Tag Archives: Domestic Terrorism

U.S. Army tells troops that Christian pro-family group is a hate group

Letitia the Damsel notified me about this story from Todd Starnes of Fox News.

Excerpt:

Several dozen U.S. Army active duty and reserve troops were told last week that the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because the group advocates for traditional family values.

The briefing was held at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and listed the AFA alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.

[…]“The instructor said AFA could be considered a hate group because they don’t like gays,” the soldier told me. “The slide was talking about how AFA refers to gays as sinners and heathens and derogatory terms.”

[…]Later in the briefing, the soldiers were reportedly told that they could face punishment for participating in organizations that are considered hate groups.

[…]Earlier this year, I exposed Army briefings that classified evangelical Christians and Catholics as examples of religious extremism.

Another briefing told officers to pay close attention to troops who supported groups like AFA and the Family Research Council.

One officer said the two Christian ministries did not “share our Army Values.”

“When we see behaviors that are inconsistent with Army Values – don’t just walk by – do the right thing and address the concern before it becomes a problem,” the officer wrote in an email to his subordinates.

[…]“The American Family Association has received numerous accounts of military installations as well as law enforcement agencies using a list compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which wrongfully identifies and defames AFA,” reads a statement they sent me.

Letitia the Damsel commented on her blog about this story and the SPLC:

This is a “Strike two!” occasion because, as Todd Starnes pointed out, this briefing by the Army is itself a dangerous hate move not unlike how the Family Research Council was also labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a potential target for a truly hateful fascist to attack, which then happened. In fact, Army officers have come to see themselves as idealogues and the mechanism of the Army as a force for activism.

She quote from the Fox News article:

One officer said the two Christian ministries did not “share our Army Values.”

“When we see behaviors that are inconsistent with Army Values – don’t just walk by – do the right thing and address the concern before it becomes a problem,” the officer wrote in an email to his subordinates.

And comments:

The US Army has values? And it is incumbent upon the American public to conform to those “Army Values?” Call me hog-tied to the text (or paranoid!), but I’m certain that whatever Army Values exist are supposed to be reflective of the US Constitution which in no way acknowledges that one must campaign to “address concerns” of average American citizens that are “inconsistent with (so-called) Army Values.”

So if the Army is going to fling open that door, then I’m not paranoid, and it’s safe again to trod out Hitler references to things I find smack of fascism. I ask that our government root out the Nazi dictator who compiled this briefing and jack him/her up for conspiracy to deprive the people of the AFA of their First Amendment rights and for putting them in potential physical harm.

Previously, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeled the Family Research Council a “hate group” because they are also pro-family and pro-marriage. A gay activist found the FRC listed as a hate group on the SPLC web site, and charged into the FRC building armed with guns. His intent was mass murder. Is that what the U.S. Army was trying to achieve by telling soldiers that the AFA is a hate group? It seems we should avoid using words to encourage people to commit acts of domestic terrorism, like the attack by the anti-FRC gay activist. I certainly never expected the U.S. Army to imitate the SPLC in demonizing pro-family groups – and at taxpayer expense. If this anti-Christian hate speech by the U.S. Army results in actual violence, can the victims then sue the U.S. Army? That seems fair to me.

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Department of Defense training manual labels Founding Fathers as “extremists”

The Daily Caller reports. (H/T Dad)

Excerpt:

A Department of Defense teaching guide meant to fight extremism advises students that rather than “dressing in sheets” modern-day radicals “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place,” and describes 18th-century American patriots seeking freedom from the British as belonging to “extremist ideologies.”

The guide comes from documents obtained by Judicial Watch and is authored by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, a DoD-funded diversity training center.

Under a section titled “extremist ideologies,” the document states, “In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

Besides a brief reference to 9/11 and another to the Sudanese civil war, the guide makes no mention of Islamic extremism.

The guide also repeatedly tells readers to use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource in identifying hate groups. The SPLC has previously come under fire for its leftist bias and tendency to identify conservative organizations such as the American Family Association as hate groups.

In August 2012, an attempted terrorist attack occurred at the Family Research Council, another conservative organization the SPLC has branded a hate group. FRC president Tony Perkins said the SPLC’s designation prompted the attack, stating the gunman “was given a license to shoot … by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

In a statement, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton slammed the Department of Defense documents for what he described as their bias against conservatives.

“The Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism. And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military,” said Fitton. ”And it is striking that some the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and Tea Party investigations. After reviewing this document, one can’t help but worry for the future and morale of our nation’s armed forces.”

The Elusive Wapiti lists some of the factors in the document which are linked to extremists like the Founding Fathers, and then comments:

I suppose it’s a marker of my supposed extremism that the Left exhibits most or all of these so-called “extremist traits”. For isn’t it the very operative definition of a Liberalist as one who engages in Alinskyite fix-it-freeze-it-polarize-it ad hominem attacks against his/her opponents, who makes sweeping generalizations of their ideological adversaries, who makes repeated assertions unsupported by facts, sometimes long after their assertions have been debunked, who view their adversaries as evil rather than merely misinformed, who’d readily resort to intimidation and sloganeering rather than rational discourse, who assume they’re morally superior to all those unevolved knuckle-draggers in flyover territory, and who themselves are in thrall to Malthusian apocalyptic dogma (overpopulation, environmentalism, anthropogenic global warming)?

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this training manual joins other documents shown to DoD personnel, characteristic of a consistent, maybe even extremist, anti-Right worldview, as little more than a cynical attempt at projection…to deflect criticism away from one’s behaviors by accusing your opponents of doing exactly what you yourself do.

Todd Starnes, who follows the persecution of Christians in the military, commented on this story over at Fox News.

Excerpt:

It’s not the first time the military has been caught using training materials that depict conservatives and Christians as extremists.

In April Fox News obtained an email sent by a lieutenant colonel at Fort Campbell to three dozen subordinates warning them to be on the lookout for any soldiers who might be members of “domestic hate groups” like the FRC and the American Family Association.

“When we see behaviors that are inconsistent with Army Values – don’t just walk by – do the right thing and address the concern before it becomes a problem,” the email advised.

At the time the Army denied there was any attack on Christians or those who hold religious beliefs.

“The notion that the Army is taking an anti-religion or anti-Christian stance is contrary to any of our policies, doctrines and regulations,” an Army spokesman told Fox News at the time.

However, in a separate incident, an Army training instructor listed Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as examples of religious extremism – along with Al Qaeda and Hamas.

The same Army spokesman said the training session was an “isolated incident not condoned by the Department of the Army.”

Fitton told Fox News the military seems to be having a lot of isolated incidents and it appears the Pentagon is sending a message to Christians.

“They are putting out the not-welcome sign to conservative Christians,” Fitton said. “They are trying to make the military an unwelcome place for conservative Christians.”

So the person who wrote this is citing the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was a source of information for the homosexual activist Floyd Lee Corkins II who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council think tank. Isn’t it ironic that the author of an anti-conservative document is citing the same source that supplied the information used by a convicted domestic terrorist who attacked a conservative organization with guns? I find that ironic. I also find it ironic that the military is so politically correct that it is trying to label what a real domestic terrorist like Nidal Hasan did as “workplace violence”. I find that ironic. Ironic and perplexing. So, Congressman Paul Ryan advocates for small government, and he’s an extremist domestic terrorist, but Floyd Corkins and Nidal Hasan don’t even get a mention in a DOD training manual.

Do you think this person has ever read a book by someone like Thomas Sowell or a Robert George or a Mark Levin? I think that they probably went through their entire education without ever reading a single thing written by an intelligent conservative. They probably can’t even name an intelligent conservative. But they still got a job in the government, working at taxpayers’ expense. I think that we should really reform the government-run public school system that produces people like this DOD writer, so that we can get students graduating with a higher degree of open-mindedness, tolerance and critical thinking. It probably wouldn’t hurt if we steered more students toward math and science instead of the liberal arts areas, which are more vulnerable to this sort of fact-free demonization of conservatives.

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IRS official who targeted Tea Party groups now a director in Obamacare administration

ABC News reports.

Excerpt:

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.

Grant announced today that he would retire June 3, despite being appointed as commissioner of the tax-exempt office May 8, a week ago.

As the House voted to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act Thursday evening, House Speaker John Boehner expressed “serious concerns” that the IRS is empowered as the law’s chief enforcer.

“Fully repealing ObamaCare will help us build a stronger, healthier economy, and will clear the way for patient-centered reforms that lower health care costs and protect jobs,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

“Obamacare empowers the agency that just violated the public’s trust by secretly targeting conservative groups,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “Even by Washington’s standards, that’s unacceptable.”

Sen. John Cornyn even introduced a bill, the “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act of 2013,” which would prohibit the Secretary of the Treasury, or any delegate, including the IRS, from enforcing the Affordable Care Act.

“Now more than ever, we need to prevent the IRS from having any role in Americans’ health care,” Cornyn, R-Texas, stated. “I do not support Obamacare, and after the events of last week, I cannot support giving the IRS any more responsibility or taxpayer dollars to implement a broken law.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also reacted to the revelation late Thursday, stating the news was “stunning, just stunning.”

More here from Guy Benson, who linked to this story. He reports that Sarah Hall Ingram received more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded bonuses while working at the IRS.