Bribing “Conversion” in a Time of War…Is There Anything Much Lower Than That?
Saturday, August 29th, 2009In the process of transitioning web sites, I want to start a new series that will be ongoing on the new site. As I have said, we will be departing the Palin port and moving into broader scopes. This will sometimes require ongoing ties back to Queen Esther – as in today’s post about the antics of Franklin Graham and his neat lil company, “Samaritan’s Purse”. Referring back to her is inevitable because they did actually choose her (as unbelievable as that still remains to my rational mind), one year ago today.
My partner Alex (aka ‘dogemporer’), in the upcoming book has done extensive research and writing over the years on dominionism and religious extremism. A great deal of her “diaries” as she calls them are spread across many web sites in the blogosphere…but I am going to start re-posting portions of them with links to her entire articles on the new blog site, “godsownparty”, in an effort to bring them into one place. Her work is invaluable.
So today I am going to share an article about proselytizing in the military and the parasites that swoop in to “harvest souls” like our friend Franklin Graham – Billy Graham’s spot-on example of a prodigal son – a rich daddy’s-boy who travels the world perpetuating his father’s 
multi-million dollar “souls-for-money” business. We saw Frank recently shuttling Palin, Parnell and the self-righteous Baptist from Anchorage, Alaska (Jerry Prevo), around to a couple of villages in western Alaska. They stood around the plane and had prayer group hugs on camera, and claimed their acts as altruistic in the name of Jesus.
First of all…there is nothing altruistic about these people. There is always an agenda, and that agenda is that you either convert to their game or get squashed. They need the numbers, for how else will they be able to traverse the globe in private planes, motorcycles, boats, limos – you name it spreading the ‘wurd’? They feed off those in despair like zealot parasites in the name of Jesus.
If it sounds like I am angry today it is because I am. A true American patriot, USAF graduate, former White House counsel in the Reagan Administration and my friend Mikey Weinstein and his family have been horribly harassed, threatened and terrorized because of his work to prevent these parasites from dominating faith in the military through his Military Religious Freedom Foundation. So I am compelled to speak out about these lovely dominionist ‘c’hristians and share the tangled web they weave together, including their act of military proselytizing.
Alex has already written about this connection in June 2008 between Samaritan’s Purse and military proselytizing which is included in full article here – but below I would like to include portions of it so I can interject a few comments:
The recent incident where a Marine was recently found distributing “Bible coins” promoted by a fundamentalist “Bible church” is, sad to say, far from the first incident of overt proselytizing in Iraq.
The truth is, this sort of thing has been going on literally since Gulf War I, and ramped up in Gulf War II–and, ironically, has directly threatened the future existence of two of the oldest Christian churches in the world–churches that can literally trace their founding to one of the Twelve Apostles. Even more disturbingly, most of the worst proselytizing has been with civilian dominionist groups that target both Iraqi citizens and US military personnel.
Not the first, and not even the worst, example of “invading missionaries”
Whilst the “Bible coin” fiasco has been given considerable press (in part because of military involvement following an incident where a copy of the Quran was used for target practice), it is by no means the first or the worst example of targeting of Iraqis–including other “people of the book”–by dominionist “missionaries”.
It has been little publicized, but dominionist “missionary” groups have been in Iraq since the US government hit the ground in Gulf War II–and their activities may have in fact directly led in part to the bucket of hell that the country is in…and to US military being targeted.
One of the first groups on the ground–and one of the more notorious offenders in regard to the use of “bait and switch” evangelism, especially in regards to relief efforts–was Frank Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse (which made plans as soon as 2003 to enter the country). The SBC, the Assemblies of God, and other groups also moved in quite rapidly after Saddam Hussein’s government fell.
Samaritan’s Purse’s actions have been especially odious. Among other things, the group literally described the attempted genocide of Iraq’s Kurdish population as a “missionary opportunity”; never mind that Kurdish people are already a marginalized people and that one of the more heavily demonized religious minorities in Iraq exists among the Kurdish people (the Yezidi faith, which venerates Malek Taus as a bringer of wisdom–a being normally equated to Shaitan in traditional Islam, which has led to Yezidis being (falsely) accused of being Satanists). As it is, Samaritan’s Purse’s leader stated that Islam was a “wicked and violent” religion in such terms that even George W. Bush didn’t want to touch that statement with a 40-foot barge pole.
Okay…It is not a stretch her to place Franklin Graham and Erik Prince (Mr. Xe formerly known as Blackwater) in the same tree house when
they were young and playing army. Frank actually was kown to take an automatic rifle and use it as a chain saw but shooting up the base of trees to the point of toppling them. Picture the vitriol hatred the 2 of them share in their righteous ‘c’hristianity towards Islam. An ugly and dangerous combination. Look at them – they look like twins. ‘c’hristians filled with hate. Wow!
Samaritan’s Purse also has a well-documented history of forcing people to be proselytized to as a condition of disaster aid and especially targeting children to do so–including gift boxes given to children with religious toys.
Starving, homeless, displaced children and families – suffering the horrors of war or other disasters – and here come these “people of God”, swooping in with aid but tell them they can’t have it until they have listen to the sales pitch and are “saved” before they can have food, clothing or trinket dangling before them.
This is saving souls! This is extortion! Shame on them!
In fact, the “bait and switch” extended to adults as well; Samaritan’s Purse ended up wearing out its welcome with the Red Cross during Gulf War I (by pulling stunts where it required people to watch “The Jesus Film” to receive aid at a Jordanian refugee center) which could have gotten our soldiers in serious trouble with their host country:
Even Franklin Graham used some of these methods. According to Graham’s biography, “Rebel With a Cause,” during the last Gulf War, Samaritan’s Purse went to Jordan under the banner “Operation Desert Save” with food and aid–and showed the Jesus Film at night until the International Red Cross complained. Graham then used the Dear Abby Any Servicemen campaign to send Arabic language Scripture tracts and New Testaments into Saudi Arabia-a country he describes as “wicked”–and smuggled them past censors concerned about cultural sensitivity by using the Dear Abby postmark. The U.S. Postal Service, acting on a complaint by Dear Abby, brought the campaign to an end.
(Of Note: Samaritan’s Purse was among a number of dominionist groups (including the Assemblies front group FGBMFI) known to have funneled aid to the Contras under the guise of “aid” and conducted extensive “bait and switch” evangelism in Nicaragua)
And lest people think Samaritan’s Purse’s behavior in Iraq was an aberration–they’re reported to have targeted survivors of Hurricane Katrina in identical manner. In fact, Frank Graham explicitly saw Katrina as “God’s Judgment” on New Orleans (how many times do we have to tell these folks that Hurricane Katrina is not divine retribution, and if it were, then God must have the worst aim in the world as Bourbon Street was probably the least damaged area that Katrina hit?).
Ironically, the influx of dominionist missionaries may well have been one of the worst things to have happened to the Christian community in Iraq in modern times.
Almost from the time they arrived, dominionist groups started aggressively targeting both Moslem *and* Christian groups for conversion–including the Chaldean Catholic and Iraqi Orthodox churches, two of the longest-lived congregations in all of Christianity. Traditionally, some of the churches in Iraq literally were founded by missionary efforts of no less than St. Thomas. As in the disciple Thomas, as in one of the guys who personally knew Jesus when he was alive in Christian tradition. Yes, these are literally some of the first Christian churches ever set up, where St. Paul would have been visiting as a traveling preacher visiting established churches.
Enough is enough for the Christian community in Iraq. The head of Iraq’s largest Christian community, Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, recently scathingly attacked the evangelical Christians who have taken their crusade to Iraq since the illegal U.S. invasion of March 2003.
According to Delly, the evangelicals attract poor youths with displays of money and then “take them out in cars to have fun. Then, they take photos and send them here, to Germany, to the United States and say ‘look how many Muslims have become Christian.’”
The interesting thing is…before the dominionist missionaries came, relations between the Christian and Moslem communities in Iraq were historically quite good in modern times. There was very much a spirit of “live and let live”–groups kept to their faith, and there was little effort at trying to convert each other.
This pretty much got shot to hell by dominionist missionaries…who, in part because of their actions, are now causing one of the oldest groups in Christendom to flee their country in droves and causing them to be targeted in such numbers that the word “genocide” has been increasingly used to describe the situation.
And increasingly, our soldiers are being associated with having brought the Dominionists to Iraq by its countrymen–and, sadly, with reports of ongoing attempts at steeplejacking of the US military’s chaplaincy system (which has been frighteningly successful in the Army and Air Force; the Navy still seems to be giving a good fight), this is not necessarily inaccurate.
Thank you, Alex.
And that is exactly what Weinstein is fighting, and being persecuted for. Working to keep our military free from these ‘c’hristian cult leaders who have now invaded the chaplaincy and dominated it, leaving subordinates to be pressured into conversion under threat of insubordination and misconduct.
And because of his fight to keep religious choice free in the military, he and his family have come under the most heinous fire. Mr. Weinstein, you sir are a true patriot!
