Uncle Sam wants US Muslims to serve
From the Christian Science Monitor: “Pentagon builds Islamic prayer rooms and hires imams to make military life more appealing”, courtesy of The American Congress for Truth.
“An underlying goal is to interest more Muslims in the military, which needs officers and troops who can speak Arabic and other relevant languages and understand the culture of places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The effort is also part of a larger outreach. Pentagon officials say they are striving for mutual understanding with Muslims at home and abroad and to win their support for US war aims.”
Muslims make up about 1 percent of the total US population, and a large portion of them are black Americans who were assimilated into our society from birth like the rest of us. The guesstimate of muslims, both of native and Middle Eastern origin, in the military runs between 3600 and 15,000.
The military is starting to provide prayer rooms and imam chaplains for the muslims. It already provides chaplains and chapels for Jews, Catholics, Buddhists and Non-denominationals so this is just normal protocol. I’m all for increasing the number of muslims in the military. In fact I hope the draft is restarted and a lot more muslims are taken into the military at all levels.
My preference is that there are no muslims in America whatever, but reality is different. We will never get rid of the muslims and I doubt that the effort will ever be made to do so. Drafting them into the military is enforced integration, which we do have a history of. School bussing, for example. Of course, this would be integration in reverse, sort of. The blacks wanted to be integrated and the whites resisted it. Now the muslims don’t want it and the rest of us either do or soon will.
So rather than see this as a bad precedent, or appeasement, or an opening of dangerous doors, it’s clearly an opportunity to take future rapists and suicide bombers off the streets and teach them democratic values. Muslims in America must be assimilated into our society whether they want to be or not. At the same time, we need to take Rep. Virgil Goodes advice and drastically restrict the entry of any more of them. Islam works as a cancer in Western societies. It’s proven itself to be worse than just incompatible. Like a cancer, it keeps eating away at its hosts. It doesn’t belong here and if we can’t cure it, we need to contain it.
In the first Gulf War, when we were routing Saddams forces out of Kuwait, a muslim US Army sergeant, Sgt. Asan Akbar, killed a fellow serviceman and wounded 15 others by throwing grenades into tents in Kuwait. He’d recently been reprimanded for insubordination and was considered to have an attitude problem. I suspect his attitude was over being a muslim and fighting against them for “infidels”. This is going to be a problem in the future within the military and it will have to be dealt with.
December 27th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
Muslims in America must be DEPORTED. A cancer must be cured by cutting off. Plain and simple.
December 27th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
A couple of things. One, our military has different types of chaplains (Catholic, Jewish, etc.), but I don’t think they have separate chapels for each denomination/religion. I could be wrong. I also do not think that soldiers always get to choose the religion of a chaplain who ministers to them in their time of need. But again, I could be wrong.
Building prayer rooms SPECIFICALLY for Muslims, if the other religions do not have the same built for them, that is wrong. That is pandering. What’s next? Stopping training 5 times a day for prayers? Having the call to prayer transmitted from speakers at each military base? Nope. NO NO NO NO
This is just taking it too far.
Second, wasn’t there a similar incident, like that with Sgt. Akbar, at the beginning of the second gulf war. A Muslim soldier threw hand grenades into a tent, or he shot into the tent, I can’t remember. He was brought back to the U.S., slipped away from his home and hasn’t been seen since.
December 27th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Keith Ellison stirs American Muslims with allahu akbar (Open Trackback Wednesday)…
Representative Elect Keith Ellison (D-MN) spoke at the annual convention of two Muslim groups, the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America. Here’s some of what he told American Muslims: “Muslims, you’re up to bat right now……
December 28th, 2006 at 1:48 am
Debbie, it depends on the size of the base or other military unit. In the Navy, for example, only a huge vessel like an aircraft carrier would have an all-purpose chaplain and one room devoted to services. If there were muslims aboard, they could go pray in there but not during duty periods. No one takes time off from duty periods for services. One space would do as chapel, prayer room, etc.. Ship space for non-military usage is extremely limited.
On a base, depending on the size of the base, you have one or more chaplains depending on the number of people of different faiths. On a large base you might have a priest, a rabbi and another chaplain who ministers to Protestants, as well as a number of rooms or buildings that have multiple uses including as chapels for various faiths or actual chapels for specific faiths. Again, depends on the size of the base.
The military isn’t going to provide an imam chaplain for just a few muslims. Everything has its limits.
Yes, I recall something too about a muslim soldier who went apewah. I don’t know what happened to him.
December 28th, 2006 at 9:04 am
I like the theory although it is difficult from a purely military point of view. We generally didn’t have Germans or Japanese in the allied forces in WW2 for a very good reason. It would be even more difficult to entirely trust Muslims because some seem to see every action that involves Muslims on the other side, regardless of the reasons for the conflict, as an attack on Islam.
December 28th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
You must be talking about Great Britain. Here in the US we had lots of young Japanese Americans in the military. Most of them could speak Japanese and were a big help translating messages between the Japanese enemy. Same with German immigrants and the children of immigrants.
National origins simply aren’t the same as religion. We carry the latter with us no matter where we live. I personally agree that it would be very difficult to give complete trust to Islamics. That’s up to the military to work out.