Excerpt: "A course for US military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following second world war precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima."
General Martin Dempsey announced the cancellation of a course that taught that Muslims are the enemy. (photo: AP)
US Military Course Taught Officers 'Islam Is the Enemy'
11 May 12
course for US military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following second world war precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.
The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.
The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by US officials over the past decade that America is at war against Islamic extremists, not the religion itself.
"They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit," the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The college, for professional military members, teaches mid-level officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.
Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are "no longer relevant".
He adds: "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 decision point)."
His war plan suggests possible outcomes such as "Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation ... Islam reduced to cult status".
A copy of the presentation was obtained and posted online by Wired.com's Danger Room blog. The college did not respond to the Associated Press' requests for copies of the documents, but a Pentagon spokesman authenticated the documents. Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching, said the joint chiefs of staff chairman, General Martin Dempsey. Dooley has refused to comment.
A military service record summary provided by army human resources at Fort Knox, Kentucky, shows that Dooley was commissioned as a second lieutenant upon graduation from the US military academy at West Point, New York, in May 1994. He has served tours in Germany, Bosnia, Kuwait and Iraq. He has numerous awards including a Bronze Star medal, the fourth-highest US combat award.
In what he termed a model for a campaign to force a transformation of Islam, Dooley called for "a direct ideological and philosophical confrontation with Islam", with the presumption that Islam is an ideology rather than just a religion.
He further asserted that Islam has already declared war on the west, and the US specifically.
"It is therefore illogical" to continue with the current US strategy, which Dooley said presumes there is a way of finding common ground with Islamic religious leaders, without "waging near total war".
The course on Islam had been taught since 2004, but was not part of the required core curriculum. It was offered five times a year, with about 20 students each time.
Though Dooley has been teaching at the college since August 2010, it was unclear when he took on that particular class, called Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.
The joint staff suspended the course after it had received a student complaint, and within days Dempsey ordered all service branches to review their training to ensure other courses do not use anti-Islamic material.
On Thursday, Dempsey said the material in the Norfolk course was counter to American "appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness".
"It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn't academically sound," Dempsey said. "This wasn't about ... pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible."
In his July 2011 presentation on "counterjihad", Dooley asserted that the rise of what he called a "military Islam/Islamist resurgence" compels the US to consider extreme measures, "unconstrained by fears of political incorrectness".
He described his purpose as generating "dynamic discussion and thought", while noting that his ideas and proposals are not official US government policy and cannot be found in any current official defence department documents.
A Pentagon inquiry is seeking to determine whether someone above the professor's level is supposed to approve course materials and whether that approval process was followed in this case, said Colonel Dave Lapan, a spokesman for Dempsey.
The problem of negative portrayals of Islam in federal government is not new. A six-month review the FBI launched into agent training material uncovered 876 offensive or inaccurate pages that had been used in 392 presentations, including a PowerPoint slide that said the bureau can sometimes bend or suspend the law in counterterror investigations.
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It is against what we claim we stand for.
But no matter what we actually stand for, it is very very stupid because it fills our officers with ideas that are at odds with reality.
Whether you are an imperialist or an isolationist or anything else, you should want your officers to be connected with reality.
(If you reread the top two paragraphs of the article, you encounter this sentence: "The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam." That is propagandizing by the AP. The problem with the material is not that it is "critical of Islam" it is that it is grossly non-factual, and of course against our values. By calling it "critical of Islam" the AP is minimizing the harmfulness, as well as falsely suggesting that there's something about political correctness going on here.)
And it's "what America stands for" ... at its best.
These are not, however, the best of times and America is betraying its own heritage.
Ah, yes -- a final solution. Time to round up the Muslims in this country too, I guess, and send them off to camps for showers.
It'll be difficult, with almost two billion Muslims in the world, but use of modern technology, and dedicated Christians, we can surely kill them them all.
It's happening again....
Some people seem to take "onward Christian soldier" a little too literally.
As a former boss of mine told me once, referring to the huge US military arsenal: "the problem with people who are good music players is they want to se lots of concerts".
A year ago he got a DUI and was caught doing 20 over the speed limit in quick succession. He resigned not long afterward and it soon was announced that he would become the #2 man at Corrections Corporation of American, for whom he had been signing contracts for over ten thousand beds during his term as Director. He would be replacing his seat warmer, his former BOP Deputy Director Rick Seiter, who announced his retirement when it was time for Harley to get his quid pro quo.
See http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m87981&hd=&size=1&l=e
U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam
By Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman
May 11, 2012
[...]
Notice the nasty cartoon with the ostrich is not only anti-Islam, but also anti-liberal.
This is from
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/all/1?pid=1198&viewall=true
(This original includes comments from Wired readers)
don´t want to comment, hoping it
just disappears by itself because
of its crazyness.
On the other hand, you know that
there are so many crazy people out
there, that if you don´t comment it
could accellerate.
So, any action - military or otherwise - is justified as "defensive" in light of Islam's alleged aggressiveness.
No distinction is made among various Islamic traditions (Sunni, Shi'ite, etc.) No account is taken for Islam in various cultures (Arab, Indonesian, etc.). Such subtleties are shrugged off as mere variations on a common theme.
Nowhere do they recognize that the ideas espoused in the cited "courses" are equal to or worse than the aims and tactics of al-Qaeda, etc.
Some measure of social justice for the Palestinians (which needn't involve "driving Israel into the sea") and the withdrawl of US and other external forces from Arabia would pretty much end the current impasse.
Back in 1919, Felix Frankfurter and Prince Feisal correspondended (see: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/FeisalFrankfurterCorrespondence.htmle). Feisal identifies Western imperialism as the common threat to Arabs and Jews who are "cousins in race." It was a start that needs to be restarted.
Note http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30777
IRAN ACCUSED OF BEING BEHIND 9/11 ATTACKS.
U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran)
by Julie Lévesque
Global Research, May 11, 2012
The U.S. court judgment issued in December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran) which blames the Iran government for the 9/11 attacks is part of the propaganda ploy, which consists in demonizing the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is part and parcel of America's ongoing war against Iran since the overthrow of its U.S.-backed monarchy in 1979.
[...]
Iran had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks -- well established fact.
They will blame a half dozen African countries if they want to invade them. THey will blame Indonesia -- anywhere Muslims can be found (about everywhere) if it suits the imperialist agenda. There is no logic or fact behind any of this -- just propaganda.
Scary.
Here is a Sufi poem about God:
I hold you in my heart.
I rock and sing you to sleep.
You are everywhere in everyone.
the holy baby in all of us,
that plays there.
The beautiful one,
born when we love,
the glowing child.
You are the meaning that blooms in the heart.
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
"There is no (more)? beautiful religion than Islam,"
I disagree with the "more" part, unless you mean that all religions are equal at heart. :)
I agree with the rest of what you say except for the "white man" part, because I don't think there is a place where a truly clear understanding of an issue, (outside of one which only concerns the color of human skin) can coexist with racial stereotypes.
I think that at the heart of religions is a profound wish to express gratitude for a "mystically" experienced beauty of existence. I think there is very little point in comparing the good or evil of one with another.
Clearly, the "mystical" experience of religion is known to the mystics, but eventually expressed in garbled translations of their teachings as concrete "dogma".
The concrete "dogma" of religion is always taken out of context by those, (well meaning or otherwise,) who wish to wield the "word", whether of Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, Mahavira, or Christ, as a tool in order to achieve one end or another, and history shows us that those who go that route are of all colors and ethnicities.
This is plainly a sad truth. Some say do away with religion, but the mystics will always be with us as one of the many expressions of the human experience. Some say depoliticize religion, but the politicians will always be with us in the same way.
When you say, as you did in your response to me, that "the white man has used religion to oppress and slaughter...etc ." you are racially stereotyping. When you say, "white men" have done this, or Asian men have done that, you are not relating specific examples, and you are excluding the rest of the human race, as if it is the "white" man, or the "black" man, or the "green" man, who alone engages in this kind of thing, as if this is just the way "they" are. If you are talking about specific instances of injustice from which our "brown" brothers and sisters have suffered lately, I would have to mention John Yoo, and Colin Powell in the long list of perpetrators, along with all the white guys. You were saying something quite beautiful about Islam, and I found the bringing of skin color into it a little out of place, alongside "you are everywhere, in everyone, the holy baby in all of us,". That's all I'm saying.
"Sharia" is a whole vision of moral life built into a single word or image. Literally it means the "path to the well or water source." The well for desert communities is a very important place and some place that you must always keep in mind. You organize your life with reference to the well. And one always knows the shortest and most efficient path to the well. This is the essence of sharia as a moral code. There are many shortest paths, since everyone will be coming from a different direction. Everyone will eventually have to find his or her own path. The well of course is Allah or heaven as a source of life. There's a lot in Islam about paths and journeys.
Islam does not have absolute doctrines as developed in catholicism and much of christianity. It is a very personal religion and its morality comes from a personal spirituality. Judaism is historical and political. It is about empire. Christianity and Judaism are filled with hypocrites, those who appear religious on the outside but are deeply anti-religious. Islam has less of this hypocrisy.
Of course, there are fanatics in every religion, but they don't define the religion. Islam suffers from the corrupt politics of the regions where it is mostly practiced -- esp. Saudi Arabia.
Also, I wanted to add that Jesus was not the sterile saint that they have made him into. He was a mystic, a mighty prophet, who was recognized by Mohammed. His persona was hijacked in later centuries by those who wanted to use him to gain power over the masses. He was a simple man, and his friends were those who were society's outcasts, poor "sinners" who were not acceptable to the Jewish church. Jesus had no material wealth, he was homeless, and depended on the kindness of strangers to give him a "place to lay his head". He was a self-realized human being, love personified, and he would not be welcome in most churches today.
In America there is a whole industry devoted to distorting Islam. Edward Said named these people "Orientalists" -- people who are accredited in Europe or the US as the official interpreters of "eastern" culture but who in reality don't know anything of what they are talking about. They write about Islam and Arab/Persian culture purely out of their own fantasies, with a few quotations thrown in for the sake of appearing authentic. Bernard Lewis is our current Orientalist in chief. The job of the Orientalists is to prove the racial superiority of the west. They are part of the apparatus of racism and colonialism.
Don't read any of these Orientalists. Read only primary texts -- the Qur'an (Oxford Classics is a good translation; Penguin is horrible). Read Sayyd Qutb. Rumi. Al Ghazzali.Ibn Battuta. Ibn Khaldoun. The list is very long.
It always makes me laugh to see how demonized Qutb is in the US. Clearly, no one has read his work. His writings are very beautiful and modern.
Mikey Weinstein, the founder of MRFF, has fought doggedly for years to expose these unConstitutiona l acts. He has taken strong action to denounce these radical teachings, which are only unConstitutiona l, but undermine morale and military readiness.
Go to and read some of the disturbing letters sent by military personnel who are literally persected by these radical "Christian" (NOT!) fundamentalists , but dare not speak out for fear of retaliation.
These ignorant, misguided anti-all-Muslim teachings result in more American military personnel deaths at the hands of radical Muslims seeking to retaliate against all Americans because of the misdeeds of these US commanders.
Jews, traditional Christians, and personnel or other -- or no -- religion
look to MRFF to fight for their freedom from persecution by their commanders.
Support MRFF!
This really is scary, because regardless of what we think about the military, it should be professional, and it should reflect the very best of society. I realize there is some contradiction between these goals and the missions we send the military on, but a professional military is so much better than a politicized or sectarianized one. It is also harder to send a professional military into an action not consistent with our stated beliefs (e.g., the war against Viet Nam).
The hatred that Christians hold for Muslims goes back to the crusades and it has never left Christian and Euro-American culture. Most US soldiers are taught that this is a crusade.
It is better that the truth is now out in the open. I would hope that Obama would now come out of the closet and confess to being a crusader. We all know the Pentagon is filled with crusaders.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31305.htm
link to video
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