While sitting in the Globe's pew:
"Muslims in New Hampshire pray for long-stalled mosque’s opening" by Sally Jacobs Globe Correspondent October 14, 2017
MANCHESTER, N.H. — From a distance, it appears an elegant structure. It sits, unfinished, on a grassy hillside at the edge of town, a bold octagonal statement overlooking lush green mountains that was supposed to have been the state’s first permanent mosque.
But come a little closer, and the scars are visible. Windows have been broken by vandals. Graffiti mars the half-built entrance. Construction has inched along for so long — more than a decade — that some of the work inside is failing and needs to be replaced. Surveillance cameras and fencing keep trespassers at bay, but they can’t stop the rocks that are regularly hurled over the fence.
Painful words are also being flung its way.
“The Islamic Society of New Hampshire is a terrorist safe haven . . . and there is a strong likelihood violent jihadist activity will be conducted by ‘sleeper terrorists’ attending this particular mosque,” Greg Salts, a former state legislator, said before the Board of Aldermen on a sweltering night in August, reading from a report by a retired federal agent. “The mosque should be closed down immediately.”
The report went viral — though only locally. A radio program advised residents to be wary of the Muslim group, which has been operating out of a temporary mosque in a strip mall while the permanent structure is under construction. Worried citizens called police. But in the end, local law enforcement dismissed the allegations, and two weeks ago even Salts backed off the charges and shook hands with one of the mosque’s leaders outside the aldermanic chambers.
“They say if you see something, say something, so that’s all I was trying to do,” said Salts, a tractor-trailer driver. “But I have to say, it does seem far-fetched. I throw up my hands.”
“Please, you must come and visit the mosque,” responded Amjad Rana, mosque treasurer. “We are open 24 hours a day.”
The episode is a microcosm of the fragile hopes and sometimes fraught relations in small-city America today, but it is also part of the tale of one immigrant community’s determined effort to set down roots. For Manchester’s Muslims, the controversy is the latest in a series of hurdles they have encountered as they have worked to bring the mosque to the mountain.
While the current confrontation has subsided, Muslim leaders remain concerned that the ripple effect of the public debate, exacerbated by the current political climate, will impede fund-raising efforts already difficult at best. The numbers are daunting: Eighteen years after the project was first envisioned, the community has raised $1.5 million toward the mosque. Another $2.5 million is needed to finish it.
“Will this episode affect people who do not know us and might have given?” said Mahboubul Hassan, a mosque board member and an economics professor at Southern New Hampshire University. “Maybe. But I believe there is something good in Americans. They can figure out who is good and who is not. History will show this as an aberration.”
Like the Germans back when, and what is this about Muslims being forbidden from charging/ paying usury, 'er, interest?
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Maybe they can all join hands and sing songs.
"Vatican court convicts ex-hospital chief in housing scandal" by Nicole Winfield Associated Press October 14, 2017
VATICAN CITY — A Vatican court on Saturday convicted the former president of the pope’s children’s hospital of diverting some $500,000 in donations to renovate a cardinal’s flat and gave him a one-year suspended sentence.
The original charges against former president Giuseppe Profiti had been embezzlement. But the court convicted him of a lesser offense of abuse of office after the defense argued the money was intended as an investment to benefit the hospital.
The three-judge tribunal absolved Bambino Gesu Pediatric Hospital’s former treasurer, Massimo Spina. Notably, neither the cardinal who benefited from the renovation nor the contractor who was apparently paid twice for doing the work was charged.
More than anything, the trial exposed how Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s former secretary of state, bent Vatican rules to get his retirement apartment ready after Pope Francis was elected in 2013 and named a new secretary of state.
It also revealed the ‘‘opacity, silence, and poor management’’ in the handling of Vatican assets, prosecutor Roberto Zanotti said in his closing arguments.
A lack of financial transparency and accountability has bedeviled the Holy See for centuries and been a top concern for Francis’ reform-minded papacy.....
Uh-huh.
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