Comments on: Dehumanizing Muslims

By: Nihat

Nihat — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:52:01 +0000

Bitter lemons make your stomach sick. What’s so hard to understand in that? An ex-muslim-terrorist-Arab-turned-evangelical-Christian can lead you to one place only: the toilet! Also, the author of the TDN article is not necessarily a journalist.

By: Tully

Tully — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:13:28 +0000

In a rhetorical war, it’s a lot easier to defend yourself when you don’t keep handing the other side ammunition. The AFA is not really doing itself any favors with its speaker lists. For either conference.

By: JudasPriest

JudasPriest — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:31:10 +0000

The bottom-line is the substance of the article which is the deliberate stereotyping of terrorists with all Muslims. Is there not similar examples from Islamic world, absolutely yes. Though, in a joint conference, insulting guest group like this is very very rare. I personally do not appreciate anyone taking the defensive position in debates like this by undermining the essence of the story, which if you do it definitely lowers the honesty and credibility of your rational approach to the subject. It is best for everyone if we could skin-off our religious identities and see "others" without hatred and stereotyping. Lucky me that I have nothing to skin off.

By: C Stanley

C Stanley — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:47:11 +0000

Oh, I’m not disputing that, Pat- I was only pointing out the journalistic weakness in the original article that Michael linked to. The additional materials support the idea that the general concern is warranted- just perhaps not to the degree that the original author expressed it (IOW, the initial article was one sided, but learning the other side doesn’t completely mitigate the problems described.)

By: PatHMV

PatHMV — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:25:38 +0000

Unfortunately, Christine, my initial reaction is to give the report some credence. There have been serious problems in the recent past with vastly inappropriate proselytization by evangelicals at the Air Force Academy. See my post at Centerfield in 2005, and a post by MW Schneider in 2006. As Tully notes in comments to the MWS post, this has come about largely because of an influx of evangelical churches to the Colorado Springs area (mostly during the years of the Clinton Administration), not because of pressure from top Air Force brass.

Based on your additional links, I suspect the problem is that they still haven’t quite gotten everybody on base on-board with the "leave your religion at home" message, and so they still get into problems, but there’s enough sensitivity to the issue at the top level that they do try to fix the problems that arise.

By: C Stanley

C Stanley — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:21:01 +0000

A couple of odd things about this article; one, the author never even names who the speakers were, and two, he doesn’t give a single quote from them, just describes his own interpretation of what they said. It’s a bit hard to know whether or not his inferrences are accurate, without even an excerpt from a transcript. And then even if I take him at his word, I don’t quite understand the outrage over people describing the terrorist acts as those of ideologues; I would think it would be a good thing to separate the ideology of militant Islamism from the religion of Islam itself. Now, whether or not those speakers are also proselytizing and claiming that the cure for terrorism is to convert the Middle East to Christianity, I have no idea (again, without a transcript, it’s impossible to know what was actually said.)

It wasn’t hard to find the names and learn more about the controversy over these speakers though; I googled and found this:
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/02/airforce_terrorists_academy_022908/

Apparently the Air Force responded to some complaints by lining up some additional speakers to give a different perspective; and then there was also controversy over THAT, because one of the additional speakers is an attorney who frequently sues the military for espousing Christian viewpoints and he spoke after those Arab evangelicals of the need to ‘deprogram’ the cadets:
http://www.christianfighterpilot.com/blog/?p=170