Arabic television channel Al Jazeera has found video footage of American soldiers planning to distribute Bible printed in Pashtu and Dari languages, to locals in Afghanisthan. The books were printed and sent by a church in the US.
A U.S. church raised money to send Bibles, printed in the Pashtu and Dari languages, to American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a report on Al Jazeera documented Sunday night.
It is against military rules to proselytize — a regulation one of the soldiers filmed by the network readily acknowledged. “You cannot proselytize, but you can give gifts,” says the soldier. It is a crime in Afghanistan to attempt to convert anyone from Islam to any other religion. “I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out.” The footage is said to be roughly a year old.
The Al Jazeera report also shows a military preacher urging army parishioners to “hunt people for Jesus.”
From Rediff:
US law prohibits soldiers from proselytising, and its is a crime to convert anyone under Afghan law, however the soldiers said they “were allowed to give gifts.”
A report on the Huffington Post website, said that the preacher urged soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus”.
“The Special Forces guys, they hunt men. Basically, we do the same things as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the Kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business,” the website quoted the preacher as saying.
From Huffington Post:
Many Americans have expressed shock at news that some U.S. soldiers have been seeking to use their positions of power in Iraq and Afghanistan to preach Christianity. But this does not come as news to Muslims, who have been long aware of these proselytizing efforts at the end of a gun.
The Pentagon’s General Order 1 prohibits American troops from attempting to convert people in foreign countries. Nonetheless, this activity has been rampant since the United States military first entered Afghanistan and Iraq. In this month’s Harper’s Magazine, Jeff Sharlet’s article “Jesus killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military” provides troubling insight into the efforts of fundamentalist Christian churches to turn our armed forces into a modern-day Knights Templar, fighting infidels on behalf of the Church.
From Common Dreams:
Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. The fact that the video footage is being broadcast on Al Jazeera guarantees that it will be seen throughout the Muslim world. It is likely to add more credence to the perception that the US is engaging in a war on Islam with neo-crusader forces invading Muslim lands.
Former Afghan prime minister Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai told Al Jazeera there must be a “serious investigation,” saying, “This is very damaging for diplomatic relations between the two counties.” Sayed Aalam Uddin Asser, of the Islamic Front for Peace and Understanding in Kabul, told the network: “It’s a national security issue … our constitution says nothing can take place in Afghanistan against Islam. If people come and propaganda other religions which have no followers in Afghanistan [then] it creates problems for the people, for peace, for stability.”
A US military spokesperson, Major Jennifer Willis, denied that the US military has allowed its soldiers to attempt to convert Afghans and said comments from sermons filmed at Bagram were taken out of context. She said the bibles were never distributed. “That specific case involved a soldier who brought in a donation of translated bibles that were sent to his personal address by his home church. He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them,” she said. “The translated bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment.”
The video footage was shot about a year ago by documentary filmmaker Brian Hughes, who is also a former US soldier. “[US soldiers] weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons,” Hughes told Al Jazeera. “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”
The broadcast of this video comes just days after a new poll of White Americans found that, in the US, church going Christians are more likely to support the use of torture than other segments of the population. The Pew Research Center poll found: “White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified – more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.”
War on terror or just the latest crusade?
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