Mikey Weinstein's Hammer Museum Speech Introduction
by Ian Masters

In recent years Mikey Weinstein has been on an unusual journey for a former United States Air Force JAG officer and a council in the Reagan White House. He is now at war with fundamentalists in the military over forced "Christian" proselytizing at the USAF Academy and in the Armed Forces. By taking a stand on behalf of his son who was a cadet at the academy, Mikey entered a surprisingly vicious battle against venal opponents who routinely threaten his life. Who knew that death threats were a Christian family value? But Mikey has done a great public service in revealing the extent to which Christian fundamentalists have already infiltrated the highest and lowest ranks of our military and that a "Crusader" ideology is being melded with the most powerful war machine in history.

One would think that the clash of civilizations Samuel Huntington warned about would be avoided at all cost, instead it appears to be inevitable as our President’s counter-intuitive war on terror creates more terrorists and suicide bombers and martyrdom becomes more and more identified with a cult of death in Islam. So too in the name of religion, ideology that borders on mental illness, has also infected Christianity.

The biggest-selling books in the United States after Harry Potter are the “left behind” series which propagate a cult of death shared by as many as fifty million Americans, (and perhaps the President too), who can’t wait for the rapture and for our world to end in burning flesh so that their world can begin.



Although we spend more than the rest of the world combined on our military, instead of deterring our enemies we appear to embolden them. And as we lose one war, and perhaps another, the jihadis, convinced they defeated the Soviet Evil Empire, are already savoring the delusion that they will bring the lone superpower to its knees. While we won the battles, we lost in Iraq and are losing in Afghanistan because we didn’t deliver on our “soft power”, food, electricity, water; the Peace Corps, not shock and awe. They hate us, our President says, for who we are, not for what we do. So what would Jesus do, fight hate with hate?

As the militarization of our foreign policy continues, it is time to face up to this sick symbiosis between these two fundamentalisms that is driving us towards a new crusade. As much as I’d like to see the 72 virgins meet Dobson and Robertson in the rapture, this time instead of medieval castles under siege we’ll have nuclear car bombs, Christians and Jews driven out of the Middle East and Muslims evicted from Europe.

On that cheery note let me introduce an unholy warrior who is doing a hell of a job waking up the American people to a deep and deadly danger to our Democracy… Mikey Weinstein.