Thursday, July 22, 2010

California Christian Apologetics Conference, 2006, Ergun Caner

Stand for Truth Ministries, California Christian Apologetics Conference, September 22, 2006 (link to partial video)

(referring to the time stamps in the partial video)

(0:10) I cannot be President. I came in 1978, when I was getting ready to go to college.
  • Did he mean to say that he came in 1969, when he was getting ready for preschool?
  • Did he mean to say, "I became a citizen in 1978, when I was getting ready to go to college"?
  • Caner was about 11-12 years old in 1978. Was he getting ready to
(0:58) I live in the country now, but I have - my entire life - lived in the cement jungle, I've been an inner city person.
  • From what we can tell, he grew up in Gahanna, Ohio. Does Gahanna even have an inner city? (See its website, noting that it was considered in 2007 to be one of the best places in America to live.)
(1:06) I learned English on Sesame Street. Held back a year from school, so I could learn English, so I could follow along better.
  • Sesame Street began airing on November 10, 1969 (documentation), so it is possible that he did start learning English as a 3-year-old on Sesame Street. It's even remotely possible that he was held back a year from entering school so he could learn English better. However, he graduated high school at age 17, so if he was held back a year, it seems he found a way to catch up.
(2:35) I hated you. That may be harsh, but as Dr. Hayes told you, my madrasa - my training center - was in Beirut before I came to America. We came as missionaries to you.
  • When did Caner study in a training center in Beirut? What year approximately?
  • If we assume Caner did not in fact ever train in Beirut, is his statement an understandable, innocent misstatement?
  • What Islamic missionary activity was the Acar Caner family ever involved with?
(2:59) [speaking of his father] Five times a day he would climb to the top of a minaret.
  • What minaret? There's no visible minaret at the Islamic foundation building on Broad St. that apparently served in place of a mosque for the Caner family.


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(3:18) And so we came to America - it was '78.
  • Again, is he just misspeaking "1969" as "1978"?
(4:03) I was the oldest. My father brought his wives with him. Yes, polygamous Muslims do come to America. We call it the Abraham lie. They say, "This is my wife, and this is my sister."
  • This seems to pretty clearly state that Ergun Caner's father was a polygamist, who had more than one wife at once. Is that true? The evidence seems to suggest that Acar Caner had only two wives, one at a time.
  • If it is not true, is this just a misstatement?
(5:11) So I, as a high school boy, moved to Gahanna, Ohio.
  • Again, is he just misspeaking "high school" for "pre-school"?
(6:49) And I walked in to the Stelzer Road Missionary Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio in full gear - full keffiyeh - and a Koran.
  • We have yet to see him wearing any true keffiyeh - and it may be that Caner does not even really understand what the term keffiyeh is, since he seems to think it means an entire outfit.
(7:21) I went home and told my father, "Abi, Isa Messiah" - Jesus is the Messiah. And my father faced Mecca and prayed the prayer of disownment. And it was done - it was the last I saw my father.
  • "Abi" is the Turkish word for "older brother." (evidence) That seems like a strange thing for someone to call his father.
  • The Koran repeatedly calls Jesus "the Messiah." (link to discussion)
  • What is this "prayer of disownment"? Can Caner provide it to us? Can anyone even find a transcription of such a prayer on the Internet?
  • Does the Sunni version of Sharia law even permit the disownment of children? Perhaps someone more well versed in Sharia law can tell me.
  • Caner saw his father again, at the end of his father's life, according to his own testimony elsewhere.
(7:41) (speaking of his mother) She got saved and in the baptistry took off her keffiyeh - took of her chador. She's a church planter in Elephant Butte, New Mexico.
  • Notice again that Caner seems to use the term "keffiyeh" now to refer to other Islamic clothing - in this case an chador.
  • From what we can tell from the court records, Caner's mother was not a practicing Muslim during his youth. Was she wearing the chador in the baptistry just for dramatic effect?
  • And why would she need to take off a chador except symbolically? The Scriptures not only permit but encourage women to cover their heads, and women in most Christian churches did, until the last 100 years.
- TurretinFan

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

The one thing in that video, if it is the one I watch yesterday at AlphaOmega, is the deliberateness of his thought and words delivered.

You certainly cannot say he was fluffy and hot with emotion and flippantly said those things as misstatements.

I read also, Liberty has dropped him off the roster for teaching in the fall term?

Is there another source to confirm that?

Mark said...

Now, if we take all of these false statements as you've pointed out and replace them with the truth does this presentation even make sense?

Unknown said...

He spoke Monday and Tuesday at a youth camp at Cedarville University. I would like to have heard what his testimony sounds like with all of this removed from it. Seems like if would be kind of boring, although the conversion of any person is a great thing and only by the grace of God.

Bennett Willis said...

It may be that "boring" was the cause of the embellishments--not profits (which were my suspected motivation at the start). The "profits" may be unintended consequences--but they certainly exist. I am starting to suspect that the benefit of the improved c.v. turned out to be greater than planned. This may help EC feel that he is innocent of the lies that he has told--he was "only" working on the boring issue.

You have to be careful about schedules and who teaches. Universities often give themselves flexibility in their schedules by using the term "unassigned" or some similar word--which really means that we have not completely decided how the teaching load would be assigned. This would especially be true of someone who did not normally have much of a load due to his or her administrative duties. Just because EC’s name does not appear on the schedule does not necessarily mean that he will not have a full teaching load when the semester starts.

Bennett Willis said...

Trying to sort out what EC says about himself in the recordings will only confuse you. If you have listened to more than a few talks, it can't be done. Look it as a "morality play" or something, not as literal truth.

Anonymous said...

Ergun Caner bought a second home shortly after moving to Lynchburg. Is it possible his mother lives there? Or maybe it's just a rental/investment property.

Anonymous said...

Ergun Caner bought a second home shortly after moving to Lynchburg. Is it possible his mother lives there? Or maybe it's just a rental property

Fredericka said...

At no time in Acar Caner's life was polygamy legal in Turkey. Where did he marry the extra wife he presented as his sister? Did he bring her with him to Sweden? Under what pretext? Ergun is always talking about how his dad was his "hero," but he always finds a way to make him look bad, even if he has to make it up out of whole cloth.

His theme is 'misconception:'

(2:38) "I hated you. That may be harsh, but as Dr. Hayes told you, my madrassa, my training center, was in Beirut. Before I came to America, we came as missionaries to you. My father was a muezzin, the one who does the prayer in the mosque. Five times a day he would climb to the top of the minaret and begin, 'Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!' He would do the call to prayer. He was also an architect. So we built mosques. And so we came to America. It was '78. Ayatollah Khomeini had said, 'We will not stop until America is an Islamic nation.' And we came. And we continue to come. Anything I knew about Christianity I learned through misconception and caricature. I knew nothing about you, had never been in a church, had never been outside of the mosque. Anything I knew about you I learned either through television, hyperbole, gossip. But I did know this. I hated you and I thought you hated me."

Why didn't he just ask his Swedish Lutheran grand-mother who lived with the family, 'Mor-mor, is it true you Christians hate us?' Plug in the truth, as Mark suggests, and there's nothing left.

Erp said...

I should point out it would be very difficult for a green card holder to bring in a 'sister' unless she qualified in her own right. A permanent resident can't even bring in adult children (1 spouse and any minor children assuming they aren't otherwise excluded are it).

The Beirut training might not be such a big lie if one or more of the teachers in the Ohio Islamic center came from Beirut though I don't think Beirut is/was known for its strict Islamic schools (if anything Beirut in the 60s/70s was the most liberal and 'western' Arabic city with Christians and Muslims of many different denominations and French a second language for the educated class).

Fredericka said...

Bennett Willis wrote, "Trying to sort out what EC says about himself in the recordings will only confuse you."

That was his undoing. The late Aimee Semple McPherson said, 'That's my story and I'm sticking to it.' Even though she realized the police did not believe her story, she understood that 'improving' it by stirring in the missing ingredient, plausibility, was the recipe for ruin. Change your story and you're an admitted liar.

Ergun has always had all these different versions out there, from his books to the 2002 AP story to the 'repentant jihadi from Turkey' pulpit testimony. This new version adds a twist, schooling in Beirut, Lebanon. That of course would upend everything else, because if he attended school in Beirut, Lebanon, then he lived for a time in a country with a sizable Christian population. In fact prior to their civil war I believe the Christians, though a minority, ran the country. (Sounds like grounds for a civil war...) So how could all he knew about Christians come from watching 'Andy Griffith' on Turkish TV? He lived in a country they ran. Or if he wants it believed he was there during the civil war, then he should say, 'I inferred you Christians hated me by counting up the incoming ordnance the Christian Phalangists lobbed my way.' In either case he would have known more about Christians (of a sort, anyway) than from watching them on TV. Lebanon was and is a multi-religious society, albeit a dysfunctional one. So this would change everything. But he never thinks it through.

Kelly said...

As Dr. White noted at aomin, this video really eviscerates Dr. Geisler's excuse making re: Caner's father's "wives."

This is still on the FAQs page at erguncaner.com:

--------------------------------
2. Why are you not darker, and why is is your accent not more pronounced?
--------------------------------

These questions go straight to the heart of Caner's deception. Apparently, he gets asked these two questions enough that he felt it best to address them on his website. They are simple questions. They have simple answers.

Something like this, for example: Well, my father is Turkish, but my mother is Swedish, and I've lived in the United States since I was about three years old.

But, Dr. Caner answers, instead, calmly, in written form, as follows:
"These are two of my favorite questions. Like I said, I am Turkish- and to many Muslims, that makes me a half-breed. Turks are Persians (neighboring Iraq to the southeast) and European. We darken in the summer, and lighten in the winter. Add this to the fact that we have a horrible human rights record (fighting Greeks, Kurds, Cossacks, Cypriotes, Iraqis, Americans, etc.) and you can see why we are hated by many! As for my accent, speak to my wife and those who have me speak at evening events. I work very hard to speak understandably, and with clear diction. The problem is, English is neither my first nor my second language. Sometimes it is really a struggle."

The only language I've heard Dr. Caner struggle with is Arabic.

See here: http://www.erguncaner.com/home/faq/default.php#2

I find it pretty low that he has involved his wife in his tall tales.

Anonymous said...

Beirut Lebanon was the pearl of the Mediterranean. I spent time with a Beirut born and raised Muslim while doing business in the Ivory Coast, W. Africa, living in his house in 1996. Beirut, from his point of view, was the hub of tourism with beautiful resorts and Middle East glamour and fine dining and a thriving economy until the wars basically destroyed that beautiful city.

Dr. Caner has just got his facts wrong here about there, too.

Fredericka said...

Kelly wrote: "Turks are Persians (neighboring Iraq to the southeast) and European."

Oh.

BruinEric said...

Wow. More examples of Mr. Caner claiming he moved to the USA in 1978...

Open (repeat) question to those who believe these are unintentional misstatements: How many times would Mr. Caner need to misstate the date he moved to the USA for you to believe it isn't a mistake? 5? 7? 10?

Anonymous said...

By the way, if I am not mistaken, which I could be, if Dr. Caner's father were indeed a registered architect, he would be listed in a "world" listings publication of architects with his own number.

I have forgotten the registry I am aware of. If it comes to me I will check for his "number" and report. I may have to contact my Tribal attorney who sued an architect on my Tribe's behalf. This particular architect that we sued just happened to represent that his hands were on the architectual design build construction of the Palm Hotel, a ritzee 5 star affair on the West Coast of Togo, West Africa, a hotel I lodged in some years ago!

The point is, I surprised this architect when he was "speaking his c. vitae" to us. When I heard him mention his involvement in the Palm Hotel in Togo, W. Africa, I promptly got up and went to my office and got some brochures I had in my brief case establishing to him, showing him by them, that I knew about that hotel and that I could easily verify his statement that he was the architect of record for that construction. Ironically, this architect had been embellishing his work all along and it wasn't until after some business with him that things began to appear different that he represented to us in the beginning.

The more we learn about Dr. Caner's factual evidences the clearer the facts are becoming about him and his family.

Hope someone beats me to the punch! :)

Turretinfan said...

I did check to see whether he was listed as the architect for the Broad St. Islamic Foundation, but I did not find any mention of his name. His death certificate indicated something other than architect, but perhaps he was an architect in Sweden or Turkey.

Anonymous said...

Just an update: I haven't be able to contact my attorney or have I found any reference made to [Architect] Acar Caner being an architect over in Turkey or Lebanon or Sweden or the United States, yet?

Seeing Dr. Caner is clear in his representation that his dad was an architect and he specifically moved here to the United States to build a mosque/s in Ohio, one would think he would have had to file his architectural registration with the legal authorities who would govern his professional services in those particular jurisdictions where architectural plans are filed for permit purposes so the hired engineers's work could be filed and building permits could be issued based on both the work of the Architect and the Engineer???

Tom said...

Regarding Caner's appearance at the Cedarville youth event on July 12-18, take a look at the CURRENT version of the Speakers section, and one finds something VERY interesting:

http://buildmomentum.org/youth-conference-speakers.asp