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Speakers at
Academy Said to Make False Claims
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/us/07muslim.html
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: February 7, 2008
The Air Force Academy was criticized by
Muslim and religious freedom
organizations for playing host on
Wednesday to three speakers who critics
say are evangelical Christians falsely
claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.
The three men were invited as part of a
weeklong conference on terrorism
organized by cadets at the academy’s
Colorado Springs campus under the
auspices of the political science
department.
The three will be paid a total of
$13,000 for their appearance, some of it
from private donors, said Maj. Brett
Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy.
The three were invited because “they
offered a unique perspective from inside
terrorism,” Major Ashworth said. The
conference is to result in a report on
methods to combat terrorism that will be
sent to the Pentagon, members of
Congress and other influential
officials, he added.
Members of the Military Religious
Freedom Foundation, a group suing the
federal government to combat what it
calls creeping evangelism in the armed
forces, said it was typical of the Air
Force Academy to invite born-again
Christians to address cadets on
terrorism rather than experts who could
teach students about the Middle East.
“This stuff going on at the academy
today is part of the endemic evangelical
infiltration that continues,” said David
Antoon, a 1970 academy graduate and a
foundation member.
The three men were invited to talk about
being recruited and trained as
terrorists, not religion, although one
of them, Zak Anani, did tell students
that converting to Christianity from
Islam saved his life, said John Van
Winkle, another spokesman for the
academy.
Muslim organizations objected to the
fact that no other perspective about
Islam was offered, saying that the three
speakers — Mr. Anani, Kamal Saleem and
Walid Shoebat — habitually paint Muslims
as inherently violent. All were born in
the Middle East but Mr. Saleem and Mr.
Shoebat are now American citizens, while
Mr. Anani has Canadian citizenship.
“Their entire world view is based on the
idea that Islam is evil,” said Ibrahim
Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on
Islamic American Relations. “We want to
provide a balancing perspective to their
hate speech.”
Academic professors and others who have
heard the three men speak in the United
States and Canada said some of their
stories border on the fantastic, like
Mr. Saleem’s account of how, as a child,
he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via
a network of tunnels underneath the
Golan Heights. No such incidents have
been reported, the academic experts
said. They also question how three
middle-aged men who claim they were
recruited as teenagers or younger could
have been steeped in the violent
religious ideology that only became
prevalent in the late 1980s.
Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the
history of the modern Middle East at
Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.,
heard Mr. Saleem speak last November at
the college and said he thought the
three were connected to several major
Christian evangelical organizations.
“It was just an old time gospel hour —
‘Jesus can change your life, he changed
mine,’ ” Mr. Howard said. “That is mixed
in with ‘Watch out America, wake up
America, the danger of Islam is here.’ ”
Mr. Howard said his doubts about their
authenticity grew after stories like the
Golan Heights saga as well as something
on Mr. Saleem’s Web site along the lines
that he was descended from the grand
wazir of Islam. “The grand wazir of
Islam is a nonsensical term,” Mr. Howard
said.
Keith Davies, the director of the Walid
Shoebat Foundation, which organizes
their appearances, said critics tried to
undermine the speakers’ reputation
because “they can’t argue with the
message.”
Arab-American civil rights organizations
question why, at a time when the United
States government has vigorously moved
to jail or at least deport anyone with a
known terrorist connection, the three
men, if they are telling the truth, are
allowed to circulate freely. A spokesman
for the F.B.I. said there were no
warrants for their arrest.
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