c. 2004 Religion News Service
Imam of Ohio’s Largest Mosque Sentenced for Lying About Jihadist Group
AKRON, Ohio (RNS) Fawaz Damra, called an interfaith peacemaker by some and a fund-raiser for terrorists by others, has been sentenced by a federal judge for lying on his immigration papers.
The leader of Ohio’s largest mosque was sentenced Monday (Sept. 20) to two months in a federal prison and four months under home confinement for lying on his immigration papers about raising funds for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Damra, a Cleveland imam known for his work promoting harmony with non-Muslim religious leaders, also must pay a $5,000 fine.
He must report to prison Nov. 22, after the holy month of Ramadan’s 30 days of fasting for Muslims. A judge will rule on Damra’s citizenship later this week. His attorneys want the issue decided after an appeals court rules on his conviction, and prosecutors want the matter settled immediately.
“It’s only a matter of time,” U.S. Attorney Gregory White said. “It’s going to happen.”
White’s office sought a five-year sentence for Damra, who was born in Palestine.
“At the very time that he asks to be a citizen of this country, he is raising funds for terrorists,” the prosecutor said. “That organization was as anti-American as any.”
The elders at Damra’s mosque, the Islamic Center of Greater Cleveland, will meet next week to decide the imam’s future with the house of worship.
In June, a jury convicted Damra, 42, of lying on his citizenship application about his past links to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In tapes of various meetings from 1991, Damra is seen ranting about the need to kill Jews.
In one tape, Damra says the crowd must help pay for the battle in the Middle East, describing how cash would “direct all the rifles at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.”
On Monday, shaking and with his voice cracking, Damra apologized before a crowd that included more than 70 people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder to support him.
“I admit the hateful, foolish statements against Jewish people,” he told U.S. District Judge James S. Gwin. “They’re indefensible. … I sincerely pray to God that they forgive me.”
John Hexter, executive director of the American Jewish Committee in Cleveland, said the conviction is difficult for Muslims and Jews.
“It is a shame that it has come down to this,” Hexter said. “It’s a sad state of affairs that such a strong leader, one who had such potential and such a great following, would besmirch the relationships that Muslims and Jews can have.”
_ John Caniglia
Evangelical Support Led to Louisiana Ban on Same-Sex Marriage
(RNS) An analysis of Saturday’s (Sept. 18) statewide vote to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana shows that areas with a large number of evangelical Christians played a key role.
In 10 of the state’s 64 parishes, voters spoke with a unified voice extraordinary in electoral politics. In those parishes, at least 90 percent of voters supported the constitutional amendment. Among the 10 were six of the most heavily evangelical parishes in the state.
Major religious groups supporting traditional marriage made passing the amendment a priority. Backers said it would protect the traditional understanding of marriage from court decisions such as those that have opened the door to same-sex unions in other states.
At the far end of the spectrum of support, 94 percent of those voting in LaSalle Parish in central Louisiana favored the amendment. LaSalle has the state’s heaviest concentration of evangelical Christians; 81 percent of the population belong to one of several evangelical congregations, according to a 2000 survey by the Glenmary Research Center.
Alone at the other end of the spectrum was New Orleans, where the amendment found the least support. It won there with 55 percent of the vote. The amendment attracted no less than 71 percent of the vote anywhere else.
Running up to the election, evangelical groups such as the Louisiana Family Forum launched a statewide drive on behalf of the amendment, educating pastors and encouraging them to launch voter registration drives in their churches.
Louisiana’s Catholic bishops also issued a public statement urging the state’s 1.5 million Catholics to vote for the amendment.
The amendment seemed to do slightly better among evangelicals than among Catholics. The level of support in the 10 most heavily evangelical parishes was 88 percent; it was 80 percent in the state’s 10 most heavily Catholic parishes.
Statewide, 78 percent of voters supported the measure, meaning that opponents fell well short of the 30 percent vote they had hoped for.
The amendment prohibits state judges and officials from recognizing same-sex marriage and civil unions sanctioned in other states. On Nov. 2, residents in as many as a dozen states will be voting on similar measures banning same-sex marriage.
_ Bruce Nolan
Rwandan Catholic Priest Faces Tribunal Trial
(RNS) The first trial of a Rwandan Roman Catholic priest by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda began Monday (Sept. 20) amid protests of the tribunal itself.
Athanese Seromba, 41, has been accused of directing the murder of 2,000 of his parishioners during the 1994 genocide in the central African country.
The priest failed to appear at the first day of the trial, joining 43 other detainees at the Tanzania-based tribunal in a boycott of the proceedings to protest plans to move case files and detainees to Rwanda, reported Agence France Presse.
On Tuesday, the presiding judge suspended proceedings for a day, issued a warning to Seromba’s attorneys and ordered the appointment of counsel for the priest.
His original lawyers told the court that their client had asked them not to represent him during the boycott, which was scheduled to end Wednesday.
Although Seromba’s case is the first trial of a Catholic priest at the tribunal, several priests have been convicted by courts in Rwanda. Two of them were later acquitted on appeal.
In 2001, a Belgian court found two Catholic nuns guilty of taking a role in the genocide.
Seromba has pleaded innocent to the charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.
His lawyers planned to argue that although their client was present at the time of the killings in his church in the western parish of Nyange, he was powerless to prevent the murders.
During a 100-day period in 1994, about 800,000 people from Rwanda’s Tutsi minority were slaughtered during a campaign organized by the then-Hutu regime.
Southern Baptist TV Network Cuts Staff
(RNS) The television network owned by the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board has cut 19 staff members as a cost-saving measure.
FamilyNet has reduced its staff from 66 to 47, Martin King, spokesman for the board, told Religion News Service. The network’s budget was reduced by half from $8.5 million to about $4 million, he said.
The Fort Worth, Texas-based network operates 24 hours a day, airing more than 50 hours of original programs each week to a potential audience of 32 million households.
“These difficult changes will help FamilyNet be in the black financially next year for the first time in its history,” said Randy Singer, special assistant to the president of the mission board, in a Sept. 14 statement released by Baptist Press, the denomination’s news service.
The responsibilities of the positions that were cut will be reassigned, transferred to mission board staff in Alpharetta, Ga., or eliminated.
Two years ago, the mission board announced a reorganization that would lead to FamilyNet being self-sustaining within three years. But expected advertising revenues have not kept up with expenses, Singer said.
“NAMB cannot provide additional help to FamilyNet beyond the amounts specified in the three-year business plan at a time when NAMB is unable to fill missionary positions in the field,” he said.
King said the overall mission board budget has been affected by a reduction in income from an annual mission offering collected through Southern Baptist churches. He said about 180 missionary positions are open and unfilled, but none has been cut.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Religious Leaders Protest Use of Cross at Nightclub
LONDON (RNS) British church leaders have roundly condemned the prominent use of a Christian symbol in the refurbishment of a popular nightclub in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Charlie’s Nightclub has reopened as The Cross, and uses the cross as the central theme of its decor, with a huge metal cross adorning the main door and mock church notice boards with illuminated crosses.
In a joint statement, Bishop Bruce Cameron of Aberdeen and Orkney (who is also primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church); Roman Catholic Bishop Peter Moran of Aberdeen; the Rev. Ian Aitken, on behalf of the Aberdeen presbytery of the Church of Scotland; and other church leaders described the use of the cross as offensive and tasteless.
“Christians are a minority in Scotland, but the cross is a powerful symbol of suffering and hope to literally billions of people across the globe, many of them in some of the poorest places on Earth,” they said in the statement. “So it reveals remarkable indifference, not to say tastelessness, to use it as a decoration for a nightclub.”
It was difficult to believe that the nightclub’s owners would show the same disrespect to the sacred symbols of Muslims or Jews, added the church leaders.
“The offensive use of Christianity’s most revered symbol, presumably for some perceived commercial advantage, has not been done in ignorance,” they commented.
The owner, G1 Group, described itself as Scotland’s leading bar and restaurant company.
“It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that the company is unable to endorse the vision of Scotland as a pluralist tolerant society, one that accords respect to the different religious and moral traditions that comprise it,” they said.
_ Robert Nowell
Quote of the Day: Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu
(RNS) “God weeps over God’s world, aching because of conflict in Darfur, in Beslan, in Harare, in Colombia, in Jerusalem, in Belfast. … God _ Emmanuel, God with us, with you _ has no one but you to help God make this world hospitable to peace and justice.”
_ Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, South Africa, in a message for the International Day of Prayer for Peace distributed by the World Council of Churches. The day was observed Tuesday (Sept. 21).
MO/PH END RNS
