Last week, when Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, the new head of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), held a commander’s call to introduce himself to DISA’s employees, the new boss showed a PowerPoint presentation that included the 18 rules he lives by.

The first of “Ronnie’s Rules” was “Always put God first, and stay within his will,” and the last was ” Alway remember that God is good — all the time!”

The alpha and omega of their new commander’s “rules” being so overtly religious shocked many DISA employees and made them extremely uncomfortable. Twenty-one DISA employees, both civilian and military, immediately contacted the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), with one of these employees sending MRFF a copy of Lt. Gen. Hawkins presentation.

MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein reached out to officials at the Pentagon on behalf of the DISA employees, but getting no response went to the media.

As reported by the Air Force Times, Lt. Gen. Hawkins was quick to excuse his clear endorsement of religion in a command setting by saying that the slides of his “rules” were “in no way a directive or expectation I have for our dedicated men and women.”

Really? A commanding general doesn’t think that what he presents at a commander’s call as his “rules” won’t be seen as what he expects from his subordinates?

Well, if the general has no expectations that the men and women under him will feel any pressure to follow his religious rules, then I guess he has no expectations that his subordinates will feel any pressure to follow any of his other 16 rules either.

Therefore, it is clear that under Lt. Gen. Hawkins the 16,000 employees of DISA will no longer be expected to take care of their families, to keep their emotions out of their decision making, to stay focused, to work as a team, to be outstanding or winners, to share the credit and spotlight with their teammates, to conduct themselves with conviction — and they will absolutely not be expected not to do dumb things!

With none of these expectations to worry about, it sounds like DISA is going to be a mighty easy place to work under Lt. Gen. Hawkins.

When it came to light earlier this week that our military has a base named “Aryan” in Afghanistan, the DoD was quick to come up with excuses to explain it away. They claimed that it was the Afghan National Army, and not our military, who named the base; that it was spelled Arian, not Aryan; and that Arian is just a variation of Ariana, the ancient name of the region that includes Afghanistan.

Wait a minute! The same military that just last week was excusing the use of the Nazi SS flag by our Marines by saying they were too historically ignorant to know it was a Nazi flag are now saying that our military members are such a bunch of history whizzes that it would be general knowledge among them that Ariana was the ancient Greek name for Afghanistan?

Well, despite the DoD’s insistence that the base is named “Arian” with an “i,” it’s not. It is absolutely named “Aryan” with a “y,” a name that had already raised concerns among some, but those concerns were just joked about and ultimately ignored.

The DoD’s attempt to explain this offensive name away as a just spelling error might have worked if the only instance of it being spelled “Aryan” was just the one Army unit that referred to the base as “Combat Outpost Aryan” back in June, the only example anyone writing about this earlier this week, had. See Tuesday’s HuffPost article, “Afghanistan Base ‘Aryan’ Raises Objections From Soldiers Over Name.”

All other news outlets reporting on this story also had only the one example cited in the HuffPost article, but the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which first exposed COP Aryan after being contacted about it by members of both the U.S. military and the Afghan National Army who want the base’s name changed, has since located a number of other examples of Army units calling the base Aryan, and also obtained official DoD documents that list the base’s name as “Aryan.”

Of all the really hard to believe excuses the military has made for the actions of military personnel, this one has to take the cake. Those Marines posing with a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan just didn’t know it was an SS flag!

Yesterday, this photo went viral:

If you somehow managed to miss all of the countless stories about this photo, here’s the AP version.

There are also a whole bunch of articles with titles like “Marines: Nazi flag was mistaken for their own,” since the Marine Corps’ official excuse is that the use of the flag was just a naive mistake on the part of Marines who didn’t know what the flag was and just thought the SS stood for Sniper Scout.

Really? And just how does someone go about buying a Nazi SS flag without realizing that it’s a Nazi SS flag? Well, I spent hours yesterday afternoon and last night trying to do just that, scouring the web for an SS flag that could be bought by mistake. And, big surprise, I couldn’t find a single place where an SS flag wasn’t very clearly being sold as what it is — a Nazi flag.

For anyone who wants to read a book that really goes inside the movement to indoctrinate children through our public schools, I highly recommend the new book The Good News Club by Katherine Stewart. I received an advance copy of the book months ago to review, but, because of working on my own book, just didn’t have time to read it and write a review before it came out on January 24. But I’m reading it right now, and from what I’ve read so far, this is the best book I could imagine to explain to people just how the “The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children,” as the book’s subtitle describes it, is happening right under everybody’s noses.

The author, Katherine Stewart, embarked on her investigation of what’s going on in our public schools with the best possible motivation to expose the truth –  she became alarmed by what was happening in her own kids’ school. She then traveled the country interviewing both other parents like herself and experts on the stealth “Good News” movement, resulting in a book that is not only full of well documented facts, but tells the personal accounts of parents who, like herself, have seen first hand what these innocuous sounding “Bible study” groups are really all about and the tactics they’re using to lure and indoctrinate America’s children into the fundamentalist Christian mindset.

Like I said, I haven’t read the whole book yet, but what I did was to read the chapters about the things that I am very familiar with from my own work, such as the chapter on the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools and some of the stuff about Child Evangelism Fellowship. Because of my own prior knowledge of these subjects, I felt like the accuracy and thorough explanation I found in those sections was enough for me to write this preliminary review, and to call Ms. Stewart’s book a must read piece of investigative journalism.

I’ll be writing a full review as soon as I finish reading the entire thing, but I didn’t want to wait to tell people to READ THIS BOOK!

I couldn’t say anything about this until it was made public, but you guys just ain’t gonna believe this one. The Air Force Academy’s Dean of Faculty, Brig. Gen. Dana Born, actually launched a counter-insurgency operation against the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and then perjured herself when asked about it in a deposition.

Read all about it here.

I just got it from a reliable source that retired Islamophobic Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin has been disinvited from speaking at West Point’s annual National Prayer Breakfast. Score one for the fight against religious bigotry and Christian nationalism!

UPDATE: thinkprogress.org is reporting that West Point’s official statement says that it was Boykin who withdrew from the event. I find that a bit hard to believe, but either way he’s not speaking at West Point, which is the important thing.

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Email that just came in to MRFF from one of the 27 faculty members at West Point who opposed Boykin speaking there:

Mikey,

I am one of the West Point Faculty leaders who reached out to you and the MRFF via a late night teleconference merely 4 days ago about the horrible invitation which West Point extended to that well known Muslim bigot retired LGen William Boykin to speak at our annual U.S. Military Academy National Prayer breakfast on 8 Feb 12. We have just learned that Boykin will no longer be coming to West Point for this event.

On behalf of all 27 West Point faculty who are MRFF clients in this matter, and the 74 West Point cadets who are MRFF clients here as well, we all send our sincerest thanks and respect for an excellent job well done! And none of us had to reveal our identities in the bargain, Mikey. None of us had any place to turn for help, without real fear of reprisal, other than you and the MRFF.

As it turns out, Mikey, you and the MRFF were more than up to the challenge! From all of us here at West Point to all of the MRFF, we thank you for taking our fight to the Army and Pentagon and Presidential powers that be.

(West Point Faculty member’s name, rank and Academy Faculty Dept. withheld)

I’m no big fan of country songs, but …

It’s that time of year again — time for all those National Prayer Breakfasts at military bases, and the speakers scheduled for some of them this year definitely fall into the WTF category. But none so far beats the choice of West Point — none other than retired Lt. Gen. Jerry “my god is bigger than your god” Boykin!

On Feb. 8, 2012, the United States Military Academy at West Point is planning to host a National Prayer Breakfast featuring ret. Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, an individual who has a long record of issuing hate-filled rhetoric about Muslims.

Here’s what Boykin has said about Muslims in the past: there should be “no mosques in America“; Muslims worship an “idol“; “Islam is a totalitarian way of life, it’s not just a religion”; “it should not be protected under the First Amendment”; Muslims operate “under an obligation todestroy our Constitution.”

Read more at thinkprogress.org

 

UPDATE: More from thinkprogress.org – West Point’s excuse in response to Vote Vets objection to the choice of Boykin.

MRFF, of course, has clients at West Point who are also objecting to Boykin, and we’ll be dealing with this on our end well into the night tonight. More to come …

UPDATE 2: MRFF president Mikey Weinstein just had two conference calls with faculty and cadets at West Point. Some of these faculty members and cadets were actually involved in working on the Prayer Breakfast, but WERE NOT TOLD that the speaker was going to be Boykin until today!

Prior to today, MRFF only had 19 clients at West Point; that just went up to 79, including 66 who are objecting to Boykin. (The breakdown is 12 faculty members, all of whom are Christians; and 54 cadets — 48 Christians, 3 Jews, and 3 Muslims.)

UPDATE 3: As of this morning, 15 more faculty members and 20 more cadets have joined those already objecting to Boykin, some citing West Point’s response to Vote Vets as their reason for adding themselves to the initial group. The religious breakdown of the now 101 is basically the same as before, with the addition of one atheist cadet, who was appalled by the Academy’s Public Affairs Office justifying inviting Boykin by saying that the cadets need to be “exposed to different perspectives” and hear a “broad range of ideas.”

One of the faculty members, speaking on behalf of himself and all the other faculty members, eight of which had a conference call with Mikey Weinstein last night, provided the following statement to MRFF:

On February 14, Scott Air Force Base in Illinois will be holding its annual National Prayer Breakfast. The guest speaker this year will be Esther Jungreis, a Holocaust survivor who founded the international Hineni movement in 1973 to discourage intermarriage and Jewish participation in cults, according to the Jewish Women’s Archive.

In her speeches and writings, Jungreis throws around the name Hitler and the word Holocaust more than Glenn Beck — not in the expected context of her being a Holocaust survivor talking about the actual Hitler and actual Holocaust, but to make comparisons to things that are not the actual Hitler or the actual Holocaust. One of the most controversial examples of this is her equating interracial marriage between Jews and non-Jews to the Holocaust, with statements like this:

“It’s a question of understanding that Hitler’s aim was to annihilate our people, and intermarriage is also a form of annihilation, which is sometimes even more deadly than the Holocaust.”

That statement was made when Jungreis was in Canada in 2007 to deliver a lecture titled “The Holocaust and the Final Solution to Intermarriage.”

Jungreis even includes marriages in which the non-Jewish partner converts to Judaism in what she calls a “spiritual Holocaust,” saying:

“Conversions are usually a sham, you know, in name only. It’s easy come, easy go, and there’s no commitment behind it. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just to accommodate someone in the family.”