US Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism

Mark Steyn: This is one for the “too stupid to survive” files:

When I first saw the headline, I assumed it must all be a little less obviously bone-crushingly stupid or at any rate more nuanced once you got into the story. But I invite you to look at the accompanying poster for the Equal Opportunity training brief issued by the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania. It lists “extremist” groups, starting with “Evangelical Christianity” at Number One, “Al Quaeda” (misspelled under any Roman rendering of Arabic) at Number Five, “Hamas” at Six, and “Catholicism” rounding out the Top Ten.

Think of the number of people involved in the creation, printing and distribution of this graphic – and along the way not one of them stopped to say, “Hey, this is totally dumb.”

At the beginning of America Alone, I quote Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” The urge to suicide is always there; the trick is keeping it confined to the outer edges: In the Cold War this kind of moronic false equivalence was the province of leftie professors and fringe playwrights, who spent three decades failing to notice nobody from West Germany was climbing over the Berlin Wall to get into the East. Now this false equivalence is peddled by the politically correct eunuch bureaucracy of the US military.

When Major Hasan got a case of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and opened fire at Fort Hood standing on a table yelling “Allahu Akbar!”, it was just the luck of the draw: He could have been shouting the Angelus. Best to prepare for all eventualities.

As Robert Spencer says, this is not going to end well.

He adds this: Too Stupid to Survive (cont.):

I see that Fleet Street is doing the job American journalists won’t do and reporting further fascinating details of this story. From the slide presentation. we learn that, having been told Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism are “extremist”,

America’s fighting men are then warned:

Soldiers are prohibited from the following actions in support of Extremist Organizations…

*Creating, Organizing, or Taking a Visible Leadership Role in such an Organization.

A Russian officer famously described British troops in the Crimea as lions led by asses. That barely begins to cover the descent of America’s military bureaucracy into the armored wing of the Berkeley faculty lounge.

More here from Ed Driscoll.