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Mikey Weinstein’s Crusade

Meet the man who’s trying to purge evangelical Christianity from the Pentagon.

You may recall the headlines in January, when a company called Trijicon, the lead supplier of rifle scopes to the U.S. military, was found to have inscribed them with coded references to passages in the New Testament. That was Weinstein — his organization threatened to sue Trijicon, which eventually agreed to discontinue the practice and distribute kits that would enable troops to retroactively secularize their scopes. Weinstein grabbed headlines again last month by pressuring the Pentagon to withdraw an invitation to the Rev. Franklin Graham, known for his Islamophobic oratory, to speak at a National Day of Prayer Task Force service. That provoked a stiff rebuke of Weinstein and his group from Shirley Dobson, wife of conservative Christian leader James Dobson and the task force chairwoman.

Built like a cinder block, with a bare cranium shaped like a howitzer round, Weinstein — a former Air Force judge advocate general — has the air of a born fighter. This battle is personal for him: Nearly 30 years ago, as a Jewish cadet at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, he was twice beaten unconscious in anti-Semitic attacks. (There wouldn’t have been much of a choice of targets — only 0.3 percent of the members of the U.S. military identify themselves as Jewish. Ninety-four percent are Christian.) Visiting his son, Curtis, on the eve of his own second year at the academy in the summer of 2004, Weinstein was stunned to learn little had changed; over lunch at McDonald’s, Curtis told his father that he had been verbally abused eight or nine times by officers and fellow cadets on account of his religion. Weinstein filed a complaint, in response to which the Air Force launched an investigation that revealed a top-down, invasive evangelicalism in the academy. Among other things, it revealed that the commandant of cadets taught the entire incoming class a “J for Jesus” hand signal, that the football coach had draped a “Team Jesus” banner across the academy locker room, and that more than 250 faculty members and senior officers signed a campus newspaper advertisement that proclaimed: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world.” Weinstein has been a First Amendment vigilante ever since.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/25/mikey_weinsteins_crusade

Weinstein argues, “are the flip side of the Taliban. They’re like Islamic officers exercising Quranic leadership to raise a jihadi army.” (A spokesman for the Navigators said the group had had no interaction with Weinstein and no comment on his activities..

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/25/mikey_weinsteins_crusade?page=0,1

Although Weinstein’s past lawsuits have garnered plenty of attention, they were just a warm-up for his next battle. Last week, he announced his group was preparing a lawsuit on behalf of Zachari Klawonn, a Muslim U.S. Army specialist at Fort Hood, Texas, who claims he was harassed and threatened after a Muslim psychiatrist’s deadly shooting spree there last fall claimed the lives of 13 people on the base.

Meet Mikey Weinstein, who has become the leading whistleblower and campaigner against the influence of fundamentalist evangelicals in the US military. Listening to him is a strange experience. He is the most combative speaker I have ever heard in public life. His language is so extreme that I hesitate to reproduce it lest readers discount his views. “When I see anti-Semitism, I don’t fucking care if I live or die, someone’s going to get a fucking beating,” he says in one of his milder moments.

http://newhumanist.org.uk/1681/backward-christian-soldiers

We are facing a national security threat in this country that is every bit as significant in magnitude, width and breadth internally as that presented externally by the now-resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda. And it is the destruction of the US constitutionally mandated wall separating metaphysical and physical, spiritual and non-spiritual, church and state, in the technologically most lethal organisation every created by humankind, which is our honourable and noble military. I’m here to report to you today that that wall is nothing but smoke and debris. We are facing an absolute fundamentalist Christianisation – a Talibanisation – of the US Marine Corps, Army, Navy, and Air Force.”