Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Are U.S. troops being force-fed Christianity? | csmonitor.com, October 4, 2007

At Speicher base in Iraq, US Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.

Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer….

The MRFF plans more lawsuits in coming weeks, says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, who founded the military watchdog group in 2005. The aim is “to show there is a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense.”

For Mr. Weinstein – a former Air Force judge advocate and assistant counsel in the Reagan White House – more is involved than isolated cases of discrimination. He charges that several incidents in recent years – and more than 5,000 complaints his group has received from active-duty and retired military personnel – point to a growing willingness inside the military to support a particular brand of Christianity and to permit improper evangelizing in the ranks. More than 95 percent of those complaints come from other Christians, he says.

The settlers’ great moment of joy: December 8, 1975. After nine days of resisting the Rabin government’s attempts to remove them from Sebastia in the West Bank, settlers hear that Rabin has blinked. Gush Emunim leaders Hanan Porat (right) and Moshe Levinger are hoisted aloft by their supporters. Photo by Moshe Milner, Israel Government Press Office.

Paolo Pellegrin’s Photographs of Lebanon during the war of 2006 (in the book Double Blind (Trolley, 2007)