Posted on 01/21/2010 9:04:32 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. General David Petraeus said on Thursday it was "disturbing" that a manufacturer had embossed biblical citations on rifle scopes sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the firm announced it would voluntarily halt the practice.
"This is a big concern to the Army and the Marine Corps, who have contracted for these particular sites," said Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, noting the religious sensitivities American forces face in the two Muslim countries.
"This is of serious concern to me and to the other commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan because, indeed, it conveys a perception that is absolutely contrary to what it is that we have sought to do," Petraeus told a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"It is disturbing to us, frankly, that this was done," he added.
President Barack Obama has sought to convince the Muslim world that the U.S. fight against al Qaeda militants should not be viewed as a war against Islam.
Former President George W. Bush heightened those concerns shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington when he referred to his war on terrorism as a "crusade," a remark critics warned raised images of Christian knights attacking Muslim cities during the Middle Ages.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Next, they’ll want to remove the cross from inside the scope.....
PC Crap!
Does anyone really think Iraqis or Afghans would give a good goddamm?
What is all the fuss about? The scope is meant to kill some Islamic terrorist SOB. What does any inscription have to do with it. Here we go again with PC idiocy.
A few symbols on our scopes referring to biblical scriptures is so HORRENDOUSLY OFFENSIVE??
Where and how is this grounds for invoking p.c. doctrine?Why are we so literally AFRAID of offending muslim terrorists that we dont dare use Isreali jewish bullets? Much less to have christian scriptural references on our scopes?
WTF are we coming to?
Damn!
Just Damn!!!!
Former President George W. Bush heightened those concerns shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington when he referred to his war on terrorism as a "crusade," a remark critics warned raised images of Christian knights attacking Muslim cities during the Middle Ages.
This is such bull s--t!
Bush bent over backwards to make it clear this wasn't a religious war. This is a total rewrite to make Obama look like the reasoned one of the two. That's a complete fabrication.
Nothing short of a revolution is going to restore our country to sanity.
If they’re not careful the veil of power may drop. :^)
Next they will forbid our troops from carrying a Bible or any Scripture with them. What about Christian tattoos..
Maybe we should not send any Christians to fight in these countries..just atheists and Muslims..
“Next, they’ll want to remove the cross from inside the scope.....”
I have to admit it took me awhile to “get” what your saying. LOL
All this is much ado about nothing. Shame on Petraus for getting all worked up about it.
If we had to deal with this PC crap 65 years ago, we would have lost WWII.
After 3 decades, Trijicon has succumbed to the pressure and is removing the Bible Verse references:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_military_weapons_bible_references
I don’t know what’s worse; the freakin’ godless Libtards who made a big deal out of this, or the gutless Christians at Tijicon who gave up without a fight...
Cheers
Oh the horrors! We celebrate freaks, perverts and all the raunchy trash on the boob tube but God’s Word is offensive?
Not to mention the little cross in the NATO symbol on the headstamp of the cartridges...
Or the term ‘in the crosshairs’...
The good General is way off base on this one...
I wonder what Patton would have said about this? Ah, nevermind. Those days are gone.
Good idea! (But send the PC generals & SecDef with ‘em to lead the battles.)
They should’ve gone Ronnie Barrett on them. The press uproar alone would spur non-military sales to make up the difference.
I hope they charge a LOT more for the unmarked “custom” version. I sure as hell would...retooling is danged pricey!
Amen to that!
Cheers
Nothing. It’s not a “Christian” thing...
Cheers
What a crock. The Crusades were a trivial counteroffensive against 13 centuries of Muslim attacks on Christian cities, including wholesale massacres of all the inhabitants and desecration of Christian churches, all of which continues up to the present day. Yet we allow this treacherous Muslim scum to enter our country, build their obscene mosques, preach their hatred, and recruit in our prisons. Why on earth are we fighting to protect Muslims from other Muslims in their Third World hellholes, when our so-called "friends" in Saudi Arabia were the ones who gave birth to al Qaeda, continue to finance it, and aggressively spread their Wahhabi cancer all over the world?
This is Political Correctness run amok.
Frankly, it's also must be offensive to God as well. There once was a time when when we wanted Him on our side and honored Him. If our Founding Fathers were still around, they would probably grab their muskets off the wall and head out to stop this madness. And they would probably take their Bibles with them as well.
Maybe we should take IN GOD WE TRUST off our coinage as well just to please CAIR and the God-hating pantywaists that infest this country,... and I hate to say it,... our "Defense" Department, too?
F*ck them! God save us from these fools.
Why is it nobody inside the beltway can call this for what it is: trivial BS that's being spun into a major crisis as a test to see how much clout the liberals and their media still have? Why hasn't one person gone on the record saying that this is a phony crisis, and the sights are on the weapons because we want to kill these people, so we don't really care if they're offended or not?
Trijicon was successful when this was a minor "insider" item that "offended" nobody. I'm sorry if they feel that continued business success depends on assuaging the feelings of some RAT liberals who feel their calling in life is to assuage the feelings of moslem terrorist cowards. It would cost tens of millions of dollars to retool their entire product line, but if Trijicon feels this is the best course for their company, so bet it.
Personally, I'd offer the government the choice of buying the existing products at existing prices, or develop a Politically Correct version at double the price. For that price, they could also include materials in arabic explaining while we're eager to kill them, we'd never intentionally or unintentionally offend them.
The saddest part is seeing retired flag officers swallow hard and tow the party line. Perhaps they remember the Clinton years, when pro-Clinton retirees got speaking and consulting gigs, while anybody who spoke up against them could find their pension checks routed into a black hole for months at a time.
I’ll echo that, Mister Mag.
And how.
DOD cancelled the Crusader in 2002.
No, General dipshit. Disturbing is the PC claptrap your Pentagon put out as a “report” about the Fort Hood jihadist scumbag POS.
What’s disturbing is that somebody at Petraeus’ level really needs to respond at all. I understand, sadly, why he feels compelled to answer it that way.
We’re finished.
That settles it. I’m buying a Trijicon ACOG this week. I want one with the inscription intact.
"Disturbing"? Hardly, but then I am a Christian. If someone were to have references to the Koran, I doubt I'd be able to read them anyway, but I could do the same.
To me, the bottom line is that the company has been doing this for years (decades), and that until someone ginned up a complaint, it wasn't a problem.
If our allies don't like it, let them buy their own scopes.
And reveal the true beauty of intellectual inbreeding...
Such astounding idiocy in an otherwise intelligent seeming individual is “disturbing”.
The mohammedans want to butcher you General, enslave your young female relatives and murder the males. A few letters and numbers embossed on a weapons sight isn’t going to make them a graver threat.
Idiot.
I agree. GEN Petraeus says cryptic inscriptions on combat optics “are disturbing” and his colleague GEN Casey said he hopes diversity is not a casualty of the Ft Hood terrorist attack. The same PC Army leadership allowed the contemptible MAJ Nidal, a clearly insane jihadists who made no attempt to hide his sympathies, advance to field grade rank and shoot up his fellow soldiers. The Army not only accommodated Nidal’s anti-American lunacy, they encouraged it by promoting him. Now the Army leaders are upset and talking more about this issue than they did about the obvious madman they had as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed and Ft Hood. I predict that they will make sure this issue is quickly resolved while they do absolutely nothing about other potential jihadists in the ranks now. The Army Officer Corps embrace of PC silliness is getting very tiresome.
I'm taking mine in to the place that engraves our Hobbit Hole knives, and have them laser-engrave the full quote onto the side, where it will be easy to see.
Oh man.....(you don’t know me)
You can expect the Generals to fret about this stuff. They became generals because they learned how to play the PC game. Dittos for the libtards.
The people that actually use the scopes don't care whether the references are on the scope at all. All they care about is whether it helps them put rounds on targets.
Roger that. I wonder if they could somewhere on there fit some of Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil...”
This thing really pisses me off.
We should name our army weapons systems after Muslim names..we already have the M. Should not be to difficult. The M1 can be Muslim1. ya think that would make the left and muslims happy?
No more Army Christian Chaplains to Iraq, Afgan, Philippines.
Cancel all Christian services for the soldiers.
If your faith is Christian..cancel all deployments to Combat zones.
Flames away:
But I agree with Petreous!
If the mil spec for these scopes did not include inscriptions, then the supplier should not be allowed to alter the mil-spec. Thus the supplied equipment does not meet contract, and should not be paid for nor accepted!
How would everyone feel if a Muzzie firm in Michigan got a contract for, say $600 toilet seats, and the firm’s president, Mohammad, ordered his workers to inscribe on them a reference to Jesus?
???????????????????????????
C’mon you guys, calm down. Please. First, GEN Petreaus is a good guy. As a general, he is obliged to comment on issues like this that the media elevates to international matters. What else is he going to say? Think about it. Everything this guy says will get international press coverage, including the 1.4 billion or so islamic audience. He has to choose his words carefully, and he will always use the best words to keep his couple hundred thousand troops in the field safe.
When people attack him so easily, in my eyes, they put themselves in the same camp as those who call him “general betray-us”. For crying out loud – he’s in charge of the most significant war effort the globe has ever seen.
The troops have no problem with the inscriptions, and were mostly unaware of them until ABC made it a big deal.
Please, have faith in our troopers – they are in the field to protect us. Including their leaders.
As long as the enemy can scream ‘allah akbar’, I reckon our rifles can bear God’s word. There are tens of thousands of these things in the field and in the supply system. We’ll be seeing them for some time to come...
Personally, I’ll support Trijicon AND General P.
Kit!
C’mon you guys, calm down. Please. First, GEN Petreaus is a good guy. As a general, he is obliged to comment on issues like this that the media elevates to international matters. What else is he going to say? Think about it. Everything this guy says will get international press coverage, including the 1.4 billion or so islamic audience. He has to choose his words carefully, and he will always use the best words to keep his couple hundred thousand troops in the field safe.
When people attack him so easily, in my eyes, they put themselves in the same camp as those who call him “general betray-us”. For crying out loud – he’s in charge of the most significant war effort the globe has ever seen.
The troops have no problem with the inscriptions, and were mostly unaware of them until ABC made it a big deal.
Please, have faith in our troopers – they are in the field to protect us. Including their leaders.
As long as the enemy can scream ‘allah akbar’, I reckon our rifles can bear God’s word. There are tens of thousands of these things in the field and in the supply system. We’ll be seeing them for some time to come...
Personally, I’ll support Trijicon AND General P.
Kit!
The good General is merely reflecting the mentality he grew up with in the military; the same mentality that ignored Hasan’s repeated warnings.
I saw Affirmative Action in the US Army in 1969, whereby quotas were filled by promoting according to race, with no regard for merit.
When I asked about it, my drill sargeant told me it was official policy.
OTOH, did any such thing ever occur in "those days" ? I doubt it! Why would that be?
wanna bet the WH leaked it to ABC
Thanks Kit. As long as I am considered “the Infidel” by Islam, I’ve got no problem with the Bible quotes.
Those arms are not issued exclusively for this campaign.
This is a non issue.
The less said about this the better, by high level members of the military. That’s my take on it.
What is all the fuss about?
I know what the fuss is about , the terrorists that take these scopes off dead soldiers will be unable to use them against live soldiers.
Lefties commie traitorous bastards do not want good scopes not to be used against our soldiers.
There are days that I wish I was supreme ruler so I could end this PC BS permeating our society
Reading the thread I’m struck by two things.
First, the general lack of understanding and misuse of the concept “Politically Correct”. Pleasing western PC sensibilities isn’t the issue. Dealing with the culture in foreign lands we are fighting is what we are attempting.
Second, the eagerness and gusto that FR employs to throw the General under the bus. A man who was nearly worshiped just a year ago. The man many wanted for president. Nobody wanting to give him even the smallest benefit of the doubt as an expert on what is needed to fight our wars in Islamic territories, and what might hinder our efforts and unnecessarily endanger US troops.
I hope the General isn’t crowding Sarah Palin under that bus, where so many consigned her yesterday.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.