Air Force Pays Evangelicals to Preach About Terrorism
Recently the Air Force Academy — a place with a history of promoting evangelical Christianity — invited three evangelical Christians who claim to have once been Muslim terrorists: Mr. Anani, Kamal Saleem and Walid Shoebat. They will be payed $13,000 and the conference they are participating in will produce a report on combatting terrorism which is to be sent to the Pentagon and various government leaders. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing to get the Air Force to hire real experts, not evangelical preachers.
“This stuff going on at the academy today is part of the endemic evangelical infiltration that continues,” said David Antoon, a 1970 academy graduate and a [Military Religious Freedom Foundation] member. ...
Muslim organizations objected to the fact that no other perspective about Islam was offered, saying that the three speakers — Mr. Anani, Kamal Saleem and Walid Shoebat — habitually paint Muslims as inherently violent. All were born in the Middle East but Mr. Saleem and Mr. Shoebat are now American citizens, while Mr. Anani has Canadian citizenship.
“Their entire world view is based on the idea that Islam is evil,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on Islamic American Relations. “We want to provide a balancing perspective to their hate speech.”
Source: The New York Times
Apologists for these sorts of evangelical speakers insist that all the complaints are little more than sour grapes. Keith Davies, director of the Walid Shoebat Foundation, says that people are attacking the speakers because “they can’t argue with the message.” So, what, the "message" here is that "Islam is evil" and can best be fought by spreading Christianity? That's an easy message to argue with.
Real academics and scholars, in contrast, offer substantive reasons to doubt the message of these speakers and therefore why they shouldn't be invited to serious academic conferences:
Academic professors and others who have heard the three men speak in the United States and Canada said some of their stories border on the fantastic, like Mr. Saleem’s account of how, as a child, he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights. No such incidents have been reported, the academic experts said. They also question how three middle-aged men who claim they were recruited as teenagers or younger could have been steeped in the violent religious ideology that only became prevalent in the late 1980s.
Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., heard Mr. Saleem speak last November at the college and said he thought the three were connected to several major Christian evangelical organizations. “It was just an old time gospel hour — ‘Jesus can change your life, he changed mine,’ ” Mr. Howard said. “That is mixed in with ‘Watch out America, wake up America, the danger of Islam is here.’ ”
Mr. Howard said his doubts about their authenticity grew after stories like the Golan Heights saga as well as something on Mr. Saleem’s Web site along the lines that he was descended from the grand wazir of Islam. “The grand wazir of Islam is a nonsensical term,” Mr. Howard said.
One interesting question that has been raised is why these three men are allowed to walk around freely, giving lectures like this. If their claims are true and they really were serious terrorists, why haven't they been arrested and placed in Guantanamo? There are people who have been there for years on the basis of second-hand testimony from paid informants, but here we have people freely admitting to terrorist activity. At the very least, why aren't they kept in seclusion where they can be interrogated.
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My ex husband went to the Air Force Academy and was not only brainwashed about military stuff, but also by the Evangelicals who had multiple weekly meetings on campus. They also pay for Christian singers to come do concerts among other things.
The AFA is a joke and spits on separation of church and state.
“If their claims are true and they really were serious terrorists, why haven’t they been arrested and placed in Guantanamo? There are people who have been there for years on the basis of second-hand testimony from paid informants, but here we have people freely admitting to terrorist activity. At the very least, why aren’t they kept in seclusion where they can be interrogated.”
Austin, you have posed these questions rhetorically, but I think the answer to them is obvious. These men were never terrorists. They are simply pious liars.