WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has revealed that it suspended late last month a controversial military course that portrayed Islam as the enemy and suggested ‘total war’ as the only way of dealing with the Muslim religion, reported The Christian Post on Friday.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey explained that the course, which also proposed ‘Hiroshima-style’ tactics to be used on Islamists, went against American values and had caused an uproar. The course reportedly made no distinction between everyday followers of the faith and terrorists. "It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn't academically sound. This wasn't about, you know, we're pushing back on liberal thought. This was just objectionable, academically irresponsible," Gen Dempsey explained.
"There is an investigation ongoing. The individual instructor is no longer in a teaching status. He is not in a teaching status. And are you asking me am I surprised? Yeah. I'm surprised. And I was actually quite thankful that the young man who did find the course material offensive spoke up," he added.
The instructor who had been leading the class, however, Army Lt-Col Matthew A Dooley, is still officially employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. While the course was only an optional one, it caused quite a stir when it was found out that future lieutenant colonels, commanders and Navy captains were being taught to take the war to Islam.
"They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit," Dooley was quoted as saying at a presentation last July, according to an American news agency.
"This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable...)," the teacher reportedly had said, and suggested that "Saudi Arabia be threatened with starvation ... Islam reduced to cult status, and the Muslim holy cities of Makkah and Medina in Saudi Arabia be destroyed."
Dooley reportedly had also positioned that the current US strategy that presumes there is a way of finding common ground with Islamic religious leaders without "waging near total war" is "illogical."
"We are looking at how that course was approved, what motivated the individual to adopt that -- it was an elective, but what motivated that elective for being part of the curriculum. We are looking across the institutions that provide our professional military education now to make sure there's nothing like that out there," Gen Dempsey added