Thread: Army to allow hijabs, turbans in Junior ROTC

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Army to allow hijabs, turbans in Junior ROTC
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The Daily Caller
By Carolina May
3:43 PM 12/22/2011


The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that the Department of Defense will now allow Muslim and Sikh students participating in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear headscarves and turbans while in uniform.

The decision, announced Thursday, followed an October incident in which Muslim teen Demin Zawity quit JROTC when her commanding officer at a Brentwood, Tenn. high school would not allow her to wear her hijab in the homecoming parade.

CAIR later wrote to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta requesting “constitutionally-protected religious accommodations for the girl and for future Muslim JROTC participants.”

In a letter to the Muslim organization sent on Panetta’s behalf, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Larry Stubblefield explained that based on the incident that led Zawity to quit JROTC, the Army will now be making more accommodations for religious headwear in the training program.

“Based on your concerns, the Army has reviewed its JROTC uniform policy and will develop appropriate procedures to provide Cadets the opportunity to request the wear of religious head dress, such as the turban and hijab,” Stubblefield wrote in the letter, made public by CAIR. “This change will allow Miss Zawity and other students the chance to fully participate in the JROTC program.”

Army spokesman George Wright confirmed Stubblefield’s letter to CAIR and explained to The Daily Caller that while JROTC is affiliated with the Army, it is not actually a part of the Army. The new procedures will provide JROTC with a exemption method more similar to current Army procedure mandated through the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

That law allows soldiers on active duty to apply for religious accommodation if they want to alter their uniforms in accordance with their religious beliefs. The exemptions are applied on a case-by-case basis. Soldiers who are transferred must reapply.

“Requests for ETP [exemptions to policy] to uniform and grooming standards (AR 670-1) based on religion, are considered on a case by case basis and balanced against military necessity ETPs are temporary, cannot be guaranteed at all times, not liberally granted, and may be revoked due to changed conditions,” Army regulations state.

According to Wright, currently there are three Sikhs and one Orthodox Jewish rabbi who have been approved to wear religious garb outside of their standard regulation uniform on active duty. One female Army captain has applied to wear the hijab for religious observance. Her case is pending.

Still, political commentator Jed Babbin, a former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, noted that the point of a uniform is uniformity.

“Look at the word: ‘uni’-’form’ — everybody wears the same thing,” Babbin told TheDC. “The military is by its own nature diverse and creates a culture in which everyone, regardless of their race or creed, is blended into one force for a common purpose. This [uniform exemption] divides it, balkanizes it on religious grounds… the point of JROTC is to get you ready for ROTC in college which is preparing you to go on active duty. So if you are going to allow it for ROTC? Why don’t you allow it on active duty?”

CAIR, though, cheered that now Muslims and Sikhs will be able to fully participate in JROTC while wearing their religious attire.

“We welcome the fact that Muslim and Sikh students nationwide will now be able to participate fully in JROTC leadership activities while maintaining their religious beliefs and practices,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad in a statement.


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This is an email I got from someone and this is the group that it came from in case any of you are interested. I had not heard of this group so thought I would pass it on...

ACT for America is an issues advocacy organization dedicated to effectively organizing and mobilizing the most powerful grassroots citizen action network in America, a grassroots network committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam. We are only as strong as our supporters, and your volunteer and financial support is essential to our success. Thank you for helping us make America safer and more secure.

Hillary Clinton suggests Islamic governments fear religious debate
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By Neil Munro - The Daily Caller 11:35 AM 12/15/2011

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used an international conference on religious freedom Wednesday as a platform to suggest that Islamic governments which suppress Christianity are secretly afraid Islam will lose out in a public debate.

“Every one of us who is a religious person knows there are some who may not support or approve of our religion, but is our religion so weak that statements of disapproval cause us to lose our faith?” she asked the attendees, who included national representatives from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

“Especially when one person’s speech seems to challenge another person’s religion’s belief, or maybe even offends that person’s religious beliefs … we defend our beliefs best by defending free speech for everyone,” she said, while citing her own experience as a Methodist — a Christian movement made up of many Protestant denominations, and where debate is common.

Clinton’s senior aide, the Saudi-born Huma Abedin, said the speech was largely unscripted. “Mostly, it was off-the-cuff,” Abedin told The Daily Caller.

Among the attendees were representatives of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Clinton did not mention any country by name, nor did she specifically mention Islam.

But her diplomatic rebuke of Islamic governments was daring and novel, partly because it may prompt a violent response, or even a careful counterargument, from advocates of Islam in the Arab world.

However, Clinton’s speech did not address similar sensitivities in the United States, where cooperating progressives and Islamists frequently say Islam’s critics are mentally ill, and typically refuse to debate the context and meaning of their own religious texts.

In August, for example, the liberal Center for American Progress issued a report titled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” The report was aimed at several critics of Islam, including Robert Spencer, a best-selling author whose repeated requests for debates have been ignored by allied progressive and Islamic advocates in the United States.

Similarly, Department of Justice officials have described American critics of Islam as mentally unstable, a danger to national security, or similar to the Ku Klux Klan, whose history includes frequent murders of black and Republican legislators and activists.

“Materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive … will not be tolerated,” and are a threat to national security, Dwight Holten, a top DOJ official, said on Oct. 19 at a Washington, D.C. event scheduled by the department.

Muslim immigrants to the United States may turn away from integration because of “Islamophobia” or racism, Holton added. When a reporter for TheDC asked Holton to explain his charges, he pushed a door shut in the reporter’s face.

At the same event, Mohamed Magid, a Sudan-born Islamic advocate in the United States, asked for criticism of Islam to be criminalized. One member of the audience was Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez, who did not rebuke or even respond to the request by Magid, who now serves as president of the largest Islamic umbrella group — the Islamic Society of North America.(RELATED: Progressives, Islamists huddle at Justice Department)

Secretary Clinton’s speech was delivered at the close of a closed-door conference intended to begin implementation of a 2011 U.N. resolution dubbed “16/18.”

That resolution was passed this year, in place of another favored by hard-line Islamic countries that would have declared criticism of Islam to be criminal defamation.

The successful resolution is titled “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief.” It urges all governments to promote tolerance of all believers, to promote “a wider knowledge of different religions and beliefs,” to counter religious discrimination, anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia.”

The deal encourages and helps activists in many countries to establish religious freedom, said Ambassador Michael Kozak, the U.S. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

The Department of State gathering was an off-the-record meeting of experts from roughly 30 countries. Attendees discussed legal and regulatory measures to promote religious freedom and free speech.

The three-day meeting was impacted by U.S. domestic politics. For example, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee was allowed present a claim, while a Christian group, the Traditional Values Coalition, was excluded from the event and from preparatory discussions. The coalition’s president, Andrea Lafferty, was briefly detained just prior to Clinton’s speech.

The meeting, and Clinton’s speech, Lafferty told TheDC, downplayed the large-scale persecution and killing of Christians in Islamic countries, including Sudan, Iran, Pakistan and Egypt.

When asked if religious freedom was being advanced in Muslim-majority countries by the administration’s current foreign policy — which encourages the removal or dictators but does not condemn Islamic groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood — Kozak said “time will tell.”

But the diplomatic debate that led to the 16/18 resolution is driven by Islamic advocates.

In orthodox Islam, there is little to no room for religious debate outside the boundaries of tradition. In several Islamic countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, people are executed for blasphemy, heresy and apostasy, which is the act of abandoning one’s religion.

Islamic advocates say the harsh punishments are mandated by Islamic texts and local culture, which do not fully separate mosque and government, and often view religious dissent as betrayal.

Those views are markedly different from Christian texts, which promise a loving God, mandate the separation of church and state, and expect moral freedom.

Clinton’s speech reflected those Christian themes. American believers argue — but do not demand — submission from their rivals, she said. Instead, “we trust that over time, if [our rivals] are wrong, they will come to see the errors of their ways.”

In contrast, she continued, there’s reason for concern when “people are not confident in their religious beliefs to the point where they do not fear speech that raises questions about religion.”

Her speech included both new and old themes in American religion.

She argued that “truly at the root of every major religion is a connection with the divinity, is an acceptance and a recognition that we are all walking a path together.”

That claim of religious universalism is not widely shared by Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist clerics. For example, Islamic clerics say the Bible’s Old Testament is really a Muslim text that is misunderstood by Christians and is distorted by Jews. Similarly, most Christians say the Christian God is guided by love and reason, and rewards faith from free people, while most Muslim clerics say Allah requires submission and accepts forced conversions.

But Clinton also repeated the traditional American Christian view that human rights “are rights endowed by our creator within each of us… [and] we have special obligations to protect these God-given rights.”

That’s a markedly more traditional view than that held by her boss, President Barack Obama.

In November, for example, he excluded Christianity from his Thanksgiving message, and suggested that Americans’ rights to freely speak, vote, assemble and own property depend on the approval of other Americans. “No matter how tough things are right now, we still give thanks for that most American of blessings — the chance to determine our own destiny.” (RELATED: Democrat leaders merge church and party)

Throughout her speech, Clinton returned to the argument that religion requires freedom. And she repeatedly, although diplomatically, prodded Islamic governments to tolerate other faiths. Without citing any countries, she directed her criticism at Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where laws actively penalize or bar rival religions.

“We know governments which fear religion can be quite oppressive, but we know that societies that think there is only one religion can be equally oppressive.”

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A Black Day for Austria"

by Soeren Kern
December 26, 2011 at 5:00 am
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An Austrian appellate court has upheld the conviction of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife and anti-Jihad activist, for "denigrating religious beliefs" after giving a series of seminars about the dangers of radical Islam.

The December 20 ruling shows that while Judaism and Christianity can be disparaged with impunity in postmodern multicultural Austria, speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties.

Although the case has major implications for freedom of speech in Austria, as well as in Europe as a whole, it has received virtually no press coverage in the American mainstream media.

Sabaditsch-Wolff's Kafkaesque legal problems began in November 2009, when she presented a three-part seminar about Islam to the Freedom Education Institute, a political academy linked to the Austrian Freedom Party.

A glossy socialist weekly magazine, NEWS -- all in capital letters -- planted a journalist in the audience to secretly record the first two lectures. Lawyers for the leftwing publication then handed the transcripts over to the Viennese public prosecutor's office as evidence of hate speech against Islam, according to Section 283 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB). Formal charges against Sabaditsch-Wolff were filed in September 2010; and her bench trial, presided on by one multicultural judge and no jury, began November 23, 2010.

On the first day of the trial, however, it quickly became clear that the case against Sabaditsch-Wolff was not as air-tight as prosecutors had made it out to be. The judge in the case, Bettina Neubauer, pointed out, for example, that only 30 minutes of the first seminar had actually been recorded.

Neubauer also noted that some of the statements attributed to Sabaditsch-Wolff were offhand comments made during breaks and not a formal part of the seminar. Moreover, only a few people heard these comments, not 30 or more -- the criterion under Austrian law for a statement being "public." In any event, Sabaditsch-Wolff says her comments were not made in a public forum because the seminars were held for a select group of people who had registered beforehand.

More importantly, many of the statements attributed to Sabaditsch-Wolff were actually quotes she made directly from the Koran and other Islamic religious texts. Fearing that the show trial would end in a mistrial, the judge abruptly suspended hearings until January 18, 2011, ostensibly to give him time to review the tape recordings, but also to give the prosecution more time to shore up its case.

On January 18, after realizing that the original charge would not hold up, the judge -- not the prosecutor -- informed Sabaditsch-Wolff that in addition to the initial charge of hate speech, she was now being charged with "denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group." Sabaditsch-Wolff's lawyer immediately demanded that the trial be postponed so that the defense could prepare a new strategy.

When the trial resumed on February 15, 2011, Sabaditsch-Wolff was exonerated of the first charge of "incitement" because the court found that here statements were not made in a "provocative" manner.

But Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of the second charge against her, namely "denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion," according to Section 188 of the Austrian Criminal Code.

The judge ruled that Sabaditsch-Wolff committed a crime by stating in her seminars about Islam that the Islamic prophet Mohammed was a pedophile (Sabaditsch-Wolff's actual words were "Mohammed had a thing for little girls.")

The judge rationalized that Mohammed's sexual contact with nine-year-old Aisha could not be considered pedophilia because Mohammed continued his marriage to Aisha until his death. According to this line of thinking, Mohammed had no exclusive desire for underage girls; he was also attracted to older females because Aisha was 18 years old when Mohammed died.

The judge ordered Sabaditsch-Wolff to pay a fine of €480 ($625) or an alternative sentence of 60 days in prison. Moreover, she was required to pay the costs of the trial. Although at first glance the fine may appear trivial -- the fine was reduced to 120 "day rates" of €4 each because Sabaditsch-Wolff is a housewife with no income -- the actual fine would have been far higher if she had had income.

Sabaditsch-Wolff appealed the conviction to the Provincial Appellate Court (Oberlandesgericht Wien) in Vienna, but that appeal was rejected on December 20. The court says she will go to prison if the fine is not paid within the next six months. She says she will take the case to the Strasbourg-based European Court for Human Rights.

After the trial, Sabaditsch-Wolff said her conviction represented "a black day for Austria." The Vienna Federation of Academics (Wiener Akademikerbund) said the ruling represented "politically and sentimentally motivated justice" and marked "the end of freedom of expression in Austria."

Sabaditsch-Wolff is not the only Austrian to run afoul of the country's anti-free speech laws. In January 2009, Susanne Winter, an Austrian politician and Member of Parliament, was convicted for the "crime" of saying that "in today's system" the Mohammed would be considered a "child molester," referring to his marriage to Aisha. Winter was also convicted of "incitement" for saying that Austria faces an "Islamic immigration tsunami." Winters was ordered to pay a fine of €24,000 ($31,000), and received a suspended three-month prison sentence.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.



http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/27...h-wolff-appeal

While the wearing of certain head dress may seem insignificant short term however long term it's a recipe for disaster this will not end well for America, the unrelenting assault on American law and ideas will someday come to a head(no pun intended) sadly no other way out.