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| Fear of bias keeps U.S. Muslims out of military |
| 2007-02-07 |
| Desperately short of soldiers who speak Arabic and understand Islam, the U.S. military is quietly courting American Muslims. But they show little enthusiasm for an institution many say is prejudiced against them. Pentagon statistics show there are more Jews and Buddhists than Muslims serving in the 1.4 million strong, overwhelmingly Christian armed forces. In the Marine Corps, there are only slightly more Muslims than Wiccans, who practice witchcraft. And in the Air Force, Wiccans outnumber Muslims by more than two to one. The Pentagon lists 3,386 Muslims in active service, compared with 1.22 million Christians. While there is no specific recruitment drive aimed at Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, the Pentagon has made well publicized moves to show that the military does not equate Islam with terrorism and is making efforts to accommodate Muslim Americans who want to serve both God and their country. Last July, the Marine Corps dedicated a new Muslim prayer center at its base in Quantico, Virginia. A month later, the Air Force Academy commissioned its first Muslim chaplain. And in September, the U.S. military academy at West Point inaugurated its first Muslim prayer room. However, concerns about fifth columnists, which have grown since September 9/11, gathered momentum after an Army sergeant who converted to Islam, Hasan Akbar, rolled grenades into the tents of sleeping soldiers at a base in Kuwait and opened fire on those who ran out. Two officers died and 14 soldiers were wounded in the attack, shortly before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The military lawyers who defended Akbar argued he had snapped after fellow soldiers relentlessly ridiculed his faith. Akbar was sentenced to death and is awaiting execution. Public opinion polls show that negative views of Muslims are not restricted to a fringe minority. In a Gallup poll taken around the time the West Point prayer room opened, a third of those surveyed thought Muslims living in the United States sympathized with al Qaeda. "This is a big problem," said Hossam Ahmed, a retired Air Force Reserve colonel who leads prayer meetings for the small Muslim congregation that meets at the Pentagon prayer room every Friday afternoon. "I never had anyone question my loyalty until September 11. After that, yes, it has happened." Ahmed, who was born in the United States of Egyptian parents, said that while he had at times encountered prejudice and hostility, his faith had not been an obstacle in his career, a frequent observation by Muslims in the military. "I've run into lack of understanding and ignorance but I don't have problems practicing my faith," said Lt. Col. Tim Oldenburg, a flight test engineer attached to the Pentagon. "What I get constantly is reactions of surprise when people hear I'm a Muslim." Unlike most Muslims in the military, Oldenburg is white and grew up on an Illinois farm. Black Americans make up for the majority of Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #22 Fear of There, fixed it for ya. |
| Posted by: BA 2007-02-07 21:16 |
| #21 LOL SHIP! |
| Posted by: RD 2007-02-07 18:56 |
| #20 Fear of bias keeps U.S. Muslims out of military That's the best news I've read all day. Its too bad they don't have enough "fear of bias" to keep them out of the country as well. |
| Posted by: Crusader 2007-02-07 18:41 |
| #19 Hell, let's think out of the box. Teach the enemy to speak English. La.E.1a Words and phrases of self-preservation ncluded are: Move motherfucker Make a dustangel Put your hands up and start praying I'm in a good mood La.E.2a Phrases of friendship Examples are, but not limited to: Your sister is shit fine! Your Momma looking street right too! No goat moron La.E.3a Bringing the English to the Souk Indeed, it is not raining, lo I am pissing upon your leg. No and Fuck off Time to review and practice: Move motherfucker With my soon to be designed tiny instruction kit an Arab could learn these magic door opening phrases in 3 days. Thousand and thousands of lives will be saved with mutual understanding. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2007-02-07 17:46 |
| #18 I dont know who was used for translating Japanese language intell provided by our decode program. My mother, for one. She was part of the unit that took over a college in DC (Wellsley?), and spent her entire wartime duty (42-45) there. She was even trained there. I didn't learn about that until I had a Japanese pen-pal who wrote me a letter in Japanese, and my mother translated it for me. I was about 17 at the time... This is what the school at Monterrey, California, did for more than 50 years, before being closed down and moved around to different places. Another idiotic move of the BRAC committee. I managed to evade attending Chinese language school there only by sheer luck. We've had a half-dozen bad incidents with US muslim personnel in the military, out of perhaps several hundred people. We haven't had anywhere close to that percentage from any other religion. Is there any wonder we look at muslims with a bit more jaundice? |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-02-07 17:30 |
| #17 This article is garbage and the FBI is a prime example why that is so. The FBI to this day refuses to hire Arabic speaking Jews from the Middle East -- justifying their refusal with the old anti-Semitic canard of divided loyalties. Also, there are hundreds of thousands of Christian Arabs in this country that could be tapped for translator duties. So who carries if the Muzzies refuse to serve? We have alternate sources of translators, IF we can get past the PC roadblocks in the various agencies. |
| Posted by: Shieldwolf 2007-02-07 17:26 |
| #16 I have a one word answer to the headline: Fear of bias keeps U.S. Muslims out of military GOOD! |
| Posted by: Intrinsicpilot 2007-02-07 17:22 |
| #15 I think we can be faulted for not having more translators. In 1945 (after 4 years of war) we had 10,000 Japanese translators in Hawaii alone (not counting similar groups in Australia and India). Only a minority were Niseii Americans. If you look at our Japanese Order of Battle documents in the National Archives, they are encyclopedic. The real sin is that we have a surplus of Russian translators 16 years after the end of the cold war. Al |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2007-02-07 14:11 |
| #14 I think we can be faulted for not having more translators. In 1945 (after 4 years of war) we had 10,000 Japanese translators in Hawaii alone (not counting similar groups in Australia and India). Only a minority were Niseii Americans. If you look at our Japanese Order of Battle documents in the National Archives, they are encyclopedic. The real sin is that we have a surplus of Russian translators 16 years after the end of the cold war. Al |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2007-02-07 14:11 |
| #13 I believe for some years now we are not taking the jihad seriously, and the chronic shortage of interpreters shows this up well. Arabic & Farsi, one or the other, should be made mandatory to graduate from either high school or college, depending on the level of the country's commitment. Hell, this effort should be taking place at the first grade level, a time when most children can pick up a foreign language with almost no effort. By 10th grade (in 2017), these students would be fluent. Screw "No Child Left Behind", aka "No Child Allowed to Excel." Servicepeople who are fluent in necessary languages should be paid big bonuses. Of course there are many Arabic dialects, does this mean we don't even bother to try to train and field our own interpreters? As far as supplying personnel to train our people, there are 1000's of highly skilled Iraqis (and Iranians) who would be more than willing to move to the US "for the duration" to become the training cadre for this massive effort in language skills upgrades. There are plenty of non-Muslims in both these countries (and domestically) who would qualify as politically reliable people to do this. The effort has not been made. #3 - ditto on your opinion, this Reuters article is a disguised hit-piece on the eeevil racist American hegemonists, etc. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2007-02-07 13:57 |
| #12 I wouldn't trust a muzzie to burn the shitter. You have to trust each other, and that won't happen with muzzies involved. Muzzies in military equals mistake. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2007-02-07 12:58 |
| #11 Whatsa mater, one Sgt. Hasan Akbar is not enough? |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-02-07 12:40 |
| #10 Seems to me the two biggest drawbacks for muslims in the US military would be taking an oath to uphold the Constitution, a document that conflicts with Sharia and the likely job of fighting against your co-religionists. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2007-02-07 12:04 |
| #9 Arabic classes should be common in our US military by now. If they are not we're not taking this seriously. Arab speakers should be seperated into those we can trust (Christian Arabs) who can go into the theater and act as backup translators to confirm the local Iraqi translaters are giving our troops the right translations... and those we're not sure we can trust, which should be divided into two groups that translate Arabic stuff for us back here. The two groups should double-check each others stuff without being aware that is what is happening so we can weed out those that give us false translations. Those that do so consistantly should be put into a special group. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2007-02-07 11:39 |
| #8 on multiple dialects If we're thinking the "long war" we probably could use almost all dialects. If the focus is on Iraq, there are considerable numbers of Iraqi americans in Detroit. Of course Christian arabs could be used as well, and others can learn Arabic. One question - undoubtedly the guys whove served in Iraq have learned some street Arabic, and at least a few officers have gone beyond that, IIUC. Is that knowledge base being tracked and developed? |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2007-02-07 10:20 |
| #7 "With the same logic the US military should have recruited plenty of Fascist Italian Americans, of Nazi German Americans and of imperialist Japanese Americans." actually we had plenty of Italian Americans, german americans, and Japanese Americans in the service during WW2. Henry Kissinger got his start as an intell officer interrogating German prisoners, IIUC, but there were plenty of gentile German Americans in the army as well, dont know if how much they were used in intell. There were Jap-American units, though they were mainly used in Europe (Daniel Inouye was in one such unit, and lost the use of his arm in Italy). I dont know who was used for translating Japanese language intell provided by our decode program. |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2007-02-07 10:18 |
| #6 With the same logic the US military should have recruited plenty of Fascist Italian Americans, of Nazi German Americans and of imperialist Japanese Americans. After all they knew the language and the ideology. Of course iun addition to the occasional fragging we would just have had to deal with Germans knowing that the Allies would land in Sicily not Sardinia, that the landings in Normandy were not a side-show for the real landings at Calais or that the Americans had deciphered Japanese codes and were waiting for the Japanese carriers at Midway. For the Black Americans who happen to be Muslims we should be reminding them non-stop about Darfur and South Sudan until they understand what is their proper place in Islam. |
| Posted by: JFM 2007-02-07 10:11 |
| #5 Pay a sufficient bonus for Arabic speakers, like an extra $50,000 a year, and either Arabic-speaking Muslims will volunteer or someone else will study Arabic to get this. How long does it take to train linguists, anyway? One issue: standard Arabic is one language, but it's used only in e.g. official news articles. What gets you are the dialects - there are a lot of them and they're pretty divergent. There's no such thing as 'plain old Arabic' once you get to the street or (to some degree) the Internet. Considering that most women and some poor men only ever learn their local dialect, it can make the problem of training people hard. Needs a clear definition of what you want that person to know and be able to do ... i.e. a guy trained to speak with Iraqi officials might not be able to talk with a poor woman in a Shiite community well, or with an Egyptian intel source at all if that source comes from among the Bedouin. |
| Posted by: occasional observer 2007-02-07 09:43 |
| #4 "I never had anyone question my loyalty until September 11. After that, yes, it has happened." Ahmed, who was born in the United States of Egyptian parents, said that while he had at times encountered prejudice and hostility, his faith had not been an obstacle in his career, a frequent observation by Muslims in the military. Rubbish, whinning, blithering fool rubbish. Had the 9/11 hijackers been Fijian fire walkers, we'd be looking askance at Pacific Islanders right now, I assure you. We've had a few experiences with Muslims in the armed forces of late, and some of them have not been too pleasant. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2007-02-07 09:43 |
| #3 This is a Reuters article. It's not about the inability of the military to recruit Arab speakers; it's about the awful repression muslims of all kinds are facing in the current US environment of oppression, and how that can cause muslims to snap and be forced to murder people, and why that's all our fault. |
| Posted by: OIF 3 21B 2007-02-07 09:31 |
| #2 What is the problem? There are christians speaking Arabic--Maronites that emigrated from Lebanon, also Iraqi Assyrians. I would bet that they understand Islam pretty well, better than some muslims. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2007-02-07 02:01 |
| #1 ---- Pay a sufficient bonus for Arabic speakers, like an extra $50,000 a year, and either Arabic-speaking Muslims will volunteer or someone else will study Arabic to get this. How long does it take to train linguists, anyway? 9/11 was more than 5 years ago. It appears that the US gov't will still be short of Arabic translators for many more years. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2007-02-07 01:57 |