Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Probe of U.S. General's Anti-Islam Remarks Drags On

Arab- and Muslim-Americans are increasingly frustrated by the Pentagon's failure to discipline a top U.S. general who said Muslims do not worship "a real God," and say it raises questions about whether the so-called war on terrorism is not a war on Islam....

In one speech, Boykin, an evangelical Christian, belittled a Muslim fighter who said Allah had protected him from U.S. forces. "I knew ... that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol," said Boykin, a much-decorated veteran of covert military operations.

Since then, an internal investigation into the affair has worked its way slowly through the Pentagon bureaucracy. A spokeswoman said there was no deadline for its completion....

Sources familiar with the investigation said Boykin would probably not face disciplinary action, noting that officials had signaled that Boykin's remarks fell into a "gray area" in rules governing the public speeches of military personnel....


--Reuters

Let's not forget the real problem here. It's not just that Boykin hasn't been disciplined or reprimanded. It's that he still has his job, a job in which his views and the boorish way he expresses them are a liability. He is still, as NBC News put it last fall,

one of the leaders of a secretive new Pentagon unit formed to coordinate intelligence on terrorists and help hunt down Osama bin Laden ... and other high-profile targets ... deputy undersecretary of defense, with a new mission for which many say he is uniquely qualified: to aggressively combine intelligence with special operations and hunt down so-called high-value terrorist targets including bin Laden....

He's a one-man clash of civilizations. And his bosses clearly don't care.

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