08/15/07 – Mikey Weinstein – The Scott Horton Show

What's going to happen to the non-believers?
Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and the next guest is Mikey Weinstein.
He's the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Association, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, and a lawyer in the Reagan administration.
Welcome to the show, sir.
I'm happy to be here.
And so the big news is that there's a new report by the Inspector General of the Pentagon, is that right?
Yes, that came out just a few days ago, finding seven senior officers in the Pentagon in violation of the uniform-wearing regulations and exonerating several political appointees.
We consider that the report is very weak and very anemic.
The report itself, by its own definition, exempted itself from DoD Directive 1300.17, which is an internal Pentagon regulation entitled accommodating the religious practices, accommodation of religious practices within the military services, by exempting the investigation from that, from the proselytizing, which the Pentagon said nobody in this video.
Which, by the way, if your listeners want to see it, it's the Christian Embassy video.
It's on our website.
We're a non-profit charity, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
You guys go see for yourself at www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org.
The report said that this was simply an issue about improperly wearing a uniform, which is as much a lie as trying to state that Jessica Lynch was a female Rambo and that Pat Tillman was killed and mowed down in a weathering field of Al-Qaeda fire.
So what was it that had actually happened?
What happened was that, again, if you go look at the video, you have senior members of the Pentagon, generals, colonels, and political appointees that are supporting an organization that was referred to as the Dominionist fundamentalist Christian far-right wing sect called the Christian Embassy, a little-known entity that has a ministry.
It's been around for about 25, 30 years.
It's an outgrowth from Dr. Bill Bright's Campus Crusade for Christ, and they minister to the glitterati incogniscenti in Washington, D.C., only on Capitol Hill, the State Department, and the Pentagon.
The video opens up, and again, everybody is listening.
Just go to www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org and look at the video yourself.
It's about 11 minutes long.
It states that the Christian Embassy, through the use of Bible studies, daily prayer breakfasts, and outreach events, is they use the word mustering, meaning lining up all troops as per battle.
All 25,000 men and women who work in the corridors and rings of the Pentagon into, quote, an intentional relationship with Jesus Christ.
You have generals claiming that they are the aroma of Jesus Christ, the Pentagon, in uniform, violating so many regulations and internal laws that, you know, it's unbelievable, but most importantly, massively violating the Constitution of the United States and their oaths that they took to preserve, support, and defend the Constitution.
Haven't the courts already found that you can't do this kind of thing?
Yes, it says that we have literally scores of years of wonderful U.S. Supreme Court case law saying that, you know, you can believe whatever you want, and you can proselytize it.
And of course, any religious faith, you cannot engage the machinery of the state to do this.
What you're seeing are seven senior officers and major political appointees, some of whom were exonerated, that are making their own biblical worldview, which is this fundamentalist, dominionist, weaponized gospel of Jesus Christ, de facto American foreign policy and domestic policy.
In fact, the report itself is interesting because it states that one of the generals that was slightly admonished, again, I think they're going to make all seven military members probably eat some strawberry and chocolate cupcakes after they're too filled from dinner or lunch as a penalty, but one of the major generals, his job was to be our liaison in Turkey to our closest Islamic allies, the country of Turkey, and the Turkish general staff, to be our best American military and political liaison.
Well, the Turkish leading newspaper, Sabah, S-A-B-A-H, picked this story up after we broke it last December, our Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and they identified this major general with a picture of the paper and a story that he was a member of a fundamentalist extremist religious sect, and the Turkish general staff called him in on the carpet because they are assiduously secular in Turkey.
There's a huge separation between mosque and state there, and that's how embarrassing it's gotten when Turkish senior generals have to call an American general to remind the American general of the importance of the oath they took to support the American Constitution.
If this is how our Islamic allies are reacting, embarrassment in theory, can you imagine the propaganda value of that Christian embassy video in the hands of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Dawari, Abu Musab al-Zakari, he's dead, but his followers, the jihadists, the insurrectionists, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah, Hamas, the Aqsa martyr's brigade, the Islamic Jihad, that's why these officers should have been court-martialed, Pete Garin, the current secretary of the army, should be fired and tried, and that this Christian embassy video, again, at military-religious-freedom.org, which you can see for yourself, is the best propaganda film that you could possibly have for our enemies, emboldening and making it easy for already angry Islamic men and young women, young men and women in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, who want to come and join the cause against us.
It's atrocious, and the report by the Pentagon's inspector general is equally as weak.
And now, what about the propagandizing of American soldiers?
I talked to a friend of mine who said that he heard from a friend of his who, I don't know if he was in Iraq or just got back from Iraq, who said, well, I know that this whole bringing the Iraqis' freedom is actually a lie, but the real thing is, we're there waiting for the next war, which is going to be against Russia and Iran.
And, you know, that's straight out of the mouth of John Hagee and the dominionists.
Look, the problem with the dominionist Christians, the fundamentalist dominionist Christians, and they can say they're a minority, they're a fringe element even of Christendom here in America, but they represent 12.6% of the American public, which is still 38 million people.
Everything, they have a playbook for every second of every day.
You know, today is Wednesday at 4.02 p.m.
Central Time, they'll know exactly that you're probably supposed to go floss your teeth.
Their playbook is this concept of eschatology, the end times, the book of Revelation, and they are completely infusing their own biblical worldviews, which are very, you know, very digital, ones or zeros.
Either you're with us or you're against us.
They'll quote Matthew, book chapter 12, verse 30, where in their interpretation, Jesus says, those who are not with me are against me.
And they're all about wanting to start the big bar fight in the sky, by going into a Western saloon with two cowboys, either end of the bar and whispering in the ear of each one, an insult that the other supposedly said to each other, you look at them both up, get that bar fight going, and that serves as an accelerant or lubricant to bring Jesus back, and want to be fun because the blood will run hip-deep.
Now, what do you make of the Israel lobbies alliance with these fundamentalist Christians?
Well, I get it from, you know, I'm Jewish, but you know, I get it from both sides.
I think that Israel needs to stop looking at its friends solely through the prism of who's giving them money, because I get it from, you know, the John Hagys, the D. James Kennedys, used to be Falwell, of course he's dead, Pat Robertson, the formerly, the currently disgraced, Pat Haggard, you know, these people are all convinced that, you know, they always say, Mikey, how come you're fighting us?
We love you Jews in Israel.
Yeah, they love it to the same extent that pilgrims love the church for the first Thanksgiving.
Yeah, I mean, and that really is what it is.
They'll tell you openly that, look, our point here is to force Jesus to come back and kill everyone, and then we'll go to heaven, and everyone else will have to go through the tribulation and then burn in hell forever.
I mean, that's all about, they do not want peace, that's why the dominions Christians were so happy last year when the Hezbollah went to war, you know, with the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, because they just want this all to start, they're tired of waiting for Jesus to come back, they want to accelerate it, so they'll do whatever they can to do it, and that's why this represents a national security threat internally to this country, just like you can see on the Christianity video at our website, militaryreligiousfreedom.org, and please consider buying my book from the largest publisher in New York, With God on Our Side, One Man's War Against the Evangelical Two in America's Military, it tells you how this all started, and, you know, they're all about this concept of wanting to bring about the big fight, and this is why this represents, again, a national security threat internally, every bit as much in magnitude, width and breadth as that which the Dao represented in challenging us externally by the resurgent Taliban, and in al-Qaeda that our most recent national intelligence estimate has determined is at least as strong as it was on 9-11.
Well, now, let me ask you, when you say national security threat, well, that's the kind of language that the right-wingers used against, you know, domestic communists in the 50s and stuff, are you saying that some extraordinary measures should be taken against them or something?
Well, look, I mean, we're going to talk about corrective measures, I mean, let's first court-martial, you know, these officers who did this for violating their oath to the Constitution.
Oh, you'll get no argument from me there.
You know, and we've got to have some heads hanging from the Pentagon, but what are they going to take, what are they going to do?
This, now, this problem has existed all throughout the Department of Defense, we have 737 U.S. military installations, but the Pentagon at least acknowledges that we have that are scattered around the globe as we garrison the planet in 132 countries, and on every one of those, now, we have multiple organizations that are just like the Christian embassy, one's called the Officer's Christian Fellowship for the officers, the other one is the Christian Military Fellowship for the enlisted, and they have a tripartite or three-level goal that they're unabashed about, it's right on their website.
These are goals that they view as least, as much more important than the oath that they've all taken to, you know, thwart an oath to protect us and defend the Constitution of the United States.
I can't make this stuff up, I mean, put on your seat belt, the first goal that they want to see, quote, a spiritually transformed U.S. military, goal number two, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, goal number three, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
You know, this is all, again, if I'm walking through a mall, if I'm at a state fair, if I'm in a restaurant, I am fair, even if I'm mowing my front yard, I'm fair game to be evangelized by anybody who wants to do it, because of the level playing field.
But in this country, if you're being even gently evangelized by your ship manager at Starbucks or Wendy's or Costco or KFC, that violates Title VII of the U.S. Code, and it's a killer lawsuit against any corporation, which is exactly why this behavior would last three seconds in the private sector.
But in the U.S. military, that's not just your ship manager at Starbucks as well, you know, that is your military superior.
The Pentagon itself is so concerned about this draconian sector of command influence that they actually have regulations on the book that prohibit military superior up and down the chain of command from pushing Tupperware or Mary Kay Cosmetics or Amway on their subordinate.
That's how concerned they are.
So, you know, as I said before, if you're being even gently evangelized in the U.S. military by your superiors, get out of my damned face or our man is not an option for you.
And as George Orwell stated, when you're facing universal defeat, speaking the truth itself is a revolutionary act.
And, brother, I'm going to tell you, we do not train our honorable and noble young sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen to be revolutionaries.
They're supposed to smartly salute, go do their jobs, and that's why our foundation, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit charity, is here, because we fight for them.
And that really does sound like a national security threat, like that anecdote I told you where this American foot soldier from Iraq comes back and, you know, the word through the grapevine is that we're going to have a war with Russia and China.
It sounds like this propaganda is at least somewhat successful on the average soldier on the ground over there.
Well, I was just contacted by the mother of a U.S. Marine pilot who was outraged about the fact that when her son was going through pilot training, an instructor on behalf of the Marine Corps and Navy from Lockheed Martin was explained to them in a class that was supposed to be about aircraft safety, about how important it was to hate all of the sons and daughters of Hagar, all Arabs, and to kill all Arabs and to kill all of their families.
I get this around the clock.
That's why this, you know, you're entitled to any view that you want.
You're not entitled to use your position of employment.
And it's like a zillion times worse than the military when you're using your, again, the draconian specter of command influence on a lower ranking person to push this particular weaponized gospel of Jesus Christ.
We've had over 5,000 members of the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, Army, and Air Force, and veterans come to our foundation, brother, as tormentees.
Over 5,000?
And 96% of those coming in are Christians themselves.
Three-fourths are traditional Protestants.
You know, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, we even get Assemblies of God, Church of Christ, and Baptists.
One-fourth are Roman Catholics.
About four, four and a half percent are going to be Jewish, Islamic, you know, the usual minority faith, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, atheist, or agnostic.
This is basically a fundamentalist, dominionist Christian situation where they are preying P-R-A-Y and P-R-E-Y on fellow Christians, telling them, you know what, you're a Christian, but you're not Christian enough for us, and as a result, you'll burn eternally in hell along with the Jews.
Yeah, and one of the most important points out of so many here is one that you brought up before, and I guess the one we'll have to end with, is I want to reiterate, when you talk about that Marine pilot being instructed that, you know, all Muslims are the sons of Hagar and he's supposed to hate them, et cetera, that plays perfectly into the propaganda of Osama bin Laden, who is trying to convince the people of the Islamic world that no matter what the American politicians say on TV, their real motivation is they are at war against Islam, and that's why you ought to be willing to kill yourself to defend it.
You're absolutely correct, and that's why this is causing the deaths of American men and women in uniform because it's emboldening the enemy, and I mean, look, I had an email last night that referred to my name not as Mikey, but as Kikey, and when I confronted the person via the email after I made a national appearance on Fox News on a special phone with Brit Hume, the guy actually called back on the phone and he found my phone number today on the website.
We have an 800 toll free number saying that he, you know, that usual word kike wasn't really anti-Semitic, and I went, okay, brother, you know what, we'll talk another time.
I've got some other shows I'd rather do.
I love doing your show, and I would once again exhort everybody to please go to www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org Buy my book, but go take a look at that Christian Embassy video.
You can see the DODIQ report that we're talking about on this great show today, and consider making a tax-free deduction, a totally tax-ductible donation to our foundation to help us fight this massive, wretched, heinous, unconstitutional heart of darkness that comes from diminutive Christians that, when they try to engage the machinery of the state, are showing the most wretched combination you could have of two human traits, heartlessness and zealousness, and I might throw unconstitutionality in there also.
Alright, great interview.
Thank you very much.
Mikey Weinstein, everybody, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, author of God with God on our side.
Thanks again.
Thank you.