[Vision2020] Hunting Down Afghans for Jesus?!

[bear at moscow.com]

Nick,

I never saw or even heard anything like that, but being from USCENTCOM
headquarters, the troops tended to treat us like the Army version of the
IRS! General Order #1, which deals with the religious issues was pretty
sacrosanct  while I was there. We did have one problem when the White
House proposed using the phrase "Operation Divine Retribution".....that
was a bad idea and it got changed quickly!

I have had discussions with our chaplains, who DID NOT even proselytize
our own troops let alone the Iraqi or Afghans!  I did have some great
discussions with Afghan generals and senior officers and while religion
came up, it came up in the context of one of the Afghan generals being a
Christian and wanted a beer!




Wayne


> Hail to the Vision!
> I want to ask Wayne Price if he saw anything like this while on assignment
> over the last several years.
> In the YouTube video the soldiers involved admitted that they knew that
> this sort of activity was strictly prohibited by the orders they received
> when deploying to Afghanistan.
> See the amazing video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVGmbzDLq5c
> Nick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ryan Grim, Huff Post, May 4, 2009
> Soldiers In Afghanistan Given Bibles, Told To "Hunt People For Jesus"
> A U.S. church raised money to send Bibles, printed in the Pashtu and Dari
> languages, to American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a report on Al
> Jazeera documented Sunday night.
> It is against military rules to proselytize -- a regulation one of the
> soldiers filmed by the network readily acknowledged. "You cannot
> proselytize, but you can give gifts," says the soldier. It is a crime in
> Afghanistan to attempt to convert anyone from Islam to any other religion.
> "I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get
> Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out." The footage is
> said to be roughly a year old.
> The Al Jazeera report also shows a military preacher urging army
> parishioners to "hunt people for Jesus."
> "The Special Forces guys, they hunt men. Basically, we do the same things
> as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the
> hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the Kingdom. That's what
> we do, that's our business," he says.
> A White House spokesman referred questions to the Department of Defense,
> which did not immediately return a call. A military spokesman did tell
> Reuters, however, that none of the Bibles were, as far as she knew, ever
> actually distributed.
> "That specific case involved a soldier who brought in a donation of
> translated Bibles that were sent to his personal address by his home
> church. He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he
> cannot distribute them," said Major Jennifer Willis.
> "The translated Bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because
> the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in
> violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment."
> President Bush created an international uproar when he referred to the
> "war on terror" as a "crusade."
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