THE AMERICAN MUSLIM (TAM) – Does the most recent military scandal reflect a deeper problem?

by Sheila Musaji

Selected Article Excerpts:

The release of a video showing U.S. troops urinating on the dead bodies of Afghans is only the most recent scandal.

• Previously, we had the “Kill Team” War Crimes in Afghanistan.  Photos show U.S. troops posing for trophy pictures with bloody, naked murdered Afghan civilians.  They had hunted these civilians for sport and murdered them in cold blood.  12 soldiers were ultimately charged with war crimes.

• There was the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal after photographs came out.

• There was the rape scandal in which four U.S. soldiers in Iraq were charged with participation in the “rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman, and the murder of three members of her family to cover it up.  A fifth soldier was accused of dereliction of duty for failing to report the offenses.

• We had the “Jesus rifles” scandal in which rifles with bible verses on their scopes were issued to troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• There was the video showing U.S. military personnel in uniform with Bibles in Pashto and Darri planning on evangelizing Muslims in Afghanistan.  The Al Jazeera report on this incident also shows a military preacher, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, urging army parishioners to “hunt people for Jesus.”  “The Special Forces guys, they hunt men. Basically, we do the same things as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the Kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business,” he says.

• There was the “freedom packages” scandal in which Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic and the apocalyptic computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” were to be included in packages put together by a fundamentalist Christian ministry called Operation Straight Up who had also planned a troop entertainment tour called “military crusade”.  The Pentagon cancelled this plan after its inappropriate nature was brought to their attention.

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