Just read a long piece in Harper's called "Jesus killed Mohammed" which refers to an sign written in Arabic on the front of some of our tanks in Afghanistan.
The base of the story is how fundies moved in to take over most of the Chaplain positions after moderate protestant churches supported anti-war sentiment in Vietnam.

Not all of the article is online and I'm not sure how to bring the article up but I think it's a subject worth discussing.

Here's a tidbit: harpers article (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488)

The tidbid was not enough to chew on ....so to speak. Give us a bit more in your own words so we can know what we are talking about.

Did you see all the little pages below the tidbit. Therein is the story. Someone with good comp skills might bring it up.

Here are a few points from the author's view:

1) Contrary to what is being stated publicly, we are fighting a crusade in the Middle East. We are not only trying to establish democracies, we are trying to convert the heathen Muslims.

2) Active proselytizing is going on by our soldiers and the chaplains.

3) The Air Force Academy is ground zero for making sure all AFA members are Christians plus they go to some effort at weeding out atheists and other religions.

4) The evangelicals took advantage of the mainstream churches reluctance to back the Vietnam War and became entrenched in the military Chaplain system.

5) As a church and state separation question the military may become a battleground.

The author interviewed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent some time in Colorado Springs and at other bases. He spent some time with a former AF officer in New Mexico named Weinstein who is whistle blowing and I expect the impetus for the investigation of the story. It looks like this story took six months to construct.

I would have to say that if there is any proselytizing is going, it would be very minimal and isolated. A large part of theater General Orders are devoted to it. If you are caught doing this sort of thing, you will be brought up on UCMJ charges. There will always be some who will try to do this sort of thing. The host Islamic countries require the foreign militaries on their soil to make sure that this does not happen. I would say that if anyone in the military is or was doing this, it certainly would not be a chaplin. As far as I have experienced, this is a non-issue. I was in Iraq all of 2006 as a Military Intelligence voice intercepter/analyst in the Army, and heard nothing of this kind of behavior. But what happens over there is not the same as what is reported here, as always.

I can't believe anyone would be so damned blind as to proselytize in a place like that. Don't these assholes know that their 'success stories' might end up being martyred for their conversion?

I'm all for freedom of religion and trying to save people, but Iraq =/= the United States. You would think our soldiers over there would be smart enough to figure that out.

Trying to give you a clearer picture without opening the article. It's like reading a whole book anyway.

But here are a couple of more excerps and comments:

from modern medieval (http://modernmedieval.blogspot.com/2009/04/jesus-killed-mohammed.html)

Here's a bigger piece from the article: More article (http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?p=260335&sid=67f06ab32131b9c3f8c06a80ec12b0d0)

I would have to say that if there is any proselytizing is going, it would be very minimal and isolated. A large part of theater General Orders are devoted to it. If you are caught doing this sort of thing, you will be brought up on UCMJ charges. There will always be some who will try to do this sort of thing. The host Islamic countries require the foreign militaries on their soil to make sure that this does not happen. I would say that if anyone in the military is or was doing this, it certainly would not be a chaplin. As far as I have experienced, this is a non-issue. I was in Iraq all of 2006 as a Military Intelligence voice intercepter/analyst in the Army, and heard nothing of this kind of behavior. But what happens over there is not the same as what is reported here, as always.

Exactly...Non-issue.

The very few people I ever came across that tried proselytizing got shut down very quickly by the chain of command. It's a BIG nono to do within a command structure, and will be met with swift punishment if somebody were to try converting others while acting in an official capacity.

Most of the chaplains I dealt with had their head screwed on right and wouldn't pull that crap anyway.

Biblical Quotes Said to Adorn Pentagon Reports

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: May 17, 2009
(New York Times)

WASHINGTON — A series of cover sheets for intelligence reports written for Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials during the early days of the war in Iraq in 2003 were adorned with biblical quotations, and appeared Sunday, six years later, on the Web site of GQ magazine.

The daily briefings were called the “Worldwide Intelligence Update,” one of several intelligence reports compiled overnight and presented in a folder for Mr. Rumsfeld and other officials as they came to work.

In the selection of the cover sheets that GQ placed on its Web site, photographs of soldiers praying or in action on the sands of Iraq were overlaid with quotations like this one from Isaiah: “Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels are like a whirlwind.”

Another, showing a tank at sunset, had this quotation 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.”

The accompanying article, written by Robert Draper, the author of a book about George W. Bush that was published in the last year of his presidency, suggested that Mr. Rumsfeld often delivered the briefings “by hand, to the White House.” But several former officials said Sunday that they doubted that Mr. Bush regularly saw the Pentagon briefing, which was considered both less complete and less sensitive than the president’s daily brief, the compilation of overnight and long-term intelligence assessments prepared for the president, and delivered every morning.

Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman during Mr. Rumsfeld’s time as secretary of defense, said that he had no recollection of the biblical briefs, but that he doubted the famously acerbic and sometimes cranky secretary would have tolerated them for long, much less shared them with Mr. Bush.

“The suggestion that Rumsfeld would have used these reports to somehow curry favor over at the White House is pretty laughable,” Mr. Di Rita said. “He bristled anytime people put quotes or something extraneous on the reports he wanted to read.”

Mr. Rumsfeld’s reputation at the Pentagon was as a strong ideologue, but not as someone motivated by religious convictions.

The GQ article reports that the cover sheets were thought up by a general who worked on the Joint Staff, and that they replaced humorous covers that had been created in the prelude to the war.

The magazine reported that some Pentagon officials were concerned that, if the cover sheets — which were marked “Top Secret” — were ever leaked, they could be interpreted as a suggestion that the war was religiously driven, a battle against Islam. But those officials were not named in the article, and a number of former Pentagon officials interviewed Sunday said they had no memory of seeing the illustrations or quotations.

Still, the publication of the cover sheets may raise more questions about the proper role of religion in the military, and whether a Christian-influenced culture, rather than a neutral one, permeated some corners of the military.

The issue flared at the Air Force Academy four years ago, when the football coach posted a locker room banner for “Team Jesus,” and there have been lawsuits against the Pentagon concerning military retreats at off-base churches, or the displays of crucifixes at military chapels in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2005, the Pentagon’s inspector general recommended “corrective action” against Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence, who, in appearances before evangelical groups, likened the war against Islamic militants to a battle against Satan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/18rumsfeld.html?hp



A slideshow of these abominable cover sheets is at this link:

GQ Articles, Pics, and More on men.style.com (http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret)