Originally posted by Ryan Devereaux in New York – guardian.co.uk,Friday 11 May 2012.
A course at a military academy that taught US officers to prepare for “total war” with Islam does not represent an isolated incident, campaigners have warned.
The Pentagon moved swiftly to distance itself from revelations that officers in a defense department class were taught that “Hiroshima”-style tactics would be needed to combat the threat from Islam.
“It was totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn’t academically sound,” said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
The class in question was canceled in April and Dempsey noted the instructor responsible for the course, army lieutenant colonel Matthew A Dooley, is “no longer in a teaching status”. Dooley, however, is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
Linda Sarsour, executive director at the Arab American Association of New York, said the course is merely the latest example in a proliferation of anti-Muslim teaching materials in law-enforcement agencies. “It’s part of a much larger problem,” Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York police department.
On Thursday, Danger Room – a national security blog at Wired.com – published a series of documents revealing that a defense department class for US military officers urged soldiers to prepare for a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. In this battle for supremacy, Geneva Convention standards for armed conflict would be irrelevant and the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be applied to civilian populations “wherever necessary”.
Hundreds of pages of teaching material and reference documents obtained by Danger Room show the course – which was open to US military commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels – argued that the real threat to US national security stemmed not from radical militants, but from Islam itself.
In a July presentation, Dooley claimed: “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” He proposed a four-stage solution that included the possibility of reducing Islam to “a cult status” and threatening Saudi Arabia with starvation.
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