Air Force Academy Promotes Cadets for Christ

Teaching Religious War

By Lawrence Swaim, Southern California InFocus

Lawrence Swaim is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation. He taught for eight years at Pacific Union College, and his academic specialties are American Studies and American literature.

The U.S. Air Force Academy just can’t seem to get it right. Six major cheating scandals in four decades. Endemic sexual harassment against female cadets. Christian evangelical officers proselytizing non-Christian cadets. But in February 2008, on the occasion of their fiftieth annual assembly, the Academy brass outdid themselves.

They presented three discredited Islamophobes who spewed religious bigotry and advocated religious war, in the process trampling on the First Amendment and exposing the Air Force to international ridicule.

Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani all claim to be "reformed terrorists." The three men’s narratives "border on the fantastic," as a Feb. 7 New York Times story delicately put it, including their claims that they killed hundreds of people while still children. Even members of Shoebat’s own family apparently believe that his stories of terrorism are fabricated. Most experts have concluded that they are frauds.

"It’s like inviting O.J.Simpson impersonators to a conference on domestic violence," Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told InFocus. "They’re snake-oil salesmen, but unfortunately they’re not really funny, because they have the capacity to severely damage national security." (The three men collected $13,000 for the Colorado Springs caper, according to The New York Times.)

(More here.)