Not the first, and not even the worst, example of "invading missionaries"

Whilst the "Bible coin" fiasco has been given considerable press (in part because of military involvement following an incident where a copy of the Quran was used for target practice), it is by no means the first or the worst example of targeting of Iraqis--including other "people of the book"--by dominionist "missionaries".

In fact, Basic Training Ministries' actions are probably on the mild end of what's gone on in Iraq.

It has been little publicised, but dominionist "missionary" groups have been in Iraq since the US government hit the ground in Gulf War II--and their activities may have in fact directly led in part to the bucket of hell that the country is in now...and to US military being targeted.

One of the first groups on the ground--and one of the more notorious offenders in regard to the use of "bait and switch" evangelism, especially in regards to relief efforts--was Frank Graham's Samaritan's Purse (which made plans as soon as 2003 to enter the country).  The SBC, the Assemblies of God, and other groups also moved in quite rapidly after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

Samaritan's Purse's actions have been especially odious.  Among other things, the group literally described the attempted genocide of Iraq's Kurdish population as a "missionary opportunity"; nevermind that Kurdish people are already a marginalised people and that one of the more heavily demonised religious minorities in Iraq exists among the Kurdish people (the Yezidi faith, which venerates Malek Taus as a bringer of wisdom--a being normally equated to Shaitan in traditional Islam, which has led to Yezidis being (falsely) accused of being Satanists).   As it is, Samaritan's Purse's leader stated that Islam was a "wicked and violent" religion in such terms that even George W. Bush didn't want to touch that statement with a 40-foot barge pole.  

Samaritan's Purse also has a well-documented history of forcing people to be prosyletised to as a condition of disaster aid and especially targeting children to do so--including gift boxes given to children with religious toys.  In fact, the "bait and switch" extended to adults as well; Samaritan's Purse ended up wearing out its welcome with the Red Cross during Gulf War I (by pulling stunts where it required people to watch "The Jesus Film" to receive aid at a Jordanian refugee center) and even even managed to wear out the welcome of none other than Dear Abby when the group essentially spammed a service Abby had set up to mail soldiers on base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia--spamming them with prosyletisation materials in Arabic, which could have gotten our soldiers in serious trouble with their host country:

Even Franklin Graham used some of these methods. According to Graham's biography, "Rebel With a Cause," during the last Gulf War, Samaritan's Purse went to Jordan under the banner "Operation Desert Save" with food and aid--and showed the Jesus Film at night until the International Red Cross complained. Graham then used the Dear Abby Any Servicemen campaign to send Arabic language Scripture tracts and New Testaments into Saudi Arabia-a country he describes as "wicked"--and smuggled them past censors concerned about cultural sensitivity by using the Dear Abby postmark. The U.S. Postal Service, acting on a complaint by Dear Abby, brought the campaign to an end.

Samaritan's Purse was among a number of dominionist groups (including the Assemblies frontgroup FGBMFI) known to have funneled aid to the Contras under the guise of "aid" and conducted extensive "bait and switch" evangelism in Nicaragua--of the exact type that was used by "Verbo Ministries" in Guatemala to ultimately turn that country into a particularly bloody version of the Republic of Gilead under the rule of Gen. Rios Montt.

And lest people think Samaritan's Purse's behaviour in Iraq was an abberation--they're reported to have targeted survivors of Hurricane Katrina in identical manner.  In fact, Frank Graham explicitly saw Katrina as "God's Judgement" on New Orleans (how many times do we have to tell these folks that Hurricane Katrina is not divine retribution, and if it were, then God must have the worst aim in the world as Bourbon Street was probably the least damaged area that Katrina hit?).

The SBC and Samaritan's Purse--among others--are also responsible for bringing American televangelism (a field that was and is dominated by Assemblies and "Assemblies daughter" preachers).  METV, a dominionist broadcast network started by groups in Lebanon (a favoured spot for Assemblies men to target Israel in particular due to that country's laws against blatant missionary activity aimed at converting Jewish people) essentially running bootleg radio and TV stations and which now operates in Cyprus, runs things like "The 700 Club" et al with Arabic subtitles.

And increasingly, such behaviour is not only putting the lives of Iraqis and other Christians at risk--but also our soldiers in Iraq.

This, sadly, is also not unprecedented.  A Salon Magazine article has noted that the activities of METV are directly linked with the worsening of Christian relations in Lebanon as people started associating all Christians with dominionists--something that has now been, as we will describe, repeated in Iraq:

Charles Kimball was in Israel and Lebanon to do interfaith work with the Mid East Council of Churches when METV started broadcasting evangelical programs like Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club" in the area. Kimball recalls that Christians from Lebanon and the Galilee region of Northern Israel bristled at Robertson's enthusiasm for the activities of the right-wing Christian Phalangist militia and the Israeli Defense Forces in Lebanon's bloody civil war. And he says that METV's broadcasts inflamed tensions between Lebanon's indigenous Christians and their Muslim countrymen, who became suspicious that their Christian neighbors might have actually agreed with Robertson's anti-Islamic vitriol.

"The problem begins with outsiders like In Touch, Pat Robertson and METV coming in and ignoring the indigenous Christian community as if they don't exist, thinking they're the only people who have the message, and broadcasting whatever they want without realizing there are consequences for the people who actually live there," says Kimball.

Ironically, the influx of dominionist missionaries may well have been one of the worst things to have happened to the Christian community in Iraq in modern times.

Almost from the time they arrived, dominionist groups started aggressively targeting both Moslem and Christian groups for conversion--including the Chaldean Catholic and Iraqi Orthodox churches, two of the longest-lived congregations in all of Christianity.  Traditionally, some of the churches in Iraq literally were founded by missionary efforts of no less than St. Thomas.  As in the disciple Thomas, as in one of the guys who personally knew Jesus when he was alive in Christian tradition.  Yes, these are literally some of the first Christian churches ever set up, where St. Paul would have been visiting as a traveling preacher visiting established churches.

Needless to say, the extreme zeal of the dominionists has now led to non-dominionist Christians being literally under the gun.   Over two-thirds of the pre-Gulf War II population of Christians has had to flee Iraq, largely to Syria; even by 2005, "bait and switch" evangelism was at such a point that the patriarch of the largest Christian church in the country was asking the dominionist "missionaries" to cool it:

Enough is enough for the Christian community in Iraq. The head of Iraq's largest Christian community, Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, recently scathingly attacked the evangelical Christians who have taken their crusade to Iraq since the illegal U.S. invasion of March 2003.

Delly told Al-Jazeera News on May 19 that Iraq did not need Christian missionaries because its churches dated back long before Protestantism. He objected to the aspect of trying to convert Muslims and said, "You can't even talk about that here."

According to Delly, the evangelicals attract poor youths with displays of money and then "take them out in cars to have fun. Then, they take photos and send them here, to Germany, to the United States and say 'look how many Muslims have become Christian.'"

Delly was a strong opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. When he was asked if he had contacts with U.S. authorities, he said:

Frankly, I try to avoid meeting them as much as possible. They are the occupiers. The occupied don't want to be occupied. That's human nature.

An article by the group "Christians In Iraq" (run by friends of the Chaldean Catholic church) notes how non-dominionist Christians are now being targeted by Moslem insurgents because of the actions of American dominionists:

Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, told journalists that many Protestant activists had come to Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and set up what he called "boutiques" to attract converts.

Many Muslim countries consider Christian missionaries as part of a Western campaign against Islam and punish both the preacher and the apostate Muslim severely. Violent Iraqi groups killed at least five evangelical missionaries last year.

One particular group involved--Campus Crusade for Christ--is also known for military prosyletisation (our own Troutfishing has documented this extensively), as well as classic "bait and switch" evangelism and "prosyletisation for aid":

Campus Crusade for Christ is an outfit based in Orlando, Florida. The name is fairly well-known and little-criticized because most people assume they do good work. The name of the organization sounds benign, however, its work is far from harmless. On its website, you can see dozens of pictures of Bible-thumping in Iraq. Also, there is the mandatory "Send us your money" message.

Let me highlight a few statements made from its "Bibles for the Middle East" section:

• People in this part of the world are desperate for such materials. 2004 was declared the Year of the Bible throughout the Arab world and interest is high. Thousands of people are seeking to receive a copy of the Bible.
  
• So, with a new year before us and so many opportunities on the horizon, would you consider a gift of $50 to get 25 Bibles into the hands of people in spiritually dark countries? Whatever you could do would be a tremendous blessing during a time of great spiritual hunger.
  
• People in these nations are hungry for God's Word, our staff are willing to risk their lives to deliver it.

Another section called "Iraq Schoolbags" offers the following statements:

• Praise God with me. Because thanks to your prayers and gifts, the doors are open to share the love of Christ with the next generation of Iraqis -- young boys and girls who are open to new ideas and who are the future teachers of their nation.
  
• Continuing a strategy first launched last year, their goal is to distribute 100,000 school bags to these little ones, each fitted with urgently needed paper, pencils, and other school materials, along with evangelistic children's books. In this way, just weeks from now, thousands of future Iraqi leaders will have the opportunity to come to know Christ.
  
• I'm sure you praise God with me for this excitement and for the fact that, thanks to this distribution, a generation of Iraqis is finally hearing the Truth about Christ.
  

From 1991 until 2003, Iraq was unable to import paper and pencils for its students. Many times, the Iraqi government pleaded with the world to rectify this injustice. Where was the Campus Crusade for Christ? Most of its affiliated groups are ultra-conservative and supported the sanctions against Iraq.

Today, the organization takes credit for bringing pencils and paper to Iraq. But, inside the package is the obligatory Christian propaganda. I would commend them if they supplied only pencils and paper, but if that were the criteria, the group would stay home in Florida.

(Emphasis mine.)

The interesting thing is...before the dominionist missionaries came, relations between the Christian and Moslem communities in Iraq were historically quite good in modern times.  There was very much a spirit of "live and let live"--groups kept to their faith, and there was little effort at trying to convert each other.

This pretty much got shot to hell by dominionist missionaries...who, in part because of their actions, are now causing one of the oldest groups in Christiandom to flee their country in droves and causing them to be targeted in such numbers that the word "genocide" has been increasingly used to describe the situation.

And--again--this was not unexpected, and people even specifically warned about this as early as 2003.  Salon Magazine reports:

Black, in an interview, seemed uninformed about Iraq's vibrant Christian community, comparing its fate to that of Christians in the Soviet Union who were forced to worship underground. Though it is beyond debate that ethnic minorities have suffered and faced brutal persecution under Saddam, Archbishop Djirbrael Kassab, leader of Basra's Chaldean Christian community,  told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in October 2002 that U.N. sanctions and constant U.S. and British bombing have contributed as much to the hardship and gradual exodus of Iraq's Christians as any of Saddam's repressive moves. In fact, Saddam's vice president, Tariq Aziz, is a Christian and 740,000 Iraqi Christians still maintain their ancient congregations, some of which date back to the days of the Apostles.

Kimball claims that the "Christian Nationalism" of prominent Southern Baptist ministers has not only offended the Middle East's indigenous Christian culture; in its most extreme form, it has infuriated Muslims and provoked violent interethnic conflict. As an example, he points to Jerry Falwell's remark in an October 2002 interview with "60 Minutes" that Muhammad is a terrorist. The remark prompted riots and clashes between Muslims and Hindus in India and Kashmir that left five dead and many injured.

Even some SBC missionaries--possibly showing some cracks in the steeplejacking--have expressed concern about televangelism making them targets by extension:

Ironically, some of the fiercest criticism of the Southern Baptist Convention's ministers has come from members of their own congregation who are concerned about the safety of missionaries already in the Muslim world. A January 2003 letter from a group of missionaries working through the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board in 10 predominately Muslim countries released to the Biblical Recorder, a Baptist news journal, expresses grave concern that the anti-Islamic rhetoric of Graham, Falwell and other ministers is being broadcast widely through the Muslim world.

"These types of comments have and can further the already heightened animosity toward Christians, more so toward Evangelicals, and even more so toward Baptists," the letter says. "We are not sure if you are aware of the ramifications that comments that malign Islam and Muhammad have not only on the message of the gospel but also on the lives of our families as we are living in the midst of already tense times."

One example of the heightened danger faced by this group of missionaries came last December, when three members of the Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board were murdered by Islamic militants in Yemen. They had operated a hospital in the country for 35 years but had begun receiving hostile threats after Yemen joined the U.S. war on terror, allowing American military advisors to train its military in counterterror operations and sanctioning the CIA assassination of a suspected al-Qaida leader on its soil. Jack Graham, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, called the missionaries' killings "a stark reminder that the war on terrorism is very real," adding, "This is a war between Christians and the forces of evil, by whatever name they choose to use. The ultimate terrorist is Satan."

And increasingly, our soldiers are being associated with having brought the dominionists to Iraq by its countrymen--and, sadly, with reports of ongoing attempts at steeplejacking of the US military's chaplaincy system (which has been frighteningly successful in the Army and Air Force; the Navy still seems to be giving a good fight), this is not necessarily inaccurate.

We go into this into much more detail tomorrow--including how our soldiers are being targeted by dominionists, and how dominionists are inadvertently making our soldiers targets.