Islamophobia which is the bigots view of all things Islamic is tolerated and taught to officers and the rank and file in the US military as those in charge are convinced that America having been blessed by God is a beacon of Christendom and that it is therefore America's duty to wipe out Islam and all Muslims.
These teachings did not end with the end of the Bush/Cheney Regime but has continued under the Obama Regime.
"For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been
working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself."
and so they promulgate :
"a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists... Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.” "
Quotes from: U.S. Military Still Using "Jesus rifles" in Afghanistan by Bruce Wilson Alternet.org September 27, 2012
Despite earlier complaints in 2009 & 2010 about so-called Jesus Rifles and promises by the Pentagon and White House the US military is still using the so-called Jesus Rifles in Afghanistan ,Iraq and elsewhere.
Even though the Pentagon claimed they would no longer tolerate the purchase of these rifle scopes upon which the manufacturer had engraved biblical inscriptions .
The problem as Bruce Wilson points out in this article is that the Evangelical Christians when it comes to issues regarding religion and the Separation of Church and State have been growing more powerful and influential within the military at all levels from the Pentagon on down including the Chaplains who are now primarily Evangelical Fundamentalists and Pentecostals and Catholics and other Christians sympathetic to their cause.
Trijicon Jesus Rifles God's Guns Bible verses.flv
See:
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. Military Still Using "Jesus rifles" in Afghanistan by Bruce Wilson Alternet.org September 27, 2012
It's not official policy, but with Internet access a 12-year old child anywhere in the Islamic world could construct, with relative ease, a plausible conspiracy theory claiming that the United States had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and was wielding its military, diplomatic, and soft-power in the Middle East and elsewhere, to combat Islam and advance a global Christian empire.
...When the story first broke in 2010 General David Petraeus, then-Head of Central Command overseeing U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, declared use of the "jesus scopes" to be "contrary to U.S. Central Command guidance." The United States military must be "sensitive to the cultural and religious norms of the populace we are supporting," stated Petraeus.
But David Petraeus himself has sent mixed messages. The 2005 evangelical Christian book Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, which claims that "Under the rubric of free speech and the twisted idea of separation of church and state, there has evolved more and more an anti-Christian bias in this country", featured a spirited endorsement from General Petraeus, whose plug appeared on the book's back cover, "Under Orders should be in every rucksack for those moments when Soldiers need spiritual energy".
Since 2005, former Reagan Administration lawyer Mikey Weinstein's Military Religious Freedom Foundation (note: I was employed by MRFF in 2007) has been uncovering one case after another of similar abuses. MRFF's media archives are bursting with stories documenting improper evangelizing in the U.S. military, a number of which were showcased in journalist Jeff Sharlet's gripping story Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military .
Sharlet's story opens with an incident that occurred in 2004, in the Iraqi holy city of Samarra. One early evening, as the Muslim call to prayer commenced from minarets throughout the city, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, with "Jesus killed Mohammed" spray painted in Arabic on its side, in giant red letters, rolled through Samarra as an Iraqi interpreter shouted, from the Bradley's turret through a bullhorn, over and over again, "Jesus killed Mohammed! Jesus killed Mohammed!"
As Sharlet described, the pattern extends up to the command level of the Pentagon where, in 2005, a sub-ministry of Campus Crusade For Christ called "Christian Embassy" filmed a promotional video , within the Pentagon, that included the participation of four generals, including then-Acting Secretary of the Air Force Pete Geren.
But the same year Sharlet's story appeared in Harpers, it was revealed, in stories from GQ magazine and the New York Times , that the evangelical Christian messaging went much higher.
In 2003, the cover sheets for daily briefings called "World Intelligence Update", written for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials, were adorned with Bible quotations. Described in the GQ story, the April 10, 2003 cover sheet of the top secret briefing, which author Robert Draper stated had been prepared for President George W. Bush, showed Iraqi crowds, jubilant as a Baghdad statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down, and an image of an Iraqi child kissing an American soldier. Over these images was a quote from Psalms 33:18 - "Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death." Wrote Draper,
"This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31 [on the intelligence briefing cover sheet], a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” "
As MRFF head Mikey Weinstein told NBC, about the continued use of the "jesus rifles",
"It’s constitutionally noxious. It's an embarrassment and makes us look exactly like the tenth incarnation of the crusades which launches 8 million new jihadist recruiting videos."
MRFF's core mission is to protect the religious freedom rights of U.S. armed forces service members and in media appearances, MRFF founder and head Mikey Weinstein stresses that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of cases MRFF has taken up since the nonprofit's founding concern complaints from Christian service members who report being targeted and improperly evangelized (in violation of Department of Defense regulations) because they profess the "wrong" sort of Christian beliefs.
...As the press release accompanying the 2010 report Manufacturing the Muslim Menace from Political Research Associates described, Cincotta's report,
"reveals a common set of conspiratorial myths propagated in varying degrees by [anti-Muslim] speakers... These narratives equate Islam with terrorism and depict a covert effort by American Muslim “stealth jihadists” to infiltrate U.S. institutions for the purpose of bringing down American infrastructure and, eventually, implementing Sharia Law."
In May 2012, Wired magazine revealed that an elective course at the United States Officer's Staff College, offered to "senior officers at the lieutenant colonel, commander, colonel and Navy captain level" and taught by Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, instructed future U.S. military leaders that,
"a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists... Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.” "
The May 2012 story came on the heels of a 2011 Wired report exposing extensive use of anti-Islam books, materials, and speakers in FBI counterterrorism training. Course materials obtained by Wired, for its May 2012 story included curriculum material from Colonel Dooley's course that stated,
•"Some actions offered for consideration here will be seen as not "politically correct" in the eyes of many, both inside and outside the United States (Examples: Decision Points considered in PH III where Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation, Mecca and Medina destroyed. Islam reduced to cult status).
•This model presumes Geneva Convention IV 1949 standards of armed conflict and the pursuant UN endorsements of it are now, due to the current common practices of Islamic terrorists, no longer relevant or respected globally. This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable to the Mecca and Medina destruction DP in Phase III.
As Wired writers Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman described in their May 2012 story,
"For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion. “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”"
and see: PRA Report Exposes Islamophobic Counterterrorism Training Industry Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security at Public Eye.org
and: http://www.islamicity.com/articles/Articles.asp?ref=HM0904-3852">"Jesus killed Mohammed": The crusade for a Christian military by jeff Sharlet at Harper's Magazine, May 2009 via Islamicity.com
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Will Obama keep pouring good money after bad into the Department of Homeland anti-terrorism "fusion centers across America even though an investigation into these "fusion centers " has concluded that these 'fusion centers "are useless bit of window dressing or propaganda initiated by the former Bush regime to give the impression that the government was taking steps to improve America's anti-terrorism capabilities allowing a number of different government agencies to communicate to share information more effectively .
Obama as we have seen is someone who desperately avoids conflict even when circumstances cry out for taking a firm stand against ill-conceived policies which have few if any positive results. So Obama may decrease funding for this useless program but not necessarily eliminate it because it would anger various politicians and self-serving interest groups including corporations, state governments and municipalities which have profited in one way or another from this almost completely unregulated boondoggle for which there has been no substantive accountability til now.
“A Bunch of Crap”--Senate Report Slams DHS Terrorism Centers by laura Gottesdiener at Alternet,Oct.3,2012
"[The] investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot," the report said.-----------
Since September 11, the federal government has poured up to $1.4 billion into the creation of the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-terrorism “fusion centers.” Today, a Senate Committee report decried these so-called information-sharing centers as “irrelevant” and “useless” wastes of money that have not uncovered a single terrorism threat.
The Subcommittee’s two-year investigation found that DHS’s support of fusion centers has yielded little, if any, benefit to federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts... The fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever," the report found.
Testimony from people inside the fusion centers was often more explicit.
There were times when it was, ‘What a bunch of crap is coming through,’” Harold “Skip” Vandover, the former director of DHS’s reporting branch, testified in the report.
The fusion centers grew out of a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission Report, which revealed that disparate law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and CIA and local police forces rarely, if ever, shared information. Their lack of cooperation made it difficult for the agencies to piece together threats and potential attacks, the Commission Report concluded. The solution: information centers where the Department of Homeland Security would “fuse” together the information in the efforts to ward off future terrorism attacks.
A decade later, we have not seen another massive terrorism attack on U.S. soil--but that’s no thanks to the fusion centers, says the Senate Report.
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