Antiwar.com Blog

As if the religious cauldron wasn’t already simmering in Iraq, add Bible Belt Missionaries Set Out on a ‘War for Souls’

American Christian missionaries have declared a “war for souls” in Iraq, telling supporters that the formal end of the US-led occupation next June will close an historic “window of opportunity”… Organising in secrecy, and emphasising their humanitarian aid work, Christian groups are pouring into the country, which is 97 per cent Muslim, bearing Arabic Bibles, videos and religious tracts designed to “save” Muslims from their “false” religion …

The missionaries are mainly evangelicals who reject talk of Muslims and Christians worshipping the same God … Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and the head of Samaritan’s Purse, a big donor to Iraq, has described Islam as a “very evil and wicked religion”…

The missionaries pose a dilemma for President George W Bush. He has reached out to Muslims since September 11, shrugging off criticism from evangelicals to describe Islam as “peaceful”. But Christian conservatives are also a key Bush constituency: Franklin Graham delivered the invocation prayer at his presidential inauguration.

Jon Hanna, an evangelical from Ohio who has recently returned from Iraq, applied for a new passport to travel there, describing himself as a humanitarian worker. “I was worried the US authorities might try to stop us, might be worried we were going to start a riot with our Bibles. He describes Islam as “false” … In Baghdad last month Mr Hanna met two other American missionary teams. One, from Indiana, had shipped in 1.3 million Christian tracts. “A US passport is all you need to get in, until the new Iraqi government takes over. What we thought was a two-year window, originally, has narrowed down to a six month window,” said Mr Hanna …

Many American troops serving in Iraq have fallen victim to what has been diagnosed by the Pentagon as leishmaniasis, an endemic parasitic skin afflication caused by biting flies. Iraqis have also been beset with skin afflictions since the war started, but these have defied diagnosis.

“Dr Jinan at the clinic in Abu Ghraib says there are patients coming in with illnesses that she and her colleagues can’t diagnose. Patients are referred to the main hospital complex at Baghdad Medical City but they return with still no diagnosis and having had no treatment. In particular, there have been patients presenting with bubbles on the skin. They “become hot, like burning coals, get hard and spread.” She said they don’t understand it…

“In the row of houses closest to the airport fence every single household reported some kind of skin or breathing problem. Probably the most common was white patches on the skin, which started, for most people, between April and July. Or spots on the skin, which turn black and then the skin peels off. Or the blisters or bubbles on the skin that Dr Jinan mentioned, with or without fluid. Women brought us inside, away from the men, took off their hijabs and showed us bald patches on their heads…

“Immediately after the bombing of the airport, people said, thousands of trucks started removing the soil from the complex. No one can tell us where it was dumped. Other trucks brought fresh soil from elsewhere to replace it and tarmac trucks came in to cover it over…”

From Jo Wilding’s first-hand account, A Health Survey in Abu Ghraib

Apparently, the Pentagon’s recruitment goals are not being reached, contrary to assurances that there has not been a marked decline in new sign-ups. Looking further afield has become the current recruitment policy for Uncle Sam Wants You, Eh?

“As Bush was ramping up the Iraq war last winter, Canadian military officials were startled to discover Pentagon recruiters roaming through their nation’s native population reserves trying to persuade Inuit and others to enlist in the U.S. military. The Americans started cropping up on the Atlantic Coast in Quebec, in the Sault Sainte Marie area of Ontario, and in Western Canada. A Canadian Defense Ministries report said the U.S. claimed that under the 1794 Jay Treaty it had the right to recruit Canadian native inhabitants for its military because aboriginal Canadians held dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship…

“…The American recruiting efforts are aimed at filling the ranks of an army stretched thin by the Iraq war and by having to post troops in other world hot spots such as Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The U.S. may well have to put a permanent military presence in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa, to protect oil and gas reserves against regional squabbles. The U.S. currently recruits from among green-card holders—people with permanent resident status who aren’t yet American citizens. In an effort to boost recruitment from such groups, Bush has signed an order reducing the time holders of green cards must wait before becoming citizens. Currently some 37,000 such people are in the military, out of a total of 1.4 million…”

Just when I was beginning to believe that the outing of an undercover CIA agent for political revenge was going to slip from memory without any heads rolling, apparently there are some who haven’t forgotten and are putting the pressure back onto the Administration. Senators Daschle and Levin, in no uncertain terms, are demanding an accounting of the progress made so far by the Justice Department on the investigation in their LETTER of December 22, 2003 to Ashcroft.

“On September 29, 2003, we wrote to you and to the President requesting the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the unauthorized disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA officer. You rejected this request, stating that the Department of Justice would initiate a criminal investigation of this matter instead. However, based on what we have seen to date, it is far from clear that the Administration and your department are truly committed to taking the steps necessary to apprehend the person or persons responsible for this grave national security breach.

“More than five months have passed since the first press report disclosed the name of the CIA officer and more than two months since your investigation was initiated…Given your refusal to name a special prosecutor and the fact that you are a political appointee of the President, receiving briefings on an investigation of officials of this Administration creates, at a minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest…

“We believe it is essential that you give our intelligence community personnel, the Congress, and the American people confidence that the Justice Department is thoroughly and aggressively pursuing all leads in this case without concern for its political ramifications. Recognizing that this is an ongoing criminal investigation, we request that you provide us with an overall status of the investigation, including the number of people the Justice Department has interviewed, the number of briefings you have received, the general types of information you are briefed on, what conditions you have placed on the scope of these briefings to ensure the independence of this investigation, and whether you have discussed this case with senior Administration officials outside the Justice Department…” (see rest of letter)

Light blogging this week—sorry—but this story was too good to pass up. I guess the Israeli government has run out of Peruvian Native Americans to import for demographic padding, because now they’re shipping in “lost tribes” from India.

“This is my land,” said Mr. [Sharon] Palian, a 45-year-old widower who left a lush rice farm and brought his three children with him from the Bnei Menashe community in northeastern India. “I am coming home.” Yet by making their home here, over the hill from the Palestinian city of Nablus, they have thrust themselves onto the front lines of the Middle East conflict.

Now, Israel’s immigration policy should be no one else’s business, but not when they stick the immigrants in Palestinian territory. The policy of moving new Israelis into settlements is particularly amusing in light of the controversy over Palestinian right of return. Of course, the dispossessed are not amused:

“Israel can bring lost tribes from India, Alaska or Mars, as long as they put them inside Israel,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. “But to bring a lost person from India and have him find his land in Nablus is just outrageous.”

Why bother importing folks just to dump them in someone else’s yard?

[P]eace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements, says the recruitment of far-flung groups with questionable Jewish ancestry is part of an effort to raise the number of settlers and to increase the Jewish population relative to the Arabs.

But, gosh, why would poor folks want to move to the Sweden of the Middle East? Oh, what a mystery:

It is not clear what prompted the Bnei Menashe to begin practicing Judaism. In the 1950’s they were still Christians, but they began adopting Old Testament laws, like observing the Sabbath and Jewish dietary laws. By the 1970’s, they were practicing Judaism, Mr. Halkin said. There was no sign of any outside influence. The Bnei Menashe wrote letters to Israeli officials in the late 1970’s seeking more information on Judaism. Then Amishav contacted them, and the group began bringing the Beni Menashe to Israel in the early 1990’s.

Has it really been more than two years since the anthrax attacks — and still no one arrested? Hard to believe! We’ve managed to bag Saddam, who never did anything to us. But Ashcroft, Ridge and untold billions of tax dollars later there are still no arrests, still no information on how anthrax from a government lab managed to get released. Note there is not a single word in the entire article mentioning the eternally on-going investigation. Where is the media to demand an accounting of the progress?

Anthrax Post Office to Open

WASHINGTON (AP) — The central mail-processing center where deadly anthrax-laced letters were discovered in the nation’s capital was set to open to the public Monday for the first time since it was closed 26 months ago. On Sunday, the former Brentwood facility was officially renamed in honor of two workers killed by anthrax-laced letters that were on their way to Capitol Hill…
… Their families were greeted with a standing ovation Sunday as they helped unveil one of two plaques, each about three feet square, that will be placed inside the building. The plaques’ bronze-on-black writing reads, “We are poorer for their loss but richer for having been touched by these dedicated, hard-working heroes”…

Not meaning in any way to belittle the memory of the unfortunate victims of this tragedy, I have not read of any heroic actions on their part in the event. At what point in time did the words “victim” and “hero” become synonymous? Getting run over by a city bus is not heroic, unless you were trying to save a child who had wandered into the street.