On May 12th a very decent, compassionate woman named Doreen Ransom submitted the following letter to ADN:
“Why is it that the paragraph I quote below from Friday's paper is merely one inch on page A-4? It is a horror—it should be plastered in great bold, black letters on the front page for us to see what some American authorities are capable of conceiving.
‘A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggested that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material’.
'(A) student objected to the material’? Just one student? Who are the officers who designed and approved this course? Have they been investigated and charged yet? Why not? What else is our military doing that I don't know about and should? What does it mean today to be American? This is insane! Surely others care too. Please speak out.
Doreen Ransom”
Thank you, Doreen—you are truly a voice crying out in the wilderness. Of course I have no choice but to care about this, and do intend to speak out—here goes:
US administrations from Bush Sr. through Obama have insisted that America’s “war on terror” doesn’t constitute all-out war against the planet’s 1.5 billion Muslims. An instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, VA, on the other hand, has been openly teaching his students such assurance is merely pleasant-sounding fiction. Pretty much anyone still living in Gaza, Baghdad, Tripoli, Khandahar or Peshawar already knows that.
You’ll note I didn’t say “all-out war against Islam”, as Lt Col Matthew A. Dooley is alleged to have taught in his course. That’s another fiction. Islam is a body of moral and spiritual teachings, popularly referred to as a religion. It can't be "targeted" in any physical sense except perhaps by gathering all the Qur'ans in the world and burning them.
When you talk about "targeting Islam for total war”, you’re talking about targeting for extermination the people who believe in it. That was Hitler’s “final solution”. That was the strategy Stalin’s “Society for Militant Atheism” used against believing Muslims, Christians and Jews in the former Soviet Union. It always boils down to murdering PEOPLE—period. Even the above example of eliminating the Qur’an would, unavoidably, involve mass-murder, as there are at any one time on the planet about a million people who have memorized it. Last I checked the youngest was six.
So let’s do away with the fiction that “total war” against Col. Dooley’s “barbaric ideology” involves anything other than mass-murder on an unprecedented scale. That’s why he openly advocates violating the Geneva Conventions in prosecuting said war.
And while we’re at it, let’s do away with our government’s equally fictional fall-back position that Dooley’s “final solution” represented unsanctioned views of a “renegade” military instructor. Nonsense—even Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams didn’t bother with that lie. When asked by the press if Col Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded "I don’t know if I would classify him (Dooley) as responsible—that would be the Commandant", i.e. Major General Joseph Ward. 800 senior and mid-level military officers don’t receive such training without approval from higher up.
Anyone who’s been in the military knows that you don’t sharpen a pencil without first running it up the chain of command for approval. Is there anyone in the US military hierarchy willing to take Harry S. Truman’s position that "the buck stops here”? Actually, no—what’s in place is the reverse as any enlisted man will tell you: “S*** rolls downhill”—and sticks to those at the bottom.
And finally, let’s also dismiss the increasingly threadbare fiction that the likes of Robert Bales, Calvin Gibbs, and Jeremy Morlock merely represent “aberrations” in otherwise “honorably” prosecuted wars—nonsense! Those “onward Christian cyborgs” represent their training—no more, no less. They represent the official yet “plausibly deniable” policies of the US military and government—right to the top.
And they are incessantly defended by a whole lot of "Dominionist" so-called “Christians” who foam at the mouth and start speaking in tongues at the thought of starting Armageddon.
And it gets worse folks—when Col Dooley advocates nuclear immolation of Mecca and al-Medina, he stresses that this should be done “without regard to civilian deaths”. Which civilians—the family of Sa’ud? At last count there were only about 36,000 of them—small potatoes in terms of the body counts the US military has habitually racked up over the last century, indeed even in the first decade of THIS century. US Forces murdered 1/6th as many civilians in Fallujah alone in 2004. The remainder of “Sa’udi” Arabia’s population pretty much consists of housekeepers, nannies, concubines, shop-keepers, hewers of wood (what little there is), drawers of water (ditto) and a whole lot of crippled beggars.
Are these the ones mighty America feels it must target for extermination in the name of “homeland security”? No. A goodly portion of the Sa'ud family's servants aren’t even Muslim. They’re just “collateral damage”.
When Dooley advocates nuking Mecca, he means to do it DURING HAJJ—at a time when there are as many as six million people there from all over the Muslim world to perform one of our holiest rituals, most of whom have saved all their lives in order to afford the pilgrimage. He wants to MAXIMIZE civilian casualties both numerically and in terms of countries afflicted, and in terms of the spiritual devastation he hopes to derive there-from.
And Dhul-Hijja—the Pilgrimage Month—would be the best time to accomplish that. Dooley’s advocated approach to “reducing Islam to cult status” (his words) is to murder millions of people while they’re bowed down in worship to Almighty God.
This is how Col Dooley and his superiors hope to eliminate the Islamic faith. And such wannabe fascists as atheist fundamentalist Richard Dawkins and “Christian” fundamentalist John Hagee are solemnly intoning “amen, brothers!”
Holy General Bat-Guano, Caped Crusader! What a shining beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of humanity America is turning out to be! It makes me want to holler “HALLELEUJAH!—(not).
So yet again my tax dollars are going to pay the salaries of people who would cheerfully “double-tap” me, my children and grandchildren in the head, a la Sgt Bale, as we lay asleep in our beds. What should be my response to that, according to you so-called "freedom-loving conservatives”? What would be your response if military officers were being taught by your own government to target YOU?
American military leaders are nothing if not short-sighted when it comes to other peoples’ lives. It’s a characteristic pretty much common to all bullies. Did it ever occur to Col Dooley and his ilk that the remaining 1,494,000,000 Muslims surviving such a hideous atrocity might NOT react by holding hands, singing "Tala’al Badru ‘Alayna", crunching granola, quaffing organic smoothies and throwing up the ‘peace sign’ to appease their tormentors?
Unless he’s prepared to kill us all, the aftermath of such an outrage may well be no less than what was described in an old African-American spiritual, derived—appropriately enough—from the biblical Book of the Apocalypse:
“I went to the rock to hide my face,
The rock cried out ‘No hiding place!’”
Of course there are some who will argue the above-referenced “prophecy” applies not to western Christians, but to non-Christians like me. Considering the fundamentally despicable and cowardly characters of those who prosecute greed-driven wars against the helpless, I’m putting my money on my own folks ultimately coming out on the right side of things should this conflict play out to such a needlessly tragic conclusion, our current relative powerlessness notwithstanding. Why? Because I do believe in Divine Justice.
“The believers will be persecuted, but they will emerge triumphant in the end.”
I have that on the very Highest Authority.
(PS: On a personal note, congratulations to Ann and Jim Curro for being selected Volunteers of the Year at St Benedict’s Church. WTG guys…)
