The Crusades, Still Killing for Christ

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has the crazy idea that our military should not discriminate against our troops on the basis of religion.

Two things happened the last several years that led to the creation of his organization now on the front lines fighting for the free exercise of religion in the military:

– George W. Bush decided unilaterally that the United States was on a "crusade" for Christianity, replete with all of the historical atrocities associated with this stated act of imbecility. The idea that the United States engages in religious wars is anathema to Weinstein, and most readers here.

Afterall, we’re a pluralistic country built on the idea of individual liberty and not state-mandated religious dogma that we wish to impose on other countries or troops and citizens.

– Secondly, Weinstein, an Air Force Academy graduate and Reagan administration White House counsel, found out the Academy was messing with his sons who were Jewish cadets at the Air Force Academy, and that such harassment is pervasive.

Weinstein is the wrong guy to mess with.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) was founded in 2005 by U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and Reagan administration White House counsel Mikey Weinstein, after the harassment his own sons faced as Jewish cadets at the Academy led him to discover that the fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Air Force Academy was far from an isolated problem. It was a military-wide issue that needed to be confronted head on. But it quickly became apparent that MRFF’s initial mission of protecting the rights of our men and women in uniform was only addressing part of the problem. The evangelizing and proselytizing of Iraqi and Afghan Muslims by both private religious organizations and U.S. military personnel also had to be exposed and stopped — particularly the materials and media available via the internet and television that could be used by extremists as propaganda for recruiting purposes.

When MRFF began exposing some of what we were finding on the internet, Weinstein was contacted by two Bush administration national security officials, one civilian and one military, confirming that the kind of stuff we were exposing was, in fact, being used as fodder for propaganda, and urging him not to stop what MRFF was doing. The most astounding thing, as you’ll see in the list below, is that it’s not the private religious organizations who are most at fault in spreading the crusader message, but the U.S. military itself.