I do feel so much better now that I know that we have the top General assigned to track down Osama and Sadman and he speaks publicly of 'the army of God'
I sleep so much better now knowing that we have some Christian Extremists in high place in the Pentagon to counteract those wackos that the middle East produces (Bin Laden & Sadman, for example)......
It is also of particular note that Daniel Pipes was nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace. This body was designed to promote Peace and understanding among Muslims and the United States, quite literally, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict.
So what? Well, Pipes happens to say that "ALL MUSLIMS MUST BE WATCHED", and Pipes sees no room for negotiation, no hope for compromise and no use for diplomacy.
Daniel Pipes says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. So why has President Bush nominated him to the board of the government's leading peace think-tank?
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/ ... 20_01.html
http://slate.msn.com/id/2086844/
LATIMES 10/16/03
By William M. Arkin, William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for The Times.
In June of 2002, Jerry Boykin stepped to the pulpit at the First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Okla., and described a set of photographs he had taken of Mogadishu, Somalia, from an Army helicopter in 1993.
The photographs were taken shortly after the disastrous "Blackhawk Down" mission had resulted in the death of 18 Americans. When Boykin came home and had them developed, he said, he noticed a strange dark mark over the city. He had an imagery interpreter trained by the military look at the mark. "This is not a blemish on your photograph," the interpreter told him, "This is real."
"Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy," Boykin said to the congregation as he flashed his pictures on a screen. "It is the principalities of darkness It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy."
That's an unusual message for a high-ranking U.S. military official to deliver. But Boykin does it frequently.
This June, for instance, at the pulpit of the Good Shepherd Community Church in Sandy, Ore., he displayed slides of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jung Il. "Why do they hate us?" Boykin asked. "The answer to that is because we're a Christian nation We are hated because we are a nation of believers."
Our "spiritual enemy," Boykin continued, "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."
Who is Jerry Boykin? He is Army Lt. General William G. "Jerry" Boykin. The day before Boykin appeared at the pulpit in Oregon, the Pentagon announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had nominated the general for a third star and named him to a new position as deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.
In this newly created position, Boykin is not just another Pentagon apparatchik or bureaucratic warrior. He has been charged with reinvigorating Rumsfeld's "High Value Target Plan" to track down Bin Laden, Hussein, Mullah Omar and other leaders in the terrorism world.
But Gen. Boykin's appointment to a high position in the administration is a frightening blunder at a time when there is widespread acknowledgment that the position of the United States in the Islamic world has never been worse.
A monthlong journalistic investigation of Boykin reveals a 30-year veteran whose classified resumé reads like a history of special operations and counter-terrorism. From the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980 to invasions in Grenada and Panama, to the hunt for drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, to Somalia and various locales in the Middle East, Boykin has been there. He also was an advisor to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno during Waco.
He has risen in the ranks, starting out as one of the first Delta Force commandos and going on to head the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command. He has served in the Central Intelligence Agency and, most recently, he commanded Army Special Forces before being brought into the Rumsfeld leadership team.
But Boykin is also an intolerant extremist who has spoken openly about how his belief in Christianity has trumped Muslims and other non-Christians in battle.
He has described himself as a warrior in the kingdom of God and invited others to join with him in fighting for the United States through repentance, prayer and the exercise of faith in God.
He has praised the leadership of President Bush, whom he extolled as "a man who prays in the Oval Office." "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States," Boykin told an Oregon congregation. "He was appointed by God."
All Americans, including those in uniform, are entitled to their views. But when Boykin publicly spews this intolerant message while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, he strongly suggests that this is an official and sanctioned view — and that the U.S. Army is indeed a Christian army.
But that's only part of the problem. Boykin is also in a senior Pentagon policymaking position, and it's a serious mistake to allow a man who believes in a Christian "jihad" to hold such a job.
For one thing, Boykin has made it clear that he takes his orders not from his Army superiors but from God — which is a worrisome line of command. For another, it is both imprudent and dangerous to have a senior officer guiding the war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan who believes that Islam is an idolatrous, sacrilegious religion against which we are waging a holy war.
And judging by his words, that is what he believes.
In a speech at a church in Daytona, Fla., in January, Boykin told the following story:
"There was a man in Mogadishu named Osman Atto," whom Boykin described as a top lieutenant of Mohammed Farah Aidid.
When Boykin's Delta Force commandos went after Atto, they missed him by seconds, he said. "He went on CNN and he laughed at us, and he said, 'They'll never get me because Allah will protect me. Allah will protect me.'
"Well, you know what?" Boykin continued. "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Atto later was captured.
Other countries, Boykin said last year, "have lost their morals, lost their values. But America is still a Christian nation."
The general has said he has no doubt that our side is the side of the true God. He says he attends prayer services five times a week.
In Iraq, he told the Oregon congregation, special operations forces were victorious precisely because of their faith in God. "Ladies and gentlemen I want to impress upon you that the battle that we're in is a spiritual battle," he said . "Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army."
Since 9/11, the war against terrorism has become almost exclusively a special operations war, melding military and CIA paramilitary and covert activities with finer and finer grained integrated intelligence information. Hence, the creation of Boykin's new job as deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.
The task facing Boykin, Rumsfeld insiders say, is to break down the wall between different intelligence collectors and agencies and quickly get the best information and analysis for American forces in the field.
But even as he begins his new duties, Boykin is still publicly preaching.
As late as Sept. 27, he was in Vero Beach, Fla., speaking on behalf of Visitation House Ministries.
In describing the war against terrorism, President Bush frequently says it "is not a war against Islam." In his National Security Strategy, Bush declared that "the war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations." Yet many in the Islamic world see the U.S. as waging a cultural and religious war against them. In fact, the White House's own Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World reported this month that since 9/11, "hostility toward America has reached shocking levels."
"Arabs and Muslims respond in anger to what they perceive as U.S. denigration of their societies and cultures," the report stated.
The task for the U.S., the report said, is to wage "a major struggle to expand the zone of tolerance and marginalize extremists."
Appointing Jerry Boykin, with his visions of holy war in the Islamic world, to a top position in the United States military is no way to marginalize extremism.
Hope you all are well....When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience. One of the most frontal challenges from Islamic theocracy came in February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a sentence of death upon Salman Rushdie. There then followed a long campaign by writers and scholars and diplomats, culminating in September 1998 in a formal repudiation of the fatwa by the Iranian regime. Good cause for celebration, one might think. But not to Pipes, who weighed in with a sour, sophomoric article arguing that nothing whatsoever had changed and that the Iranian authorities were as committed to Rushdie's elimination as ever. His "sources" were a few clips from the Iranian press and a few stray statements from extremists. That was five years ago. Today, Salman Rushdie lives in New York without body guards and travels freely, and there are leading Shiite voices raised in Iran in favor of the coalition's successful demolition of the Iraqi Baath Party. To put it bluntly, I suspect that Pipes is so consumed by dislike that he will not recognize good news from the Islamic world even when it arrives. And this makes him dangerous and unreliable.
Then, I heard recently, Pipes has maintained that professor Edward Said of Columbia University is not really a Palestinian and never lost his family home in Jerusalem in the fighting of 1947-48. I have my own disagreements with Said, but this is a much-discredited libel that undermines the credibility of anybody circulating it. Professor Said is deservedly respected for his long advocacy of mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians; yet, once again, Pipes spits and curses at anything short of his own highly emotional agenda. In the February 2003 issue of Commentary magazine, he wrote an attack on the "road map" proposals, which included the words "the so-called Palestinian refugees," and which by other crude tricks of language insinuated that there had been no Palestinian dispossession in the first place. In which case, there is obviously nothing to negotiate about, is there? It's one thing to argue, as many Palestinians are prepared to do, that not every refugee can expect "the right of return." It's quite another to deny history and to assert that there is no refugee problem to begin with.
By coincidence, that same issue of Commentary contained several columns of letters from aggrieved scholars, complaining at the way in which Pipes had misrepresented their work. Pipes himself was forced to concede grudgingly that he had been in error when he described professor John Kelsay of Princeton and professor James Turner Johnson of Rutgers as having denied that the term "jihad" had any military meaning. I admire those who admit their mistakes, especially under the pressure of fact. But Pipes hasn't just been engaged in a dispute in print with other academics. He is the founder of Campus Watch, a Web-site crusade that purports to expose heretical or subversive teachers in America. It's not pleasant to think of such an organization being run by somebody who won't, or who can't, read the published work of more distinguished colleagues.
On more than one occasion, Pipes has called for the extension of Israel's already ruthless policy of collective punishment, arguing that leveling Palestinian villages is justifiable if attacks are launched from among their inhabitants. It seems to me from observing his style that he came to this conclusion with rather more relish than regret. And, invited recently to comment on the wartime internment of the Japanese—as a comparison case to his own call for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim and Arab-Americans—he declined on the grounds that he didn't know enough about the subject. One isn't necessarily obliged to know the history of discrimination as it has been applied to American security policy—unless, that is, one is proposing a new form of it. To be uninformed at that point is to disqualify oneself, as the Senate should disqualify Pipes.
The board of USIP already contains enough people to make sure that the hawkish viewpoint does not go unrepresented. It includes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, and Harriet Zimmerman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The objection to Pipes is not, in any case, strictly a political one. It is an objection to a person who confuses scholarship with propaganda and who pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity.
ATH
.. so never question what your minister tells you. Very often the minister will endorse a political party.. hence the PTL people and the 700 club. So every so often I have to be assaulted by someone with glazed over eyes's views about government.. whos views I have to wonder about. Did they even second guess once what Rush Limbaaaugh or Gerry Fallwel told them? Probably not. Liberal thought can be the same way.. those evil repulicans!! 
and it's hard not to be wounded when you're under frequent attack) There's a fair amount of explanation to some of this...