In light of word spreading that a local business owning family has been potentially linked to a terrorism network, it’s natural for the community to be in shock.

As news broke yesterday, there were lots of emotions reported and the most common was the need for the community to not frequent any resort area businesses owned by Basel and Samir Ramadan, the two alleged ring leaders in this multi-million dollar cigarette smuggling effort that could be profiting from terrorist activities. That’s a reasonable reaction and we agree with the basic premise. Nobody wants to help businesses or operators affiliated with the terrorism world.

However, it’s also not as simple of an issue as that. Once we started working on this story, one of the first goals we set in-house was to determine who these individuals are and to determine exactly what businesses they own. It’s not an easy chore.

Due to the common nature of their last name and the realization there are other Ramadan families in business in this area, the fact is it’s difficult to ascertain without a tremendous amount of research. Even then, court and business license documents can be dated and names can be generic enough to raise questions.

What we have been able to determine we reported in our article on page 6. We will continue to look into the story and dig into what exactly these two own here. In the meantime, we think a little discretion is in order.

The kneejerk reaction is to impact what we citizens can and that’s by boycotting their businesses. That’s fine, but we advise for people to be careful with these decisions because you could be hurting families who have no consideration at all in this scheming endeavor.