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Article excerpts (emphasis added):
“I first learned about ‘Mikey’ Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation from a Harper’s Magazine article entitled, ‘Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military.’ In that 2009 article the author Jeff Sharlet wrote about an American military squadron in Iraq that had their Iraqi interpreter paint ‘Jesus killed Mohammed’ in red Arabic letters across their Bradley armored vehicle. Sharlet describes how the soldiers in question laughed at the insult to Mohammed and Islam before driving out into Iraqi neighborhoods and a night of firefights.
“As Sharlet delved into the role of religious nationalism in the American military, he told the story of New Mexican Mikey Weinstein, the widely known figure defending religious freedom in the United States military. As I inquired more about the life and work of Michael ‘Mikey’ Weinstein, I found that he had been named one of the fifty most influential Jews in America by the Forward. Defense News named him one of the 100 most influential people on U.S. defense. Americans United for Separation of Church and State – the most important national organization addressing that issue – gave him their first ever ‘Person of the Year’ award. Over more than twenty years, awards for his work have continued to accumulate.”
[…]
“When we asked what stimulated the dramatic change in 2006 from being legal counsel to [Ross] Perot to forming a nonprofit for legal work to defend religious freedom, Mikey said two immediate causes had triggered it. One was Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which was known for its graphic violence and antisemitism, portraying Jews as brutal and evil. The Air Force Academy posted advertisements of The Passion of the Christ on campus, which seemed to be an encouragement for cadets to see the film. That combined with a visit he had later that year with his son Curtis, who was a first year ‘doolie’ in the Air Force Academy like he had been in 1973, prodded him to do something.
“Curtis pulled him aside at one point and told him that there was going to be trouble. He said that he was going to beat up the next cadet or officer who referred to him as a ‘fucking Jew,’ and he went on to tell his father about the antisemitic harassment that he was continually experiencing. Mikey went back to his hotel room that night deeply disturbed about what his son had told him. He said that he began to wonder whether, if he had fought back harder when he was a cadet thirty years earlier, his son might not be experiencing the same bad antisemitic experiences he had endured.”
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