Monday, March 12, 2007

Those damn hardline Muslims -- they're stealing our religious extremists' best material!

Muslim extremists (in Australia):

HARDLINE Muslim clerics are encouraging their followers to cheat the tax system because they consider paying income tax contrary to Islamic law....

Sydney-based Islamic leader Fadi Rahman told The Australian that ... he had heard hardline clerics at Friday sermons in Sydney highlight the importance of cheating the tax system.

...Muslim community leader Keysar Trad ... said he was often told by "conservative" clerics to quit his former job at the tax office because they considered it contrary to sharia law....


Our extremists:

A newly remorseful Pensacola evangelist, who still disputes the government's right to make him pay taxes, was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on federal tax charges....

Kent Hovind, owner of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land on North Palafox Street in Pensacola, has maintained he owes no taxes because everything he owns belongs to God.

During his trial, Kent Hovind was characterized as a tax protester who paid his employees in cash and labeled them "missionaries" to avoid payroll tax and FICA requirements....


More of our extremists:

For 16 years the leaders of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple refused to withhold federal taxes from their employees' paychecks or to pay federal taxes as an employer. The protest came to an end Feb. 13, 2001, when federal marshals seized the church building to pay taxes and fines totalling $6 million.

... in 1983 ... the church's pastor, the Rev. Gregory J. Dixon, decided the church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent in withholding taxes from its employees.

Dixon, along with his son and co-pastor, the Rev. Gregory A. Dixon, ... argu[ed] that Jesus Christ is the only authority over the church and that withholding taxes would impose a secular authority over the church, thereby violating its core belief.....


There's one difference, however: The dirty filthy Moo-slimes who allegedly urge tax avoidance in Australia may or may not exist -- that the first article (from Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper) doesn't actually provide the name of a single person who's advocating this course of action. Our taxes-are-illegal crazies, by contrast, shout their names from the housetops. (The best-known protester currently making this argument in America, who admittedly doesn't seem to quote the Bible to buttress his arguments, is Ed Brown of New Hampshire. He has a MySpace page.)

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