ONWARD CHRISTIAN JIHADIS!

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins."
~ George W. Bush.

Does anyone remember, back in the day, when this whole bullshit Global War on Terror, Inc., started up, Bush mentioned "crusade" in one of his early speeches and then everyone had to go around controlling the spin on that one? Well, that whole crusade-religious war thing wasn't too far off the mark, as it is now revealed:

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

[ . . . ]

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

There's a little discussion on that at Antiwar Radio, run time almost 23 minutes.

But it gets worse, as reported in Harper's:

Humphrey had been in Samarra for a month, and until that day his stay had been a quiet respite in one of the world’s oldest cities. Not long before, though, there had been a hint of trouble: a briefing in which his squad was warned that any soldier caught desecrating Islamic sites—Samarra is considered a holy city—would fall under “extreme penalty,” a category that can include a general court-martial and prison time. “I heard some guys were vandalizing mosques,” Humphrey says. “Spray-painting ’em with crosses.”

The rest of that Easter was spent under siege. Insurgents held off Bravo Company, which was called in to rescue the men in the compound. Ammunition ran low. A helicopter tried to drop more but missed. As dusk fell, the men prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a “run and gun” to draw fire away from the compound. Humphrey headed down from the roof to get a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley’s armor, in giant red Arabic script.

“What’s it mean?” asked Humphrey.

“Jesus killed Mohammed,” one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night.

It would be interesting to know exactly who that Iraqi from Texas is. If they're all engaging in this kind of behavior, it's no wonder everyone wants to kill the interpreters and their families.

Again, there's an interview with Jeff Sharlet, the author of the Harper's piece at Antiwar Radio, run time almost 26 minutes. I happen to think Sharlet is a little too apologetic, a little too willing to engage in excuses or cutting slack for the American Taliban, but give it a listen and see what you think.

The Harper's article is longish but it will definitely reward the persevering with a good read. According to the piece, the source of Christian jihadism in the US military is within the officer corps. Still, given Bush's words to Chirac it's clear that this jihadi problem went to the very top of the administration, as a recent article in GQ with slideshow:

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

More from Britain's The Guardian.

There you have it again: The Crusades. What is it that these good Christian jihadis are up to in the territories they occupy? Britain's Telegraph spills the beans on that:

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

General Taguba's report can be found here.

What the rest of us would call rape or sodomy is referred to by Americans as "enhanced interrogation techniques". Onward Christian jihadis! But what do you expect from people who treat their own in the very same way?

Naturally, the Pentagon denies the Telegraph story. But the Pentagon denied that Christian jihadis were trying to distribute bibles (in Pashto and Dari) in Afghanistan, too. That is, until the Pentagon issued a statement saying the bibles in question had been confiscated. And there's more on that, with video.

Now, what I would like is for someone to explain to me just how the US military, and it's political leadership, differs from Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or Ahmadinejad? These groups also use violence to force their ideology onto those who don't want it and, in Ahmadinejad's case, he's supposedly concerned about bringing about the coming of the Mahdi.

How does this:

World leaders had expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran had restarted another part of its nuclear programme in August.

Instead, they heard the president [Ahmadinejad] speak in apocalyptic terms of Iran struggling against an evil West that sought to promote "state terrorism", impose "the logic of the dark ages" and divide the world into "light and dark countries".

The speech ended with the messianic appeal to God to "hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace".

Differ from this?

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

It doesn't differ. Both are the very same thing and both are religious sociopaths that threaten the rest of the world at the point of a gun with their batshit insanity. It's disgusting and it's yet another reason to despise religion.