Religious fanatics: Muslim vs. Christian

Stunned by that pipsqueak Gainesville preacher's nitwit notion of burning Korans, and terrified by the escalating global reactions, I ordered a highly recommended book for perspective: Reza Aslan's Beyond Fundamentalism. It erased much of my culpable ignorance of Christian/Islamic history, but its analysis of the contemporary standoff wasn't at all reassuring.

The most astonishing information concerned how widely the U.S. military was employing a crazed version of Christian fundamentalism as a battle strategy— generals talking openly about End Time Christianity and what that allegedly implied about defending Israel at all costs. I had also missed Ronald Reagan's contention that Catholic Liberation Theology in Central America was a "threat to U.S. national security."

Aslan also notes that our military tactics in the Middle East involve soldiers passing out Bibles in Arabic. Fundamentalist professors and chaplains at the Air Force Academy are using their positions to evangelize students. Comic books about Christian hell are given to Islamic youth.

In that case, it's easy to understand why Jihadists were upset by our tactics: Indeed, Aslan writes, U.S. conduct in both Iraq and Afghanistan— the evangelizing soldiers, the humiliation of Muslim prisoners forced under torture to eat pork and curse Muhammad, the Crusader rhetoric of the military officers and political leaders— "has not only validated the Jihadist argument that these wars are "'a new Crusader campaign for the Islamic world'."

I'm reading this book as our media reveal the horror stories of American soldiers killing Afghans for kicks and cutting off fingers as souvenirs. We hear plenty of inflated rhetoric about our brave soldiers, but nothing about the lowest dregs of our volunteer forces— the least educated losers in our unemployment debacle, sworn in as soldiers in desperate last-minute efforts to fulfill quotas. We saw these GIs before in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Hyper-fundamentalist officers and uneducated U.S. soldiers— such a combination is a disgrace to any religion.

In the Conference in Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II spelled out the protocols for the First Crusade: Forgiveness of sins for those who fight the Church's enemies: "I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds…. to destroy that vile race, the Muslims, from the lands of our friends… All who die by the way, whether by land or sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested."

Popes don't talk that way any more— only Islamic jihadists, and fundamentalist American officers.