truthout: Kansas Military Chaplains Accused of Teaching from Anti-Semitic Tracts Available Online from the Federal Government

Kobutsu Malone recently forwarded me a story from truthout by Jason Leopold. The article reveals that military chaplains at Kansas’s Fort Leavenworth army base have been using apparently anti-Semitic study guides in Bible classes for soldiers. On top of that, the study guides were available online at a webpage maintained by the federal government. The report contiues:

    The Fort Leavenworth chaplains have posted these lesson plans on the Internet under a web address that is maintained by the federal government, giving off the appearance that the religious materials in question are endorsed by the Pentagon. Moreover, disseminating the ideology via a government funded web site may violate the law mandating the separation between church and state.

    The nonprofit watchdog group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization that seeks to enforce the law mandating the separation between church and state in the US military, discovered the documents late last week. The anti-Semitic materials are posted as PDF files at the web site, Command Chaplain Bible Studies, which is maintained by the US Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth.

The hyperlinks in the article, which presumably worked when it was written, now lead to 404 error pages on the U.S. Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth’s official website. Leopold and his interview subjects well describe the content of study guides in the article, though.

    In one of the study guides, Galatians, posted on the Fort Leavenworth chaplain web site, the materials refer to Jews as “Judaizers” – persons who without being Jews follow in whole or in part the Jewish religion or claim to be Jews – and claim that “the Judaizers were zealous people much like the zealous Moslems have become today.”

    The 34-page Galatians study guide deals primarily with “Paul,” who the Jews “persecuted,” according to the study guide.

    “Why did the Jews persecute Paul? Because of his teachings,” the study guide says. “The cross was an offense to the Jews. Jesus had victory over the cross (death).”

    The study guide then says that anyone who turns from Christianity to Judaism “should be condemned to spiritual death and hell.”

    “The Judaizers attempted to destroy the two foundations of the Christian religion: a. The Grace of God, and b. The Death of Christ,” the Galtatian study guide says, adding that Judaism is a religion of “bondage” and Christianity a religion of “freedom.”

    In discussing modern day Jerusalem, chaplains ask soldiers to provide an answer to the following question: “How does the present Jerusalem represent slavery?”

    [...]

    [Chris Rodda, a senior researcher at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation] said, “The study guides also encourage soldiers to engage in an unconstitutional level of proselytizing to fellow military personnel in the Fort Leavenworth Community.”

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has said that he intends to file suit against the U.S. Army for violating the Constitutional rights of soldiers at Fort Leavenworth. [Regular readers may remember mention of Weinstein and his organization in this post and this post.]

I will follow this story as it develops, so stay tuned. Thanks once again to Kobutsu for bringing this story to our attention.