Danny Nalliah
Danny Nalliah (born 1964) is an Australian Christian evangelist pastor and political candidate. He is the leader of Rise Up Australia, a prayer organisation, and the President of the Assemblies of God-affiliated Catch the Fire Ministries. Nalliah is particularly known for his conservative and often incendiary comments about Muslims, Jews and gay and lesbians. In a landmark case, along with his colleage Daniel Scot, Nalliah was found guilty of inciting hatred under Victoria's then-new religious vilification laws.
Nalliah was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was raised in a strongly religious family, and rose through the church ranks from youth leader through to becoming a pastor. He married in 1987, and his two children were born soon after. He continued to preach in the more remote regions of Sri Lanka until 1995, when he and his wife moved to Saudi Arabia. He spent two years preaching Christianity and attempting to circumvent the official ban on the religion in the Muslim state. However, in 1997, he decided to move to Australia and found his own evangelical organisation.
After moving to Australia and founding Catch the Fire, Nalliah traveled extensively, preaching to congregations in a number of countries. He claims to have witnessed the healing of blind, deaf and crippled people at his prayer sessions, and claims that a dead girl was resurrected after he prayed for her.
On March 9, 2002, Nalliah and Scot spoke at a seminar concerning Islam, sponsored by Catch the Fire Ministries. The seminar was attended by three Australian Muslims, who later launched action under the Religious and Racial Tolerance Act, backed by the Islamic Council of Victoria. They claimed that the intent of the speech had been to vilify Muslims, rather than to discuss Islam itself. The subsequent legal action became the first real test case under the Act, and split the Christian community, with the Catholic and Uniting Churches supporting the Islamic Council, and Pentecostal and evangelical organisations, alleging that the law inhibited free speech.
In a landmark ruling on December 17, 2004, the court ruled that Nalliah and Scot had indeed breached the law. While prison terms are an option under the act, the judge declared that that would not be appropriate in this case, and reserved sentencing for early in 2005. Nalliah publicly blasted the verdict, and declared his intention to continue fighting the case, potentially as far as the High Court of Australia. The Age newspaper quoted him as stating "We may have lost the battle, but the war is not over. The law has to be removed, there is no question."
In November 2004, Nalliah campaigned for a seat in the Australian Senate, as a candidate of the Family First Party. He had virtually no chance of winning the seat, however, as he was second on the ticket of five candidates in Victoria, and it is almost impossible for a minor party in Australia to win more than one Senate seat in each state at each election.
Nevertheless, his candidacy caused considerable controversy when conservative National Party Senate candidate Barnaby Joyce launched a heavily publicised attack on Family First (which his party had exchanged preferences with) the day before the election. He used some of Nalliah's statements, most notably a quote from one of his brochures that "mosques and Buddhist and Hindu temples [are] Satan's strongholds and that people should pray for their destruction" [1] as the basis of much of his attack, in which he stated that "these are not the sort of people you do preference deals with.".
Books
- Worship Under the Sword