"U.S. Army struggles to grasp foreign cultures," from Reuters, with thanks to Sparta:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army plans to train its officers to think like their enemies and better understand foreign cultures after an Army report found that no one could have envisioned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Think like their enemies? Really? So they will be undertaking in-depth studies of jihad theology and ideology? Somehow I doubt it: if they really did this, it could lead to conclusions that will be at odds with fundamental dogmas that currently go unquestioned in the military and the government.
Small groups of officers soon will take classes in cultural anthropology and cross-cultural communication as U.S. troops continue to battle insurgents daily in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Who's teaching about Islam? John Esposito and Karen Armstrong?
Academic experts welcomed the move, but said reshaping the U.S. military would be difficult, given continuing reports of religious intolerance at military institutions and charges of detainee abuse abroad.The Army's report, released last month, concludes that even seasoned analysts failed to predict a strike of the magnitude of the 2001 attacks because they based their assessments on U.S. culture, values and reasoning....
That continues to be a fundamental problem. Witness this clueless head of Army Intelligence:
Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of Army intelligence and President Bush's nominee as director of the National Security Agency, recently highlighted efforts to improve Army intelligence through better technology and improved training.After spending time in the Middle East, Alexander told reporters he concluded that anti-U.S. sentiment in the region was complex and cumulative after years of negative perceptions, some dating back to the creation of Israel in 1948.
Alexander, if you don't know by now that they're a lot older than that and arise from causes that have nothing to do with Israel, I doubt you will ever learn.
"This is going to be a war not of technology, but of people," he said, adding, "Most of the Arabs that I talk to really want to forge a friendship."
I doubt the Lt. General is familiar with Qur'an 5:51 ("take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors") or 3:28 ("Let not the believers take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of precaution, that ye may guard yourselves from them" -- in other words, pretend to be their friends to gain an advantage over them). And that's not all he's unfamiliar with:
Even as Alexander cited the need for better cultural understanding, he called the language spoken in Iraq "Iraqi" instead of Arabic, and repeatedly called potential suspects "Abu," a honorific title meaning "father" in Arabic....Yvonne Haddad, professor of history at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, faulted U.S. officials for alienating people in Islamic countries with speeches geared to appeal to the U.S. Christian right.
"Every time President Bush speaks, he creates more enemies," she said. "People think he has declared a war on Islam."...
It is breathtaking that Bush could take such pains to emphasize that he has not declared war on Islam, and people like Yvonne Haddad and Zarqawi can brush it all aside and maintain that he has declared war on Islam. How? By pandering to shady American Muslim advocacy groups? By having CAIR give sensitivity training to FBI and DHS?
And CAIR has made it known that they are still watching:
The Council on American Islamic Relations welcomed efforts to better understand other cultures, but said it was continuing to monitor the U.S. military after reports of inappropriate proselytizing by evangelical Christians at the Air Force Academy, said spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.
"...but said it was continuing to monitor the U.S. military after reports of inappropriate proselytizing by evangelical Christians at the Air Force Academy,..."
Something tells me that CAIR wouldn't be watching the military were there to be any reports of "proselytizing by Muslims at the Air Force Academy". In fact, I will go out on a limb and guess that CAIR would not call "proselytizing" by Muslims to be "inappropriate". Just a hunch.
Someone should ask CAIR what they think about that. Ask them if they would have a problem with Muslims proselytizing in the Air Force. Let's see how they spin their way out of that question.
Ibrahim Hooper was on C-Span yesterday, with his usual spin. A few people called him on his lies, but not enough. Unfortunately, those people were countered by a number of callers who lamented the dangerous religious right in the US, making the ex-Presbyterian Mr. Hooper a very happy man. How sad and how terrifying that Lt. General Alexander has crawled into Hooper's back pocket without having a clue about where he is.
"This is going to be a war not of technology, but of people," he said, adding, "Most of the Arabs that I talk to really want to forge a friendship."
--- from a posting above
The person who said it is not some member of an Interfaith gathering, not some schoolgirl fresh from learning Arabic at Middlebury from a wonderful "Palestinian" who taught her so much "about the real Middle East" and "opened her eyes to all the lies that Americans are taught" and further showed her "that the Arabs love Americans -- it's just the foreign policy that they hate."
And now take deeply in, the following: the man who uttered that basic inanity is Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, “head of Army intelligence and President Bush's nominee as director of the National Security Agency."
You know how Lt. Gen. Alexander knows that "Arabs really want to forge a friendship" (well, in a manner of speaking, they do, entirely on their terms -- they want American aid, billions of dollars worth, just the way Egypt and the “Palestinians” and Jordan and non-Arab but Muslim Pakistan gets it; , they want green cards for their children; they want, want, want, but they are not going to change their deep hostility to Infidel America, to Infidels in America and elsewhere. They can’t, they won’t. Have nearly 30 years of huge aid to Egypt made Egyptians, quite possibly the most anti-American people in the world, our “friends”? And how do Muslims get around those passages in the Qur’an, only a very few of which Robert quoted above, or the stories in the Hadith, or the attitudes that Muhammad expressed toward non-Muslims – just how does a Believer overlook all of that? He can assure Infidels that this is all nonsense, he can smile, he can offer the coffee ceremoniously, he can look as sincere as they come, he can do all manner of things, as he assures you that it is not Americans but “only their foreign policy” that is the problem, “only that little matter of Israel.” Of course there are still people who insist on that. The writers at The Guardian. George Galloway. Ramsey Clark. And a cast of hundreds of thousands. But they are not supposed to be the people who become “head of Army Inteligence and President Bush’s nominee as director of the National Security Agency.”
One wonders what is going on. One reads Sperry’s book “Infiltration.” One notes the absurd reading list that was concoted by some apologists for Islam – Esposito? Haddad? Who? – for General Vines (google “jihadwatch” and “General Vines” and “reading list” and see what comes up).
How can, on our side, there be such naivete, such evident innocence or gullibility, and on their side, where everyone and his brother is a past master of deception, beginning with religiously-sanctioned taqiyya and kitman, and ending in the market souk, where the Infidel tourists are cajoled and inveigled and flimflammed into at last knocking the initial price down, so that it is no longer 100 times its real value, but 20 or 10 times. This is a way of life in the Muslim Middle East. This is where they excel. They win every negotiation with the Infidel state of Israel, even if Israel – so far—has managed to win its wars.
Lt. Gen. Alexander is one of the people we would naturally assume is by now thoroughly versed in the tenets of Islam, has read and re-read and what’s more, understood under the tutelage of a “defector” from Islam who is not likely to steer him wrong.
Apparently we were wrong. Those whose duty and task it is to defend us, to be wary, to be fully informed, to be extremely clever and supple of mind and full of imaginative ideas as to how to demoralize and divide the Muslims of this world – well, at least one of them, judging by his ex-ungue-leonem remark, cannot be described in that manner.
One becomes nervous. Has it really come to this? Is the naivete this deep?
Who will help out? Who will bring his cold-eyed mistrust, his complete comprehension, to the task? Perhaps there are such people, and we simply will never learn their names. Let us hope they exist, and they are there. But the history of Western Europe, and the criminal negligence with which millions of Muslims were allowed in, does not augur well.
Our leaders must grow up. This is not about Supreme Court appointments, or marginal tax rates, or fiddling with Social Security. This is civilizational, and physical, life-and-death. We can’t tolerate the hopelessly innocent, the hopelessly ill-informed. Ignorance cannot be permitted. We deserve better. And so do all those who created the United States – they deserve better.
Will Congress examine this man, to find out what he knows about Islam, which is surely a sine qua non for any such appointment nowadays. And if it must conduct its hearings behind closed doors, to ask certain questions about Islam, and even read from the relevant passages in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, then so be it. This cannot be taken lightly. This Ted Mack's Amateur Hour just can't continue. We can't take it. We don't deserve it.
Oooh. I feel safe now! Instruction for posters here at JW would better serve the military than that which they probably get from their so-called experts.
Yesterday in a National Canadian newspaper the Lawyer for CAIR-Canada expressed sadness that the bomings in London have tarnished their Peaceful protests against Canada's "Occupation"
of Afghanistan from a unjust War not recognized
by the U.N. .
So now we see the real face of CAIR,they claim to be loyal Canadians demanding equal treatment and yet support the Jihadists that want to punish Canada for being part of NATO that agreed to defend any other member that was attacked.
CAIR-Canada has already ran to the defense of 5
Muslims (Non-Citizens) being detained on suspicion
of terror links from their forged papers and
lies they told the Immigration and Custom officers,in fact CAIR had a petition on their website that demanded the release of Ernst Zundel
that was rejected for his Refugee claim and was to be deported to Germany which was his Country of Origin.
Just try to convince me the that Islam isn't the new NAZI party out to rule the World by banning all religions and enslaving people into a life of communistic slave labour and State run
laws for behaviour.
Yesterday in a National Canadian newspaper the Lawyer for CAIR-Canada expressed sadness that the bomings in London have tarnished their Peaceful protests against Canada's "Occupation"
of Afghanistan from a unjust War not recognized
by the U.N. .
So now we see the real face of CAIR,they claim to be loyal Canadians demanding equal treatment and yet support the Jihadists that want to punish Canada for being part of NATO that agreed to defend any other member that was attacked.
CAIR-Canada has already ran to the defense of 5
Muslims (Non-Citizens) being detained on suspicion
of terror links from their forged papers and
lies they told the Immigration and Custom officers,in fact CAIR had a petition on their website that demanded the release of Ernst Zundel
that was rejected for his Refugee claim and was to be deported to Germany which was his Country of Origin.
Just try to convince me the that Islam isn't the new NAZI party out to rule the World by banning all religions and enslaving people into a life of communistic slave labour and State run
laws for behaviour.
Hugh-
Unless the General is understudying for a minor role in a USO production of "Dr. Strangelove" ("You can't fight in here! This is the 'War Room'!), his words are terrifyingly naive. And incomprehensible as a sign of our 'intelligence' services.
What he should be saying (to inversely paraphrase old Gen. Curtis LeMay) is:
"We're trying to bomb them out of the Stone Age!"
That could be a real strategy.
Muslims may be trusted - as 'friends' -once they leave, or utterly reform, Islam.
Anything less is Western self-deception of a very general nature.
Four star.
Hugh-
Unless the General is understudying for a minor role in a USO production of "Dr. Strangelove" ("You can't fight in here! This is the 'War Room'!), his words are terrifyingly naive. And incomprehensible as a sign of our 'intelligence' services.
What he should be saying (to inversely paraphrase old Gen. Curtis LeMay) is:
"We're trying to bomb them out of the Stone Age!"
That could be a real strategy.
Muslims may be trusted - as 'friends' -once they leave, or utterly reform, Islam.
Anything less is Western self-deception of a very general nature.
Four star.
I hate to repeat myself, but TYPE KEY makes it a bit hard not to until the Muslim server attack is cleaned up.
OT-
The German 'youth' who spread the SASSER worm last year got a 'suspended sentence' for causing about a billion dollars in global damage.
Thanks, Germany, for encouraging hacker terrorism!
OT. An amusing LA Times story with a sting in it. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-diplomat11jul11,0,922382,print.story?coll=la-home-local
The sting is this: Ms.Arana admits that when she met her future lover, she was an illegal immigrant, studying at university and working as a waitress. Which means that an US university allowed a foreign student to matriculate without checking her identity and visa.
Suddenly I have a very good idea why American citizens complain about immigration law enforcement.
Hugh, I think that Sperry's Infiltration has it right. Remember this: that before 1944, Communist agents, sponsored by naive New Dealers who thought anyone "progressive" was a friend, had spread all over the US administration. Indeed, until FDR (himself hardly without fault) had the sense to ditch Wallace as Veep and take Truman, the infiltration led right up to the office of the Vice-President; and it brings hair-raisingly close the possibility that the ailing FDR might have died and left the country in the charge of a Stalinist stooge such as Wallace. (To show how deep the New Dealer naivety was and how long it lasted - Katharine Hepburn mentions in her autobiography that she took part in the Wallace campaign of 1948, which everyone and his chicken knew was a Soviet front; and she does so without any visible regret.) Harry Dexter White sat in Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's office and collaborated in catastrophic notions such as the Morgenthau plan - which would have destroyed Germany's capacity as an industrial power - and the insane pressure on Hugh Dalton to float Sterling in 1946, which destroyed the British currency and placed the Labour government (which happened to be strongly anti-Communist, thanks to Ernest Bevin) in a disastrous economic crisis. Alger Hiss dominated Foggy Bottom. And all the time, people who worked under them had seen them for what they were; but they could not speak without endangering their own future - as was seen when Whittaker Chambers took the plunge. In Britain, too, Communists had risen to the very top. Kim Philby oversaw an operation against Enver Hodja's Albania and sent hundreds of men to their deaths; Maclean, the son of a Liberal party leader, was bound for the top table in the Foreign office; Blunt counselled the Queen on art; and Burgess was the disreputable friend of everyone worth knowing, including the whole leadership of the BBC.
It can happen. It is probably happening right now.