Warith Deen Umar Update from AP, :
NEW YORK (AP) — The former head Islamic chaplain for the state prison system was sentenced Thursday to a year of home detention by a judge who said he deserved leniency on a gun charge after decades of achievements that followed childhood poverty.
Warith Deen Umar will be permitted to leave home for work, medical care and religious services, Judge Robert P. Patterson said.
Earlier this year, Umar, 62, 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.
The judge rejected efforts by the government to get him to take into consideration a published report that quoted Umar as saying in an unpublished memoir that even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly admire and applaud the Sept. 11 hijackers.
That would be this Wall Street Journal piece (subscribers only). Prison officials took it seriously enough to ban him from the prison system:
Umar was banned from state prisons shortly after the 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.”…
He said he was shunned by many in his religious community after a false report that he had sympathized with Sept. 11 hijackers. He said one New York mosque has permanently banned him.
Good for them.
He said he had been comforted by neighbors around his home in Glenmont, N.Y., near Albany, where he said a mostly white group of people including Christians, Jews and gays came to his defense.
“These are Americans,” he said….
Yes, probably. And besotted dhimmi fellow travelers also, probably.
Umar has said he believes “they are persecuting me because I’m Muslim and I’m black and I speak out and because I was the Muslim chaplain in the state prison system for 25 years.”…
Get real, Umar. Being Muslim and black, if you were an outspoken anti-jihadist, would get you front-page, above the fold coverage, plus seats on all the pseudo-fearless conservative talking head shows. There is nothing that American officials and media want to find more than an outspoken, passionate, articulate moderate Muslim. If you were one, you’d be everyone’s hero.
The judge told Umar that some Christians and others in the United States had trouble understanding how some Muslims could interpret the Quran in a way to permit people to blow themselves up in Afghanistan and Iraq in an effort to kill others.
“I happen to be Christian,” the judge said. “That’s very difficult for me to understand.”
Well, judge, why don’t you explain to us how you think Muslims should interpret the Qur’an? Here is another non-Muslim lecturing a Muslim about how to understand a book that he probably hasn’t actually even read.