Last week, the prestigious United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs invited three self-described former terrorists who have boasted about murdering hundreds of civilians in the Middle East and blowing up a bank in Israel to speak to cadets about the evils of Islam and their experiences as alleged radical Islamic fundamentalists.
Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zacharia Anani claim they were once members of the Palestine Liberation Organization who "practiced hatred against Christians, Jews and Americans, have rioted, bombed and maimed" civilians. Anani maintains that he was trained to kill Jews as a teenager and claims responsibility for the deaths of 223 Arabs who he says he personally killed in "gang warfare." Shoebat and Saleem are US citizens and Anani is a Canadian citizen.
The ex-terrorists have since disavowed their alleged ties with the PLO, denounced their allegiance to Islam, converted to Christianity, and are now on the lecture circuit where their discussions often center on their faith as Christians and how it is a way to conquer Islamic extremists. They maintain a website, 3exterrorists.com, where they say Muslims by and large are determined to launch "jihad's" against the United States. Shoebat is the author of the book "Why We Want to Kill You," released in February 2007.
Shoebat, Saleem and Anani were asked by Air Force Academy officials to speak at last Wednesday's 50th Annual Academy Assembly on the topic: "Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today’s Plague of Violence” for which they were paid $13,000.
"The academy assembly has nothing to do with religion or anything with Evangelical Christianity," Warthen said in an interview. "They were invited to give a perspective from a terrorist point-of-view. But we have no control over what they say about any religion good or bad and we certainly are not going to guarantee that they won't say anything" critical about Islam or Muslims.
But moments after taking the stage to address academy cadets, Shoebat and his alleged terrorist colleagues did just that. The men railed against Islam, and praised their newfound faith as Christians.
Getting inside the mind of a terrorist would seem to be an important issue, but these alleged ex-terrorists' close ties to apocalyptic end-times preachers such as John Hagee and Tim LaHaye has caused some to question the veracity of their credentials and wonder if their true mission is to proselytize.
Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org and a 1977 graduate of the Air Force Academy, said in an interview that the ex-terrorists are disseminating propaganda and maligning Islam and all Muslims as evildoers while preaching the virtues of fundamental Christianity in hopes of converting the "unchurched"--which ultimately is the goal of behind their lectures. Weinstein criticized the Air Force Academy's decision to invite Shoebat, Saleem, and Anani to speak to cadets saying that it's just another example of the Air Force Academy's long documented history of using unconstitutional, propaganda, fear, and military command influence to promote fundamentalist Christianity to its cadets and staff.
In 2005, Brig. Gen. Cecil R. Richardson, the deputy Air Force Chief of Chaplains, was quoted in a front-page, July 12, 2005, New York Times story saying the Air Force reserves the right "to evangelize the unchurched."
The distinction, Richardson said at the time, "is that proselytizing is trying to convert someone in an aggressive way, while evangelizing is more gently sharing the gospel."
Weinstein filed a federal lawsuit against the Air Force in October 2005 after Richardson's comments were published alleging "severe, systemic and pervasive" religious discrimination within the Air Force. The federal lawsuit was dismissed, but the Air Force agreed to withdraw a document that authorized chaplains to evangelize members of the military.
Weinstein says the inclusion of the ex-terrorists as guest speakers is the US Air Force Academy’s way of continuing to proselytize.
"In the four years that our Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been fighting this invasion of fundamentalist Christianity in the US military absolutely nothing has been as surreal as this event," Weinstein said. "The US Air Force Academy has either invited Osama Bin Laden and his buddies or Las Vegas Elvis impersonators to come to speak. No matter which category this falls into to this represents a scandalous outrage that is off the scale of repugnancy and duplicity. These three jokers are as much former Islamic terrorists as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk was a real Starship Captain. Our foundation will immediately include this entire sordid matter as part of our federal lawsuit against the Pentagon currently being litigated in Kansas City."
In September, MRFF filed a lawsuit in federal court against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and US Army Maj. Freddy Welborn, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The complaint filed in US District Court in Kansas City alleges that Jeremy Hall's an Army specialist currently on active duty in Combat Operations Base Speicher, Iraq, First Amendment rights were violated when Welborn threatened to retaliate against Hall and block his reenlistment in the Army because of Hall's atheist beliefs.
Prior to the ex-terrorists appearance at the US Air Force Academy last week, the Washington, DC-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamic civil rights organization, said last week that it asked academy officials to invite members of Colorado’s Muslim community to “offer balancing perspective to what the "hate-filled rhetoric" of the invited speakers.”
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