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Slap on wrist for gun-toting Wahhabi Imam in NY
The former head Islamic chaplain for the state prison system was sentenced Thursday [9/23/2006] to a year of home detention by a judge who said he deserved leniency on a gun charge. Warith Deen Umar will be permitted to leave home for work, medical care and religious services. ... [having] pleaded guilty to a gun charge after admitting he waved an empty shotgun at an angry tenant who struck him at a Bronx building he owns. He also owned a .22-caliber rifle and four shotgun shells.The government charged Umar with gun possession, saying he was not allowed to have one because he had been convicted in 1971 of possession of a dangerous weapon. A 2/5/2003 article in the Wall Street Journal Over a quiet dinner at an Indian restaurant in upstate New York, Warith Deen Umar offered his views of Islam and the Sept. 11 attacks. The hijackers should be honored as martyrs, he said. The U.S. risks further terrorism attacks because it oppresses Muslims around the world. "Without justice, there will be warfare, and it can come to this country, too," he said. During a long and extraordinary career, he has had an unusual opportunity to spread these ideas. For about 20 years until he retired in 2000, Imam Umar -- the title means prayer leader -- helped run New York's growing Islamic prison program, recruiting and training dozens of chaplains, and ministering to thousands of inmates himself. "Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud" the hijackers, he wrote in an unpublished memoir. The Quran, he said, does not condemn terrorism against oppressors of Muslims, even if innocent people die. "This is the sort of teaching they don't want in prison," he said. "But this is what I'm doing." The NY Post article goes on to say: Umar was banned from state prisons shortly after the [preceding] article was published in 2003 despite his assertion that his comments were taken out of context and that he never said the terrorists were martyrs or honored them. The judge said he considered the article and two others cited by prosecutors "unreliable for sentencing purposes." That judge is "unreliable for sentencing purposes." Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2006-09-29 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=167236 |