Democracy for Vancouver

Move along folks, nothing to see here:

BAGHDAD (AFP) — The US military said on Friday it was probing complaints that marines handed out coins inscribed with a verse from the Bible to a group of Sunni Muslims in Iraq, sparking outrage among local residents.

It said a marine involved in the incident in the former flashpoint city of Fallujah west of Baghdad was removed from his duties on Thursday.

“US forces initiated an investigation into reports that a coin with a Bible verse written in Arabic was distributed to Iraqi citizens as they passed through a Fallujah entry control point,” a statement said.
…
It stressed that handing out Christian coins was the action of a single soldier…

Boy, that guy sure gets around:

“They are trying to convert us to Christianity,” said Anad, a Sunni Muslim like most residents of this city in Anbar province. At home, he told his story, and his relatives echoed their disapproval: They’d been given the coins, too, he said.

Why would anybody think coercive proselytizing might be going on in Iraq? After all, the armed services are strictly secular outfits, right?

Not so much:

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall… “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

You could say Major Welborn is just another bad apple, of course; but then you’d have to ignore the steaming, flyblown compost heap over at the Air Force Academy:

Examples of questionable behavior highlighted in the report included the school’s head football coach hanging a “Team Jesus” banner in the locker room in November 2004; the academy’s commandant sending out a schoolwide message on the National Day of Prayer and encouraging cadets to use the “J for Jesus” hand signal; and senior school personnel signing on to a Christian advertisement citing scripture in the base newspaper.

Also detailed in the report was an incident in February 2004, when cadets reported their peers had placed fliers on the more than 4,000 place settings at the cadet dining facility and in other common areas promoting the film “The Passion of the Christ.”
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Cadets also reported being harassed for not taking part in voluntary prayer meetings during basic training and being labeled as instead taking part in the “Heathen Flight” back to dorms for time to relax.

The Air Force’s “complaint analysis” of the problem found that there was no “systemic” evangelizing, and that school officials may have “advocated one religious tradition over others,” but that this “did not violate any published standard” and “followed traditional military custom.”

Nice. So by that standard, Tailhook was a-o.k., right?

This comes from the top down. When you have an administration that calls Muslims “Islamofascists” and refuses to fund any “faith based initiatives” that are not based in Judaism or Christianity, you are giving carte blache to the evangelists and Christian bullies in the ranks, like William Boykin:

Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

“We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this,” Boykin said last year.

On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of President Bush: “He’s in the White House because God put him there.”

Bush: the original bad apple.