co-conspirators to
the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

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