© Alex Brandon/APAshley Young, center, walks away after a status hearing for her brother, Nicholas Young, on Aug. 3, 2016, at the Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse in Alexandria, Va.
According to a transcript of the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg said that the defendant, Nicholas Young, was interested in ISIS and Nazism simultaneously. As an example of historical Muslim-Nazi cooperation, Kromberg noted that Young, on Facebook, had "liked" Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, a Palestinian nationalist who supported Adolf Hitler. Last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused an uproar by claiming that al-Husayni inspired the Nazi Holocaust, an allegation that was widely denounced as untrue by historians.
Young's lawyer pointed out to the judge that the FBI agents who executed a search warrant on Young's apartment initially thought they lacked the authority to seize the Nazi mementos — not seeing them as obviously relevant to a terrorism case — but that Kromberg had told them to seize the items anyway. Kromberg, for his part, has previously faced accusations in sworn affidavits by defense attorneys of anti-Muslim bias.
