When someone shares with you something of value, you have an obligation to share it with others.
Friday, 27 March 2009
Co-accused ‘unaware’ of tracts’ content
A woman who mass-mailed evangelical tracts that the authorities have found objectionable claimed in her defence yesterday that she did not know what was in them. Fucking Liar!
A woman who mass-mailed evangelical tracts that the authorities have found objectionable claimed in her defence yesterday that she did not know what was in them.
Dorothy Chan Hien Leng said it was only after her arrest in January last year that she read the 11 publications ‘because I wanted to know why I was arrested’.
The 45-year-old associate director of UBS and her husband allegedly had 439 copies of the seditious tracts at their Bukit Timah condominium in Maplewoods on Jan 30 last year. They were arrested that day.
Her defence mirrored that of her husband, SingTel technical officer Ong Kian Cheong, 50, who completed his defence last week.
They are being tried for distributing the tracts to three Muslim civil servants between March and December 2007, and for possessing similar booklets.
One of the tracts sent out was titled The Little Bride, which the prosecution said would fan ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims.
Chan, who had been distributing Christian tracts for 20 years, said she did not know what she had been arrested for.
Replying to a query from her lawyer, Mr. Selva Naidu, she said she did not think she was doing anything wrong by mailing out the tracts. In fact, she said, she and her husband believed it was a good way to evangelise.
She told the court that she hoped people would come to know ‘the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ’.
‘We were sowing the Gospel seed,’ she said.
She bought the tracts from Tecman in Bras Basah Complex and another now-defunct bookshop in Bukit Timah Plaza. She also wrote to distributors and societies overseas for other titles.
Later, for convenience and cost, she went online and ordered tracts from Chick Publications, which she said was an established American outfit with annual sales of US$2.9 million (S$4.5 million).
When she and her husband started out, they simply dropped tracts in letter boxes at Housing Board blocks.
In the late 1990s, she began mailing them to people whose names she picked out randomly from the phone book.
She claimed to have read only some of the tracts, and that she stopped reading them in 2004.
She added that she did not show them to her husband.
Cross-examined by Deputy Public Prosecutor Anandan Bala, she confirmed that her husband had not read the 11 tracts, which were ‘very doctrinal’.
She said she was unsure if he could understand them as he was a ‘technical man’ and not much of a reader.
She agreed with the DPP, however, that they could be offensive to people of different religions, including even Roman Catholics.
Asked whether she agreed that a practising Catholic would be offended by the publication Are Roman Catholics Christians?, Chan replied: ‘It could cause great offence, or it could cause the Catholics to turn around and believe in Jesus.’
1 comment:
Co-accused ‘unaware’ of tracts’ content
Elena Chong, Straits Times
10 March 2009
A woman who mass-mailed evangelical tracts that the authorities have found objectionable claimed in her defence yesterday that she did not know what was in them.
Dorothy Chan Hien Leng said it was only after her arrest in January last year that she read the 11 publications ‘because I wanted to know why I was arrested’.
The 45-year-old associate director of UBS and her husband allegedly had 439 copies of the seditious tracts at their Bukit Timah condominium in Maplewoods on Jan 30 last year. They were arrested that day.
Her defence mirrored that of her husband, SingTel technical officer Ong Kian Cheong, 50, who completed his defence last week.
They are being tried for distributing the tracts to three Muslim civil servants between March and December 2007, and for possessing similar booklets.
One of the tracts sent out was titled The Little Bride, which the prosecution said would fan ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims.
Chan, who had been distributing Christian tracts for 20 years, said she did not know what she had been arrested for.
Replying to a query from her lawyer, Mr. Selva Naidu, she said she did not think she was doing anything wrong by mailing out the tracts. In fact, she said, she and her husband believed it was a good way to evangelise.
She told the court that she hoped people would come to know ‘the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ’.
‘We were sowing the Gospel seed,’ she said.
She bought the tracts from Tecman in Bras Basah Complex and another now-defunct bookshop in Bukit Timah Plaza. She also wrote to distributors and societies overseas for other titles.
Later, for convenience and cost, she went online and ordered tracts from Chick Publications, which she said was an established American outfit with annual sales of US$2.9 million (S$4.5 million).
When she and her husband started out, they simply dropped tracts in letter boxes at Housing Board blocks.
In the late 1990s, she began mailing them to people whose names she picked out randomly from the phone book.
She claimed to have read only some of the tracts, and that she stopped reading them in 2004.
She added that she did not show them to her husband.
Cross-examined by Deputy Public Prosecutor Anandan Bala, she confirmed that her husband had not read the 11 tracts, which were ‘very doctrinal’.
She said she was unsure if he could understand them as he was a ‘technical man’ and not much of a reader.
She agreed with the DPP, however, that they could be offensive to people of different religions, including even Roman Catholics.
Asked whether she agreed that a practising Catholic would be offended by the publication Are Roman Catholics Christians?, Chan replied: ‘It could cause great offence, or it could cause the Catholics to turn around and believe in Jesus.’
Post a Comment