From Capt. Yee, a stunning lesson in U.S. naiveté [Mulshine]

Newark Star Ledger ^ | 9/24/03 | Paul Mulshine

[Incorrigible]

A whole lot of people are proclaiming themselves to be stunned that a former resident of Springfield [NJ] who spent four years in Syria somehow ended up having the political and religious beliefs common to Syrians.

The former James Yee is a 35-year-old U.S. Army chaplain who grew up in Springfield and who is being held on unspecified charges stemming from his work among Muslim combatants captured in Afghanistan and being held in Guantanamo Bay. Yee has an interesting life story. After graduating from Jonathan Dayton High School, he won an appointment to West Point. After graduation, he left the Army and decided to go to Syria, a country that was then and is now on the list of nations supporting terrorism. He converted to Islam, changed his first name to Yousef, married a Syrian woman, and returned to the United States.

[Incorrigible]

Other threads on Captain Yee:

Silence of Guilt-The group that vetted accused spy James "Yousef" Yee won't talk to reporters

Arrest for suspicion of espionage a shock to those who knew chaplain at Fort Lewis [Yee]

U.S. Army (Islamic Chaplain) Capt. Yee and the charges he may face

Ex-Fort Lewis chaplain detained (Muslim Yee)

[sarasota]

We are being naive if we don't pay more attention to racial profiling.

[txzman]

This isn't naivite - it is the DIRECT cause of two generations of politically correct BS in our society. You reap what you sow.

[300winmag]

Weirder still was the fact that U.S. Army intelligence would let Yee back into the service after he spent so much time there.

And weirdest yet, how could he "quit" his requirement for Army service after graduating from West Point on the taxpayers' nickel? All of this is a product of the klinton years.

[tioga]

-true, if Yee isn't the poster boy for the PC "Muslim is a religion of peace", then there is no bias in the media...

-I am more concerned with our young men in uniform, then any Muslim's feelings at this point. I'm more and more convinced that the missing U.S. Gitmo service man, presumed dead, is linked to this. One is way too many.

[Bud Bundy]

He calls it naive, but it's not really, it's political correctness. I don't think too many people look at this guy who went to Syria and say "not a patriotic American? Oh gee, how surprising." No, it's government idiocy, courtesy of the left wing multiculturalists. They can't get it through their heads that different cultures have different values, because that would mean that the "racists" were right all along. And they'd much rather see a few thousand more Americans die than to have their theory disproven.

[Guillermo]

Makes you wonder if the Army was onto him from the very beginning...

[Guillermo]

Americans who convert to Islam, then go to Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabi or Yemen to "study" their new "faith" should raise a red flag.

[aristeides]

For an American male ex-military type to show up and get a visa is very odd."

I imagine he got the visa through the Abu Nour Institute of the Grand Mufti of Syria, where he was going to study.

Amazing that a column as un-PC as this one should have appeared in the Star-Ledger.

[aristeides]

PC kills.

[Dialup Llama]

Its clear this guy had issues regarding his identity and is not normally a person you'd put in a sensitive job. Its just like these Saudis and Pakistanis that get US security clearances because they just happened to have been born in the US, making them native US citizens and eligible for all kinds of security related positions- no questions asked.

[Dialup Llama]

>Makes you wonder if the Army was onto him from the very beginning...

That would imply a level of strategizing, flexibility, intelligence and planning that I rarely have found in the govt. Most likely he was sent in due to idiocy and PC.

[dufekin]

This isn't racial profiling. It's having the pea-brain required to recognize that persons who enjoy spending time in terror-supporting countries and in regions of terrorist activity (doing something other than plotting against and killing terrorists or changing the regimes that harbor them) AREN'T LOYAL AMERICANS. The seven terror-supporting regimes ARE OUR ENEMIES. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gave AID AND COMFORT to ENEMIES OF THE UNITED STATES by one or more OVERT ACTS, supported by MULTIPLE WITNESSES or CONFESSION IN OPEN COURT. That's treason. I don't know the facts in this case, but he's either a traitor or a hair's width shy of that low mark.

It's not racial profiling; it's TRAITOR DETECTION.

[RussianConservative]

Americans, but he considers us hopelessly naive.

No not naive, arrogant. It is American arrogance to think all think like Americans or deep down in all is little American trying to get out...it culturanya arrogance and it got England slapped down many time and now America. I laugh at these occurances, not because they occure (I expect Islamo trash to act like Islamo trash) but because Americans not learn but run head first into wall over and over and over again. Ritlen maybe?

[Chancellor Palpatine]

More likely related to that fine institutional notion of "he went to Hudson High, so he has to be a good guy".

Once they noted that aspect of his background, they stopped checking.

[steplock]

"minister to his coreligionists"

Say WUT ????

[Dark Wing]

fyi

[monday]

"And we are asking Muslims everywhere to take sides. And the deeper we get into Iraq, the more they'll take the other side."


Do Iraqis really deserve democracy? Will they be able to keep it after we leave?

They have different values than us. They will continue to have a repressive, NON-DEMOCRATIC gov't if we leave because that is the type of gov't they want. It is stupid of us to think otherwise.

We will be stuck there forever, just as we are stuck in every other country where we have ever intervened. Just another massive welfare project we are stuck with. This one has cost US taxpayers 150 billion this year alone. We can expect to pay thousands of billions more in the years to come.

Of course the Iraqis will thank us graciously for our generosity. NOT!!!!!!!!!