As soon as I got into my car after spending over five hours on Mt. Lemmon outside of Tucson last Wednesday, I got a call requesting me to speak with an AP reporter on the Caner saga. So as I was driving across Tucson (note to Tucson: you really, really need an East/West corridor aka freeway. Really) I was on the phone with the reporter. Anyway, a friend in the car commented as soon as the phone call was finished, “All of that will end up as two sentences in the story.” And, as you can see, that observation was spot on.
Most interesting item in this story? This paragraph:
He told The Associated Press in 2002 that he was born in Sweden to a Turkish father and Swedish mother, who brought the family to Ohio in 1969, when he was about 3 years old. He said he accepted Christ as a teenager at a Baptist church in Columbus, and then pursued ministry, getting a degree from Criswell College, a Baptist school in Dallas.
I would love to see a link to this material, personally. If that is the case, then isn’t it ironic that the very conclusions we have come to in our inquiry into Caner’s past is what he said to the AP in 2002? And doesn’t this provide final and absolute evidence that all of his claims since then about Turkey, moving his arrival in the US back so he can become a jihad-trained Muslim from Turkey, etc., are false? I mean, if Ergun Caner isn’t a good enough source for documentation on Ergun Caner, what, pray tell, would be?
Meanwhile, Tom Chantry has provided another pastorally relevant exhortation based upon this situation. I appreciate Pastor Chantry’s contributions, since he is working hard at making something good come out of what is otherwise a very troubling and at times very nasty situation.
Finally, Hussein Wario continues on his crusade to major on the minors and tilt at the proverbial windmills. He still thinks it is just fine for Muslims to pray in bathrooms, despite the fact that the reality is they are prohibited from doing so by direct statement from the prophet. As I noted in an earlier blog entry:
The Hadith of Al-Tirmidhi, 242, reads: Allah’s Messenger (peace be upon him) prohibited the observance of prayers in seven places: on a dung hill, in a slaughterhouse, in a graveyard, in the middle of the road, in a bathroom, in the watering place where camels drink and sit, and upon the roof of the House of Allah. Likewise, we read in Fiqh-us-Sunnah 4.53a, “…they cite the Prophet’s hadith: “The entire earth is a mosque except for a graveyard and a bathroom.”
Now, as I pointed out on the DL, Caner made his comments about praying in the school bathroom not by way of demonstrating his ignorance of Islamic law, nor by way of admitting he was ashamed to be a Muslim, or afraid for his life (the only reasons anyone has come up with for offering salah in a bathroom), but in the exact opposite context: he was asserting how devout he was, not how ignorant he was. So why do prayers in a bathroom? Why not out on the front lawn of the Gahanna Lincoln High School, in full Islamic garb? But this kind of reasoning is lost on Mr. Hussein, who seems to feel that if any Muslim has ever offered salah in a bathroom, then Ergun Caner must have, too! It is this kind of reasoning that prompted me to warn our brother earlier, “You have completely lost your balance, brother. You are becoming a spectacle along with EC. Consider your ways.”
