The Beat Goes On
by
Amory C. Minot
On September
24, 20-year-old Army private Michael Handman was sent to the hospital and
treated for a concussion, facial lacerations, and severe oral injuries.
These were not battle wounds. They were inflicted in a Fort Benning laundry
room, by one or more of his platoon mates.
Handman
claimed he was beaten because he was Jewish, but the Army didn’t see it that
way. On October 10, a Fort Benning spokeswoman told the AP that military
police had concluded that the attack “wasn’t motivated by religious
bigotry.”
Not that
Handman hadn’t been subjected to anti-Semitic abuse earlier in his basic
training. Just four days before the beating, two of his drill sergeants were
reprimanded by the Department of Defense for making him remove his yarmulke
during meals and calling him “kike” and “fucking Jew.”
“I have never
been so discriminated against/humiliated about my religion,” Handman wrote
in a letter to his parents. “[A]nd the only justification they have is I’m
Jewish.” A friend, he said, “heard some of the guys in my platoon talking
about how they wanted to beat the shit out of me tonight when I’m sleeping.”
Handman
complained that he had been rebuked for reading a Jewish Bible even as a
nearby solder reading the New Testament a few feet away was left unmolested.
Concerned for his safety, his parents wrote to Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss
(R.), who asked the Department of Defense to investigate.
On September
26, Fort Benning Deputy Chief of Staff Samuel Selby Rollinson informed
Chambliss by letter that he did not “condone the actions of the
non-commissioned officers in slurring Handman, and denying him the right to
wear a yarmulke or attend Jewish prayer services.” But Rollinson claimed
that the perpetrators’ actions were “not meant to be malicious, and were
done out of ignorance for regulations and cultural awareness.”
According to a
September 30 report in the online news magazine Public Record, which
quoted Rollinson’s letter, the department’s detailed report included nothing
about the beating.
Although
Handman claimed that several men had been present, on October 10, the AP
reported that just one member of his platoon would “face nonjudicial
punishment rather than criminal charges…a move that keeps many details of
the attack secret.” These details include the name of the trainee, which
under the terms of the federal Privacy Act was not released.
In such a
nonjudicial proceeding, Army regulations stipulate that the maximum penalty
that can be imposed is 45 days’ confinement to barracks, 45 days’ extra
duty, a reduction in grade, and a forfeiture of pay. But within a month, the
Army announced that the soldier had been “punished under Article 15 of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice and administratively separated for
misconduct,” the Atlanta Jewish Times reported November 7.
While the
punishment was commended by the southeast region of the Anti-Defamation
League, Handman’s cause was not universally embraced in the Jewish
community.
Captain Neil
Block, a retired Navy captain charged with representing the interests of
Jewish soldiers at Fort Benning, was critical of the private. Writing in
Public Record October 13, Jason Leopold reported that Block “seemed to
place blame for the brutal attack and the prior incidents of anti-Semitism
on Pvt. Handman for naively believing that wearing a yarmulke would not
invite ridicule by his fellow soldiers” and suggested that “Pvt. Handman
used his ‘minority status’ as a Jew to play the ‘Jew card,’ in other words,
a ‘victim.’”
“He has a
drill sergeant who has never seen a [yarmulke] in his life and treated him
less than mommy and daddy would and made some derogatory comments about his
faith. This whole thing is an issue of overreaction,” Block said. “But it’s
basic training. You can’t control 100 or so soldiers. I mean everybody uses
the ‘n’ word now and then.”
Quick to come
to Handman’s defense was Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the
Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). A Jewish graduate of the Air
Force Academy, he made a name for himself during the 2004 controversy over
proselytization and religious discrimination there.
“Mr. Block
displays a truly alarming and willful reckless disregard for the truth of
this tragic Army hate crime and subsequent cover-up,” Weinstein told
Leopold.
On October 17,
Jews in Green, an online organization devoted to supporting Jews in the
military with which Block is associated, posted “An Open Letter to Mikey
Weinstein” from Sgt. Brian Kresge accusing Weinstein of crossing the line
from “aggressive pursuit of injustice” to being a “media whore.” MRFF,
Kresge said, does not actually represent Jewish interests.
In a
Huffington Post column a month later, Chris Rodda, MRFF’s Senior Research
Director, criticized Jews in Green for letting their goal of increasing the
number of Jewish military personnel trump concerns about anti-Semitism in
the Armed Forces. As a result, the two organizations had become “bitter
adversaries.”
For better or
worse, Weinstein has become the central figure in a running series of
disputes over religious prejudice in the military. Last June, when nine
midshipmen at the Naval Academy filed a complaint against the practice of
the ‘noon meal prayer,’ Weinstein was quoted in the New York Times as
saying that “fear silenced” many others who were equally disturbed by such
practices at the military academies.
Weinstein is
also representing Army Spc. Dustin Chalker in a lawsuit filed in September
against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in which Chalker alleges that he
was repeatedly subjected to fundamentalist Christian evangelizing practices
during mandatory military events. According to Jason Leopold’s September 26
article in the Public Record, “Chalker, who said he is an atheist,
asked his superiors for permission to leave the prayer sessions and on each
occasion his request to be excused was denied.”
The suit,
Weinstein told Leopold, “leveled a blow in Federal Court against the
unlawful religious bigotry and persecution that is sadly systemic in today’s
armed forces.”
Since the
election, those who feel victimized by religious pressures in the military
have begun to look to the newly elected president as well. On November 10,
the Secular Coalition for America held a news conference in Washington
asking for “new rules against proselytizing and more training for chaplains
on how to handle nonreligious troops,” and calling on “the new White House
to protect young military members from what they see as rampant religious
discrimination in the services,” Leo Shane III reported in Stars and
Stripes.
Specifically,
the coalition requested that the president-elect “develop a new directive
for all chaplains and commanders that eliminates public prayers from any
mandatory-attendance events for troops and ensures the Defense Department
will not endorse any single religion, or even the idea of religion over
nonreligion.”
Shane cited a
Defense Department survey showing that roughly one-fifth of current service
personnel say they have “no religious preference.” Disputing that figure,
Jason Torpy, a retired soldier who is president of the Military Association
of Atheists and Freethinkers, said many do not identify themselves as
non-believers “because they fear retribution,”
“We’re as
dedicated to the military as our Christian counterparts,” Torpy said. “We
just want to serve our country, too.”
The ongoing
skirmishes over religion in the armed forces do not appear to be merely
aftershocks of the Air Force Academy affair or the product of Mikey
Weinstein’s hyper-vigilance. They are, rather, the consequence of the
increased dominance of evangelicals in the military chaplaincy.
As Anne C.
Loveland pointed out in these pages three years ago (“The
God Squadron,” Fall 2005) “the evangelical mission to the military is
not likely to disappear any time soon.” The question is: What are the rest
of us going to do about it?
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