UPDATE: Eluana Englaro died on Monday Feb. 9.

What’s been called “Italy’s Terry Schiavo case” is starting to resemble its U.S. precedent in more ways than one. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered doctors on Friday not to disconnect the feeding tubes that the country’s top appeals court had ruled could be removed. Doctors had began withdrawing them on Friday before the order came from Rome.

Eluana Englaro, 38, has been in a vegetative state since a car crash in 1992. Her  case has looked much like that of Schiavo, the American who spent 15 years in a vegetative state and was allowed to die in 2005 after a long court battle.

(Photo:Eluana Englaro in an undated family photo)

“Until we have a law about end-of-life issues, nutrition and hydration, because they are a form of vital life sustenance, cannot be suspended under any circumstances by those who are care-givers of people who are not self-sufficient,” Berlusconi said after making the case resemble the Schiavo drama even more by intervening to stop Englaro’s tubes from being removed. In the Schiavo case, President George Bush also stepped in at a late stage to try to block a court decision to disconnect her.

The cabinet acted in defiance of Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano, who was opposed to dealing with the issue through a decree and has the power to block it. But Berlusconi said that if that happened he would call an emergency session of parliament, where he has a comfortable majority, to enact a law.

Catholic politicians, mostly in the centre right, have said that not feeding Englaro amounts to euthanasia, which is illegal in Italy, and had urged the government to intervene.

As in the Schiavo case, the Milan court that ruled on Englaro back in November said it was convinced that her condition was irreversible and that she would prefer to die rather than be kept alive artificially. Do you think those criteria are enough to allow doctors to remove the nutrition and hydration tubes?

(Photo: Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, 20 Dec 2008/Remo Casilli)

Seven years after it was shut in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, a leading U.S. Islamic charity and five men linked to it have been convicted on numerous terrorist financing charges related to the funnelling of over $12 million to the militant Palestinian group Hamas. You can read our report here.

The guilty verdicts delivered on Monday by a federal jury in Dallas cap an arduous process that included a debacle last year that saw a mistrial on most of the counts, leading to this year’s lengthy retrial. Many years of investigation and probably millions of dollars in tax payer money went into the case against the Holy Land Foundation that finally resulted in a rare judicial victory for the out-going administration of U.S. President George W. Bush in its efforts to curtail the financing of overseas organisations it considers to be terrorist.

The stakes were high — a failure to secure convictions this time round would have probably brought the whole affair to an end. Investigators and prosecutors may now have more confidence to bring similar cases to trial down the road.

For the retrial the prosecution narrowed its case and simplified its narrative in a bid to reduce the complexity for the jury — a lesson learned from last year’s confusing mess. There were still 108 counts in all and the jury deliberated for eight days.

The Islamic community has said the case highlights the unfair scrutiny that U.S. Muslims have been subjected to since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that such action criminalizes legitimate charitable activities which are central to the Islamic faith.

Support web sites such as “Freedom to Give” say the charity and the men were guilty of nothing more than supporting Palestinian refugees in need; the U.S. government maintains it was all a front to support Hamas.

There are still Islamic charities still operating in the United States such as Islamic Relief USA. But as we have reported on elsewhere — see two recent Reuters articles on the U.S. elections and fear of Muslims — many Americans of this faith live in a climate of suspicion.

What do you think of this verdict? Did the Holy Land Foundation get a fair trial?

“Comfortable candor” is the way Leith Anderson described the atmosphere at the Common Word conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue that ended at Yale University on Thursday. The term is as interesting for its image as for the person who used it. Anderson is president of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals and one of several evangelicals attending the meeting. Among the mostly Protestant leaders who responded to the Common Word dialogue appeal in a letter launched by Yale Divinity School, evangelicals tended to be more cautious and more concerned about pointing out the fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam. Even with those reservations , these participants faced some criticism in their own ranks for attending and came to the conference not knowing how open it would be.

Anderson told me on the first day that he appreciated how forthright the discussion was, with each side standing up for its beliefs while seeking common ground where they could. In his keynote address in the final session, he put his stamp of approval on the process: “Our differences are deep and real. Sometimes those differences are cultural or ethnic or racial. But I have been especially impressed this week with the comfortable candor with which Muslims and Christians have clearly stated their own doctrines to one another.”

Geoff Tunnicliffe, international director of the World Evangelical Alliance, made the same point in his address. “We can affirm the appropriateness of simply engaging in dialogue and conversation with each other at this critical time in history. It is right that we’re together. We can affirm the development of new and strengthened relationships. It has been good to sit together and build new friendships. We can affirm the genuine spirit of being willing to listen to each other and seeking to gain understanding into each others’ perspectives.”

Some Christians in dialogue sessions like this seem ready to blur theological distinctions for the sake of harmony with Muslims. By contrast, evangelicals are steadfast in proclaiming their belief in Jesus and the Bible (as Anderson did repeatedly in his keynote address). As steadfast, in fact, as the Muslims are in proclaiming their faith in the Koran and the prophethood of Mohammad. So if they can approve a dialogue project like this, it must be doing something right.

Another theme in the two speeches was the diversity of the evangelical movement. Anderson stressed that the NAE covered 61 denominations and hundreds of evangelical organisations. The majority of evangelicals live in the Global South, he stressed, and much of the recent growth of evangelical Christianity in the United States came from immigrants. “We are not about politics or power or money or culture,” he said. As he said that, I wondered whether the Arabic interpreters were tempted to translate that as “they are not all George Bush’s allies.” Tunnicliffe even said one thing evangelicals certainly had in common with Muslims was the experience of being “stereotyped and stigmatized in the media” and invited them to look beyond cliches about evangelicals.

Anderson also noted that he was no stranger to contacts with Muslims even if this kind of theological dialogue was “not part of our normal repertoire,” as David Neff, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today (and fellow conference blogger) put it when we spoke. The NAE held a meeting on creation care and climate change with North African Muslim leaders, the World Bank and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Washington in June and Anderson addressed an interfaith dialogue meeting in Qatar in May. “And that’s just the last 60 days…” he remarked.

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, made a similar point about explaining the diversity of American Christianity to foreign Muslims when we spoke just before the Yale conference started. “When we U.S. Muslims hear Muslims in other parts of the world talk about the crusading spirit of contemporary America, the problem of the conflation of religion and politics in America and how that effects Muslim life and aspirations, we try to explain to them that the American political process is complicated, American Christianity is diverse and there are many different political opinions even among very devoted Christians. This is something that it’s important to have them understand … I think it’s important (for them) to have this opportunity to hear a more nuanced perspective on how American Christians look at the importance of their faith for motivating their sense of social justice and the involvement they have in certain issues.”

That the evangelical movement is not simply the Republican Party at prayer has made its way into the newspapers in recent years, especially on environmental issues. Do you think this message of dialogue and cooperation with Muslims has been heard?

What do George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton have in common, besides a shared address in Washington? (With dates that did not overlap of course).

They actually have a shared faith: The United Methodist Church.

This may surprise many people, given the fact that their politics are polar opposites. The anti-abortion rights Bush strikes many as a Southern Baptist in everything but name; the pro-choice Clinton is seldom associated with religion though she has been actively courting the faith vote as of late.

As its general conference in Fort Worth discussed issues such as its take on human sexuality, Scott Jones, the resident bishop for the Kansas area, said differences of opinion were in the church’s “DNA” but “We are united in our mission to transform the world.”

“I would point out that Hillary and George Bush have one crucial thing in common… That is a a strong desire to make the world a better place. That’s deep in our Methodist DNA also,” he said.

With about eight million members in the United States the church is America’s third largest denomination and can draw on a rich history of social activism which has included a big role in the anti-slavery movement.